Business

Good business leaders need to be able to take a strong, big-picture view when it comes to dealing with problems in a business. This is a big part of business acumen. Good leaders can make quick, accurate assessments of the actions required, and they can offer logical, confident input. They can use their social skills to influence others and to create a consensus.

In a company, there is usually at least one manager that is seen as being the one with good general business acumen. He will exercise sound judgment, and usually, the results of any decisions that he makes are favourable. It is managers like this that support companies to have a more profitable and sustainable outlook. Acumen is a broad term, and it covers all of the aspects of running a business – including finance and accounting, operational functions, HR and sales.

A Breadth of Understanding

In a small business, one manager might take on several roles. In a bigger business, a company may have experts that handle accounting, marketing production, finance and IT. There is still the need for a manager, however, that can tie all those experts together. Individual managers should be able and willing to think about how their decisions might affect each other too. Those who can see the whole of the business are ones who have a good general business acumen and will be an asset to any business they work with.

Broad Skills

Being able to effectively communicate with people in different areas of the organisation is something that people with acumen can do. A marketing manager does not need to have a degree in finance, but they should have enough of a broad understanding to communicate clearly with the finance director. The finance director should be able to express concerns or make requests of the IT department. PEople with good acumen will be thinking ahead, planning and looking for insights into the opportunities that might come their way. They are always aiming to stay ahead of the competition, and they have good vision when it comes to where their company is going.

Specialist vs Generalist

Those who show strong acumen in the general field of business will have the chance to rise through the ranks in whatever business they deal with. Having good judgment is useful for a CEO because the decisions that they make impact the whole of the organisation. A generalist might be asked to take on high visibility jobs, and lead other managers to report to a board of directors. In a smaller company, an entrepreneur might be asked to show the ability to manage all of the functional areas of the business, because they do not have the staff to take on those roles. By having a good level of general acumen, the entrepreneur will be able to grow the business to the level where they can appoint those specific staff.

Learning Acumen

There are a couple of qualities and skills that build acumen. Someone who is a good listener has good acumen. Someone who takes the time to cultivate relationships will be in a good position to develop acumen. Taking the time to learn how a business work is also important. As you are working up the ranks, ask your superiors to show you research that is relevant to your organisation. Seek out market research reports, and read up on the latest events in the industry. Try to learn as much as possible about the broader operations of the company. This will give you the chance to contribute insightfully about more topics in meetings and will allow you the chance to prove yourself when it comes to your abilities, knowledge and interest within the business.

Increasing a company’s efficiency through the help of a program that could automate all your project management processes, activities and information storage is the best decision you can make. Doing all these tasks by hand could be a very tiring and ineffective idea and this article is meant to present you the main benefits of using a contact management platform to complete your deeds. No matter what field your business covers, you will definitely want to keep track of all your clients, their preferences and the history of their actions.

The main advantages of CRM programs:

• Production/sales department automation
• Minimizing all the management costs
• Increasing the overall efficiency of the activities
• Ensuring full control to the activities
• Optimizing each aspect of the organizational structure and making it more efficient than it used to be
• Personalizing who has access to information based on the main user’s preferences
• Completing daily backups of the entire system info

Vendors and products

• bpm’online

Bpm’online offers support for aspects such as boosting marketing productivity, sales and service performance while giving you the possibility to track all the changes that are happening in your business records. Also, their software allows users to access the data in real time whenever they need it, including merging social profiles and seeing the history of actions available. Cases that were submitted are also available for viewing at any given point with contact management programs. This 360 degree visibility over the customer’s activity and not only will help business owners to manage their companies much more effectively than they did before and besides that, the costs will be visibly reduced.

• Pepperi

Pepperi is another CRM software vendor that has all the options a small company needs. The interesting part about this vendor is that they offer support for all kinds of platforms: tablets, mobile phones, desktops etc. No matter where you are, at any given point and even offline, you can access the information needed in less than a minute. Having everything you need in the palm of your hands, exactly when you need it without being required to involve other employees into this process sounds like the ideal situation. Opt for implementing a contact management program if you want your life to be much easier and if you desire to save time and money regarding the business you own.

Benefits

• Costs are lower

Most of the times this factor is the first one to be observed during implementation attempts. One of the main aspects for this type of system is the fact that the actual implementation of effective contact information systems with the client can be completed in a very easy way, as well as the sales and service activities. Separate tools are usually sold individually at low prices for using them as independent ones, but most of the functions that are deployed in the system from document generation to managing agent tasks and on-going activities are primarily intended to increase the employee productivity.

• Increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty

CRM tools facilitate the formation of customer-company relationships. With their flexible functions and ease of use, customers are thus able to achieve what they want in a shorter time because employees are more productive and more efficient, or because the information they deliver is very effectively stored.

Many studies have shown that most satisfied customers have the following descriptions: buying in larger quantities, generating lower service costs in correlation with the quantity purchased, are more sensitive to minor price changes. So you will be able to see a distinction in the cultivation of customer loyalty if following these simple hints.

• Increasing profitability

Increasing profits is the last step in building a successful business and is a consequence of lowering costs and increasing customer loyalty. It is not always easy to highlight the role of CRM applications in increasing profit levels, but it is often seen that the positive rate of profit change works only if the implementation of new systems is took into consideration. You can learn more about platforms for productivity boost if you compare the results of different existent companies and see if these could be possible to yours.

• Enhancing management power

By assigning and tracking processes, CRM solutions make it possible for everyone to pursue the entire process from the owner to owner, analyse the inaccuracies that may arise, the errors and delays they produce. This function is very useful both for the management part of the company that wants to evaluate the performance of the team it manages, as well as for those who have to coordinate their activities according to third parties that appear in the production flow, thus eliminating all the problems related to the lack of knowledge about the exact responsibility of certain parts of the activities.