It’s happened again…
Another small business owner I met lost hours of their life fixing a spreadsheet. They couldn’t understand how costs on the Excel estimate were different to the ones in the Word proposal.
It’s easy to get your numbers in a mess when you’ve got lots of separate calculations.
I hear it often as I travel around Yorkshire and meet other small business owners who struggle with their systems.
It goes something like this:
- “We create our estimates in Excel”
- “Often there might be several estimates, depending on the options we want to present to the customer. They can be quite complex”
- “These get copied into a Word template that we send out as our proposal.”
- “When I came to review the proposal, I couldn’t make sense of the numbers and I knew something was wrong.”
- “My colleague who created it wasn’t around, so I opened all the versions and spent ages figuring out how the values had got mixed up. “
- “It’s a nightmare when this happens. It’s always when I’m in the middle of another critical task!”
Now, what happened next was unexpected.
I was discussing their services. They knew what All My Systems do. They knew that we sort out business systems. Properly. They knew that our solution would be relevant for them…or at least that’s what I thought they knew…
What they actually thought, was that Microsoft Dynamics 365 was too big for them, and not relevant. A sledgehammer to crack a nut.
I explained that:
- Businesses with as few as 2 employees use Microsoft Dynamics 365.
- The system grows with you. You’re not thrown in at the deep end. For example, you could start by recording leads, then when you’re comfortable, move on to marketing automation. Dynamics 365 is flexible.
- Even though Dynamics is powerful, it is easy to use. Even if you only use it for simple tasks, it will soon pay for itself.
And thanks to Microsoft’s flexible licencing, even micro businesses can afford Dynamics 365. This gives them the same access to all Microsoft’s knowledge and innovation as big corporates.
I showed him how he’d generate a quote:
- The system stores their products and services, which can then be added to quotes.
- Quotes are built, then added to professional, branded proposals and emailed to the customer.
- You’d see all the communications and all the files your colleagues used. They’re not hidden on email or private files.
- If the quote needs updating, the changes are recorded using a version control system, so nothing is lost.
- Finally the quote can be marked as won (hopefully!) and the system will produce an order.
This forms part of a successful sales pipeline:
- You don’t need to copy and paste from quote documents on your server
- You don’t need to transpose figures from Excel to Word
- You don’t need to waste time unpicking problems in simple processes.
Boom! – They now saw what this could do for them.
They realised the difference Microsoft Dynamics 365 could make to their business. It would help them grow by:
- Streamlining their sales pipeline processes
- Removing duplication by entering data once
- Providing a better and more consistent customer experience
- Reducing mundane, lengthy tasks through automation
- Motivating their team because the system works for them
It was an exciting moment for both of us. That light bulb moment when someone realises that a system built for large companies is actually available to them.
The possibilities are endless. Suddenly they began to imagine new capabilities they didn’t know existed.
Using Microsoft Dynamics 365, there isn’t a business problem that we haven’t been able to solve so far.
Contact us for a free business systems audit and we’ll show you how to streamline your current processes and inspire new ideas.
