Tag: #software

Are Sales Enablement Tools Worth it? Here’s how they can Benefit your Business

It should be a no-brainer that sales act as the most integral part of the pathway of improving the growth of your business. It is the aspect that requires most of your attention. It does not matter if your business is small, medium, or large-sized, its sales will directly correlate to the revenue generated. Sales can become the defining factor in which businesses will prosper and which of them will get devoured by the fast-paced, ever-changing market. The only business that can manage to come out at the top amidst all this rising competition is one that boosts its sales.

So, how can you boost your sales, you might ask? The answer is simple – with the help of a sales enablement tool. These programs help to provide your sales teams with all the right resources and modern technology that they would require to conduct their sales successfully. 

How does a Sales Enablement Tool Boosts Sales?

In order to conduct effective sales, all the successful companies of the world wish to provide their sellers with information regarding their customers. Sales enablement softwares makes this process significantly easier by creating a customer-centric environment to help the sales reps understand customers’ ambitions and motivations. Moreover, they keep track of all the data and changes in market trends to keep them aware of what approach they should take. This also helps you to make sure that your company’s sales always stay above a certain threshold by continuing the successful aspects of currently implemented strategies.

Another key aspect of a sales enablement software is its training program. When your sales reps are well-trained, they can predict the market better and perform in an optimised fashion. The tool helps to keep a schedule for such a training program where you can also keep a track of how much training is being done. New suggestions are put forward by these software’s as well, depending upon the effectiveness of the current programs.

Communication is the key to a department performing at its max potential. Hence, sales enablement tools provide a platform where your sellers, buyers, and even marketers can share information with one another. This information exchange can be performed in the form of questionnaires, feedback forms, and also content reports. It is kept well organised and easily accessible to all the relevant people.

Thus, a sales enablement software equips your sales team to handle any real-life scenarios that may occur during their trade deals.

Why is Sales Enablement Important?

In order to keep the consistency levels up, your sales team needs to close as many successful trade deals as possible. Providing them with the right resources, training, and counselling will increase their efficiency. After all, the ultimate goal is to perform in the ever-changing market trends.

So how can a sales enablement program help you increase your business revenue?

  • Boosting the interactions with customers:

When your sales reps have access to all the data regarding their product at their fingertips, and that too organized in an efficient manner, the customers are bound to get impressed! They can be persuaded much more easily if they can receive access to the content specific to their needs. These impressed and satisfied customers can then turn into returning customers in the future.

  • Saving time:

Sales enablement softwares takes control of all the repetitive mundane tasks of the sellers. They no longer have to focus on the monotonous activities, and instead can concentrate on more important tasks such as analysing the market and developing client relationships. Even the research work can be automated by the sales enablement tools.

  • Departments cooperating with each other:

Connecting the different departments together, especially the sales and marketing, means that the information exchange about the product performance and specifications can be performed quickly. This ensures that your business has a continuous flow of ideas and strategies between different branches.

Final Notes

Hence, it has been established that sales enablement programs are almost a necessity for your business in modern times. A rare gem among the heap of different software’s available is Content Camel which is a cloud-based tool that checks on all the requirements for a sales enablement software. This tool will not only help you maximise your current sales strategy but also pave a pathway for future advancements so that you too can enjoy the profits from a successful business.

How to Better Manage a Field Service Team

If you have a business in the service industry, there’s a big chance that some of your operations will extend beyond the office. As the business grows, you will have one or several teams out there in the field performing various tasks daily or occasionally depending on the current demands. Whether you are the manager or the owner, managing such a team can present a wide spectrum of challenges. 

For instance, it can be a bit daunting to tell whether all members of the team are at work in the required hours and are diligently performing their roles as stipulated in their employment contracts. Some might give themselves time off or not show up for work. It is even harder to keep track of progress and monitor performance on field service tasks when dealing with outsourced teams.

While all this can cause frequent headaches, it doesn’t necessarily have to be the trigger to your downfall. You can streamline field service operations and keep track of everything, provided you have focus and use the right approach. Without further ado, here are some tips on how to better manage a field service team.

1. Embrace Technology for Better Response and Delivery 

There is no lie in the fact that the world has changed greatly over the years, especially due to technological advancements. Most of these advancements are designed to save time and money while increasing convenience and reducing the manual effort spent. When managing a field service team, technology can help streamline processes and make the job easier for you.

If you guessed right, you need to embrace technology even more if your business is located in countries like China, the US, or the United Kingdom, where technological expertise is immensely utilized. If you are providing field services in England, Wales, Northern Ireland, or Scotland, field service management software in the UK can help ease your worries. The best part is that you don’t always have to be behind a desktop computer screen to utilize this software. You can get a version that is mobile compatible for better team management in real-time even while away from the office. A reputed field service management solution also comes with features like:

  • Job sheet management
  • Instantaneous job detail updates
  • Progress and time-tracking
  • Job location tracking
  • Productivity tracking
  • Inventory management
  • Real-time communication with customers
  • Real-time communication with team members
  • And much more

All these features can help make it easier for you to manage and monitor your field service team regardless of how far from the office they are.

2. Ensure Improved Communication

As a manager, your job is to act as the coordinator of the team. It is your job to make sure that the individual members of the team collaborate for efficient service delivery. A field service team will of course not be enclosed in a single room working towards a common goal. Maintaining collaboration in a team that is out there in the field requires effective and efficient communication. With that in mind, if you want to effectively manage such a team, you need to make sure communication between you as the manager and the team members is top-notch. Communication makes every member comfortable with each other and the management as well which in the end makes the execution of tasks more effective.

3. Have Clearly-Defined Operation Protocol in Place 

As a team with common goals, you have procedures you follow in service delivery. As a manager, you are tasked with making sure any delivered service should adhere to that protocol. To make this possible, every member of the team needs to clearly understand every relevant procedure. This reduces the amount of work you have to do as a manager and also increases the effectiveness of work execution. As a way of enhancing this, make sure that every member has access to this information from anywhere they are. This promotes service delivery in general.


4. Always Have a Back-Up Plan

Optimizing your service operations can improve customer satisfaction, save time, and minimize your scheduling headaches. One of the ways to do this is to be prepared with a backup plan in case anything goes wrong. For instance, you could consider having some members of the entire team on standby in case the ones in the field fail to deliver. This means conducting thorough research on the current demand of your services to balance it with your capacity. It also means being on the lookout when demand is on the rise so you know when to bring in the new force in case of delays. This helps improve efficiency for your team and the company at large.

In a field service business, the last thing you want is to violate contracts or consistently fail to meet the agreed deadlines between you and your customers. Keeping your customers waiting shows a lack of proper team management, which can be detrimental to the organization in the long run. Thankfully, the few tips above should help improve your team’s productivity and company performance.

4 Signs You’re Taking Your Monitoring Too Far

If you’re like most employers, you probably got the employee tracking app last year when everyone started working from home. We get it, you were in a completely new place, your entire team was suddenly working remotely, and it wasn’t easy managing everyone’s time and making sure people are staying productive.

And employee tracking software is amazing! It helps quantify and improve productivity, keeps you in the loop on your team’s usual activities, etc.

However, there are some lines you shouldn’t cross when using an employee tracking app.

Let’s see what they are.

Tracking Employees Without Their Knowledge

Monitoring employees’ computers in secret is only okay if you’re suspecting malpractice and you need to catch the perpetrator in the act. In most countries, this is the only time you’re allowed by law to monitor your team’s activities without their knowledge or permission. 

However, if you’re using the software so you could improve your business, you should give them a heads up. Depending on where you’re located, you might need to tell your employees a few weeks in advance, or even have them sign consent forms and create policies that exhaustively explain everything about your monitoring practices.

What can happen if you don’t do this? Well, your employees will find out at some point, leaving you open to lawsuits. Not only that, but you can expect that your workers will be outraged, potentially quitting your business and giving it a bad reputation.

Using the Tracking Software Outside of Working Hours

Depending on how you set up your employee tracking app, it might be monitoring your employees since they turn on their work computer until they turn it off. Or, they need to clock in and out. If you’re using the second option, you can move to our next tip. If you belong to the first group, keep reading.

There’s no scenario in which it is good to collect employees’ private data, even if they’re doing private things on their work computers. So, if you have an option to make the tracker active only during specific hours – use it. It will automatically start at 9 AM and turn off at 5 o’clock. This way, you’ll avoid potentially catching their Facebook newsfeed, private emails, or whatever else they decide to check after hours.

The same goes for tracking during breaks – your employees should have an option to pause the tracking when they go on a break.

Collecting Private Data

 

As we said, collecting private data isn’t okay in any case. But, how can you prevent this if your employee decides to scroll through social media or pay some bills during working hours? Well, it depends on the employee tracking app you’re using.

Ideally, you should have the option to either turn off tracking or turn off screenshots (if this feature is on in other cases) when your employees are browsing through the aforementioned websites. You’ll still probably want to know that they’ve spent some time on social media, but you don’t need to see what they were doing there.

Not Using the Data for Improvement

Collecting the data about employees’ everyday activities just for the sake of monitoring doesn’t make much sense. It’s a waste of time, money, and other resources. The reason why you implemented such software should be connected to your business goals, or to the improvement paths you’re creating for your teams or individuals.

Don’t go around “catching” employees who slack off for short time periods. Track their behavior on a weekly or monthly level, and see how that “slacking” affects their overall workload or deliverables. If they’re doing a good job – you don’t have to give them a lecture on how they use their time.

On the other hand, if you do see that such behaviour affects your worker’s performance – talk to them. Tell them that you’ve been reviewing their data, and how it doesn’t look so good. Work with them to find the cause of this issue, as well as the potential solutions.

Wrapping Up

It’s not that hard to use employee tracking software “the right way”. Essentially, all you have to do is avoid being a snooping micromanager and you should be good to go.

Irish software company Pharmapod developing system to manage global vaccine rollout. #Pharmapod #Software

Award-winning Irish software company Pharmapod, has announced today that it is in the final stages of developing a cloud-based solution for the rollout of the Covid-19 vaccine globally. This important work is supported by the International Pharmaceutical Federation (FIP), who will continue to collaborate as Pharmapod makes this solution available on an international basis for healthcare professionals involved in the roll out of the Covid-19 vaccine.

The system will streamline the process of administering the vaccine by allowing patients to book their vaccination appointment, providing real-time information to healthcare professionals and their organisations, as well as businesses and public health bodies.

According to Pharmapod’s founder and Chief Executive, Leonora O’Brien, the company hopes to have the vaccination system up and running in line with the release of the Covid-19 vaccination to the market; ‘’our vaccination system has been in development since the beginning of the pandemic and we are working alongside partners such as the International Pharmaceutical Federation to bring it through the final stages. Essentially, the system will streamline the end-to-end process for patients and those administrating the vaccine. This will allow the public to easily book their vaccine via any device, schedule multiple doses, complete their eligibility criteria and provide details of any side-effects that have occurred. The data will flow securely from patient to administrator to national stakeholders and governmental organisations. Public health authorities will be able to receive real time, anonymous information about how the vaccine rollout is working. By simplifying the entire process, the solution promotes vaccine uptake, minimises the time required to administer each vaccine and provides critical data on side-effects so that corrective actions may be put in place as required”.

Pharmapod currently provides a number of cloud-based, healthcare specific solutions for pharmacies and the Long-Term Care sector. Its clinical services module facilitate the delivery of services such as flu vaccines and emergency contraception in pharmacies. It is the leading cloud-based software for driving efficiencies and reducing Patient Safety Incidents (PSIs) in community pharmacies and long-term care globally.

60% of all Canadian Pharmacies use Pharmapod’s system to minimise medication errors and improve best practice. Pharmapod has operations in the United States, the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Ireland.

Leonora went on to say; ‘’Our solutions and platform are designed by healthcare professionals. The vaccination system will also be able to spot potential problems in the rollout such as shortages of vaccines, uptake resistance, people not showing up for vaccinations, regional uptake comparisons, etc. It will also give patients notifications about their appointments and provide advice and information. The idea is to make everything easier and quicker for both the patient, and the healthcare professional as well as deliver the required service performance data to national stakeholders. Pharmapod has experience in developing large scale systems of this nature and we are in discussions with a number of governments around the world in relation to our system.’’

Pharmapod was established by Leonora O’Brien in 2013, a fully qualified pharmacist with over 25 years’ experience in the pharmacy sector. Businesses, pharmacies, care homes, hospitals and other healthcare organisations, may pre-register their interest in the solution here: https://www.pharmapodhq.com/app_register.