So many people extol the virtues of cloud computing these days, it’s hard to find reasons NOT to move to cloud. You know that it saves you money on expensive infrastructure and IT costs. You also know that you can consume it as a service which means you only pay for what you “eat”. You definitely already know about the benefits of accessing cloud based software from any device and any location.
But here are 3 unexpected ways that cloud computing will change your business:
1) You will start to sell smarter
Cloud based ERP makes your sales function much smarter. Imagine you sell “stuff”. By connecting your CRM to your finance and inventory management, your sales people can immediately see crucial bits and pieces of info such as up to date stock levels and upsell opportunities. This makes the whole sales experience for the customer a lot more “holistic” and provides sales people with opportunities they might otherwise have missed. Even if you don’t sell “stuff” your sales people can still benefit from reviewing information like project profitability. It will help them make smarter decisions about charges and resources.
2) You will make smarter decisions
It’s not just sales people who will make smarter decisions as result of cloud based software. As the business owner or manager, you will too. You will have access to all sorts of brilliant business intelligence at your fingertips. Your dashboard will be configured to have all the most important information front and centre whenever you log on. You can look at your sales KPIs and watch them change real time as the team moves closer to target. You can review your most profitable customers and review the P&L. Rather than waiting until the end of the month to analyse the key metrics you can analyse them all through the month and catch any issues early. Rather than discussing, at your monthly board meeting, what went wrong and how you plan to fix it, you can fix your issues before they become problems. Manage by exception. Manage early. Manage better.
3) You will improve collaboration with all your key stakeholders
Cloud computing improves collaboration between employees. Before, you might have had each department working in silos, neither one nor the other really understanding the needs and business drivers of people out with their own department. With cloud software everyone can have access to each other’s key metrics. If the production team know what the sales team need to hit their quota, they can staff up accordingly. And if the sales team know how stretched the production team are, they can fill their pipeline to manage a steady stream of sales.
Collaboration is also improved with other stakeholders. There are lots of new and exciting ways that companies can collaborate with each other to develop new ideas and extend out old ones, relatively quickly and cheaply. This can accelerate business overall. At Cofficient we work with various software companies to connect the APIs and provide our customers, such as Actavo, with a really collaborative and diverse software portfolio. One which really matches the business needs. We don’t need to invent complex and expensive new business software to achieve this. We only need to integrate and develop out existing solutions. Most cloud based software models encourage this so that customers get maximum benefit from the product.
To find out more about all the ways cloud computing can enhance your business why not attend our free Cloud Business Seminar, Edinburgh, 26 April at Dynamic Earth. Hosted by NetSuite and Cofficient you will learn more about the cloud and how your peers are leveraging the benefits to improve their business performance.
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To talk to someone about how cloud can improve your business, get in touch
Written by Emma Stewart – Sales and Marketing Director at Cofficient
