Pitch to the Experts is a competition where the winning food business will receive up to a total of £10,000 worth of expert advice and help from the 10 members of the panel.
We’d like to introduce each of the panel members individually to give you a better understanding of their businesses and how they could help you.
There are also details of the prize they are offering to the Pitch to the Experts winner.
Today we introduce Light Degree, experts in customer relationship management…
Automating systems in the Food Industry
When operating a business, a key component in ensuring the success of the business for the long term, is a list of your customers. Then you might extend the list to include potential customers and even suppliers.
While when starting out you might be able to use a spreadsheet to record this information. As your business expands, however, it is a little trickier to keep it updated and at the same time sharing it with other team members, for example, is this the most recent version that has the updates? and also there can be a lot of copying and pasting to even make it work effectively.
A minimum basic requirement is a CRM or customer relationship management software which can have shared access and when it is updated all of the updates are automatically in place for everyone else.
This then not only records details of static information but, just as importantly,
it can track the status of your contacts, such as are they a potential customer, have we already sent them a quote or a brochure or have they been a customer for a long time. Because when they call your business it can make a difference to how you will speak with them, at least it will make a difference what you will talk to them about. For example, if they are a long standing customer, who called a couple of days ago to ask about a new product order, then they don’t really want to receive a sales pitch, instead they probably just want to talk about their football team or what they did last weekend. If you have this information in front of you when talking with them to prompt you with what you talked about with them the last time you spoke, it is so much easier to build strong relationships with them.
It is really helpful to be able to sort your contacts list into categories and then to be able to send a mail-out either in the post or using a bulk email application. This means that you can send a marketing campaign that has been tailored to the interests of the people you are talking too.
You might also want to capture a list of names of people who are interested in your business and who would like to receive press release information and announcements of special products etc. so that you can email them updates. This can have a profound benefit when releasing a new product because you can spread the word probably so much easier than using traditional marketing methods (and it’s probably much cheaper as well).
OK so now you have your contact / customers and supplier details sorted,
how about your employees? This application allows you to record employees or contractors details including such things like their home address, next of
kin etc.
Along with your supplier details you can also record stock or inventory information. Stock levels, quantities stored in different stores or warehouses along with details about each of your stock line items such as descriptions, photographs / images, batch best before dates, bar codes and other information.
If you have a manufacturing process that runs over days or weeks then each batch can be added as a project. Then you can allocate jobs and manage the progression through the process.
Because all of this information can be accessed using this one application which you can update from any computer or by using a mobile app it is really easy to put the systems in place to manage your business.
The best part is that with the systems in place you are in a position to expand and grow your business.
The Prize
- 12 months access to the light degree application
- up to 10 users
- setup including custom fields / tags for your business
- uploading of your contact information (bulk data import)
- unlimited online training (for the first 30 days) to get you started
- backups of all information
- ongoing support
- application updates
Web: www.lightdegree.com
Google+: https://plus.google.com/b/103643126310114431777/+Lightdegree-Job-Management-and-CRM/posts
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/light-degree-limited?trk=biz-companies-cym
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Light-Degree/260778820692229
Twitter: @lightdegree
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