What are “data silos”?
A data silo is information that is used by one individual or by one department and is NOT available to others in your company.
Why data silos are holding you back…
You have almost no chance to get your arms around what is going on at your company with customers, prospects, and sales. In general, this is called “Business Intelligence”. Wikipedia has an interesting article about this subject: Business Intelligence definition. The article makes it sound like business intelligence is very complicated (and expensive). If you use Act! as designed it will give you a ton of what is going on at your company with your customers and prospects with very little effort.
How do data silos start
Your people are doing the best they can. Everyone’s comfort zone is in Outlook and Excel. That is where they tend to go when you give them a job to do. What needs to be asked first is, “how can we input and use the information in Act!!?”.
How Act! can solve the problem
Act!! is a very seasoned program and can store information about virtually everything about your customers and prospects. 99.9% of companies experience this data silo issue and are not making data-driven decisions.
Some examples I have encountered over my 30 years of consulting:
- One of my Act! customers was using Excel to track quotes and opportunities. They were opening Excel and typing in the Company name and customer name (already in Act!), entering the amount, and the date due. They saved the spreadsheet to their desktop. They were spending more time entering into Excel and they were missing some nice features of Act!!: what sales stage is the opportunity, how long it has been in that stage, what’s next, what has happened, barriers to the sale, etc.
- A lot of customers still insist on keeping calendar items in Outlook. When you use Act! (or any CRM) and you are focused outside of your organization (i.e. prospects and customers). You need to schedule it in the CRM. In Act!! you get some automatic stuff with a minimum effort: who it is scheduled with, scheduled for, type of task (call, meeting, todo, or a custom Activity). Also, if you do your one-click scheduling from an opportunity, Act! will automatically link if to that opportunity. Very powerful, very easy.
- Act! is your CRM and should be the first place that your organization knows about a prospect. As they move from prospect to customer, it makes sense to set up a link to your accounting system so you can click one button and add the new person to your accounting. As long as someone has entered the data, why make someone else re-enter it?
Did you see something here that you are experiencing? Schedule some time with me. The call is free and there is no charge for our initial session. Book an Appointment with me
“Manage cycle time and magic happens”