How unified communications can increase productivity and sales

Remote working is often a concept that has been hijacked in recent years to mean working from home. And whilst that is true and there are many benefits to being able to provide a remote working solution for those staff members, often the root cause of where it all started from is overlooked.

Remote working actually dates back almost a century and can be found in the days of travelling salespeople. This people would often be on the road for long periods of time travelling up and down the country in the days when everything took longer. Communication was done by telegraph and by mail, to ensure the team was processing orders as quickly as possible.

Fast forward to today when field sales teams are still in abundance but the speed of communication and being able to process information and instructions has significantly increased. The tools which the teams use today need greater flexibility.

The daily schedule of a travelling salesperson

Imagine a theoretical but fairly typical day for these people.

  • 5.00am: Drive to Networking event
  • 7.00am: Networking event
  • 9.30am: First face to face meeting of the day
  • 10.30am: Catch up on emails
  • 11.00am: Second client in the same area
  • 12.30pm: Lunch
  • 1.00pm: Drive to next meeting
  • 2.00pm: Third client meeting
  • 4.30pm: Catch up on emails and process orders from the day
  • 3.00pm: Drive Home

How could this be changed?

Now timings aside this does make up the general day of most people who work in sales, from your 1-man bands to your big corporates. The hardest part of these type of days is being able to process information and respond to people during the day the more productive and successful the day the more a sales person can feel like the end of the day just drags on. Likewise, the flexibility to respond to changes to the day and still maintain productivity can be restrictive.

Let’s say the second meeting was cancelled and was rearranged for another day. If you used a UC tool that second meeting could be done over the internet of a video conference and the presentation being delivered in that capacity. This would reduce costs of travel and travel time for the rearranged appointment and still gives you valuable face time with the prospect.

What could the day look like?

Now that’s just looking at it from a micro level reaction. Now imagine if all of those meetings were done via video conference, without the need for the prospect needing to download software. The time squandered travelling from one location would be cut down as well as the cost of each journey. The day will end up looking more like this:

  • 5.00am: Drive to Networking event
  • 7.00am: Networking event
  • 9.30am: First Video conference of the day
  • 10.30am: Catch up on emails
  • 11.00am: Second Video conference of the day
  • 12.30pm: Lunch
  • 1.00pm: Third Video conference of the day
  • 2.15pm: Fourth Video conference of the day
  • 3.30pm: Fifth Video conference of the day
  • 4.30pm: Catch up on emails and process orders from the day

How does this change impact the numbers?

The ability to reduce wasted travel time and then the cost of travel from your business could have significant impacts on your bottom line both in terms of reducing expenses but by also improving the productivity of your salesperson’s time. Put that into play as an exercise for one day a week for the calendar year and the impact could be as follows:

Assuming the following:

  • Salesperson has 4 weeks holiday.
  • 48 working weeks in the year.
  • Average daily travel cost £25
  • Additional 2 sales meetings

Just using these numbers, we can see that we can save the business £6,000 in travel costs annually. And we can have 480 additional sales meetings a year!

Using some standard sales conversion figures. Say we converted 30% of all meetings and the average sale value was £10,000 per year. That would equate to an additional £1.4m of lost revenue under the traditional salesman routine.

Now whilst the figures are theoretical these processes can be adapted to every organisation. Ignoring lost revenue surely the savings in travel cost are worth considering for a small business, particularly if you look at the current cost of your phone bill. Most telecoms supply costs about £20 – £30 per user per month (including broadband). Most Unified Communications solution would push the worst-case scenario to £35 per user per month. This marginal increased cost would be offset against savings of approximately £100 a month.

So, an increase in existing costs or probably £5 per user with savings of £100 a month per salesperson. And that’s before you consider increased productivity and the impact on sale revenue.

Worth considering?

If you’d like to find out more and see how this could help you improve the productivity of your sales staff, get in touch with chris@edisonnetworks.net for a free consultation and we can work with you to show the financial impact for your organisation.

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