Are You an SMB with Small Budgets and Resources? Here’s How to Get More From Them
If you’re an SMB with a tight budget and stretched resources, you probably struggle to thrive and grow. This article talks through the most common challenges and impacts faced by subscription and membership-based SMBs. It also shows how the right platform can cut operational costs, improve customer experience, boost incoming revenue and growth, and provide reliable financial management.
In this article:
- The Challenges That SMBs Like Yours Face
- How Automation Brings SMBs Major Gains
- The Problem of Money
- What Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and Bluefort Does For You
If you run a small or medium-sized business (SMB) with very limited resources and budget, you probably feel like you’ve got both arms tied behind your back.
It can be difficult to take action, improve customer relationships, or strengthen finances because any time or resources spent in one area drains another.
Constantly stretching your money as much as possible can be completely exhausting.
The good news is that you can get more out of what you have, even with just one thing: a little automation.
The Challenges that SMBs Like Yours Face
A tight budget controls everything.
That means you are stuck making tough choices and cutbacks. You may have to delay important things.
It’s pressure that’s demoralizing and keeps you in a state of frustration. You and your teams work hard, juggle roles and jobs, but no matter how hard you all try, things skip through the cracks.
Here are some of the areas where SMBs feel it the most:
1. Resource allocation – Resources involve trade-off. For example, should you invest in marketing or sales to drive growth, or update the technology you desperately need? Or should you bring in stellar talent to get the job done? It’s all decisions about what can temporarily suffer for the sake of something else.
2. Staff morale – Consistently overworked employees battle low morale and burnout. They’re stuck with tasks that are outside of their talent and expertise. And they’re far more likely to quit. Ánd employee turnover is disruptive and expensive for an SMB.
3. Inefficiency in your operations – Limited resources create operational problems. Everything from data entry, sales strategy, invoicing, reconciliation, and compliance are slowed down and prone to mistakes. That boosts costs and leaves you vulnerable to upsetting customers.
4. Limited tech – Outdated tech creates more problems than it solves. You might have a Frankenstein situation with multiple solutions and none of the information flowing between them. That puts you at a huge disadvantage to any competitor that has their tech solution specifically geared toward driving efficiency and keeping an eye on rivals like you.
5. Struggling customer service – Good relationships with customers is so important because each customer counts. But it’s hard to keep up with all queries, returns, and problems in a timely way. That’s a recipe for churn, which robs you of revenue in the short and long-term.
This cycle can be hard to escape.
But if you’re stuck, how can you get your way out of these challenges, let alone accomplish things that will build and strengthen your SMB?
How Automation Brings Your SMB Major Gains
The more your resources are stretched, the bigger the transformation that automation can bring.
It’s a game-changer. Automation uses cutting-edge technology to do three things:
- perform time-wasting repetitive tasks
- streamline and integrate multiple processes
- boost efficiency and cut costs
For SMBs, the right choice of automation provider can make the difference between treading water and winning gold in the 400m individual competition at the Olympics.
Let’s look specifically at how that works for an SMB:
It streamlines the boring, time-stealing administrative tasks
No one likes doing admin. Data entry, scheduling, tracking and processing usage, invoicing, and emailing take the joy of your day.
They also stop you from doing what makes most of your talent and passion.
But automation takes care of these things for you. Let’s look at invoicing. Automation takes the contract terms, monitors for any changes and usage, creates reminders for your customers, correctly calculates the invoices on time, sends them, and collects the payments for you.
How much time would that save you? And how much of a cash flow situation would that improve?
And that’s just one function. A better CRM
You know how important customer relationships are to your SMB. And that requires consistent management.
Your SMB might struggle to keep track of all interactions with every customer. Things might fall between the cracks. When a customer feels neglected or ignored, when you reach out with sales tactics, it turns them off.
A good CRM:
- manages sales pipelines
- creates personalized experiences and offerings
- keeps track of communication with customers
- constantly pivots to continue a good business-customer relationship.
Without automation, that’s a big ask.
But with automation, you’ll know that nothing’s forgotten. It even spots customers at risk of leaving and creates tailored suggestions for offers and interactions to keep them on-side.
The personalized experience
Customers love and expect personalization. It can be hard for SMBs to even think about personalization because of the resources needed.
But with automation, it’s done for you. It will cater to their individual and collective needs and preferences.
Personalization includes:
- customized content and marketing
- tailored products and offerings
- pricing based on patterns and needs
- getting feedback
- recommendations
- loyalty programs
It also manages emails and lead generation using segmentation filters (that can be as niche as you want) that consider patterns, needs, and demographic information.
And it’s so effective. When SMBs offer a personalized experience, they boost customer satisfaction and loyalty, improve retention rates, and increase their overall Customer Lifetime Value (CLV).
Why? Because most of their competitors can’t bring the same experience to the table. Brings sales opportunities
SMBs with stretched budgets and resources need as many sales opportunities as possible. They simply cannot afford to miss anything.
But keeping track of all your customers, what products they use, what they need, what they don’t want can be a formidable task for whoever handles sales in your business.
Which means that sales opportunities will be missed.
Maybe not all, but some. And that is costly.
Automation is built to combine customer data and CRM to spot sales opportunities, and this goes beyond personalized marketing.
The system will take contract terms, customer usage, competitor offerings, and customer behavior and engagement, to spot what types of products and offering combination would better suit each customer’s situation.
So if the solution noticed the customer wasn’t using a particular product, or there’s a new product that would better meet their needs, the system will create a special offering, and channel it to the customer at the best time.
All sorted out for you.
It’s a proactive approach that not only revs up your sales, but makes customers happier, because who doesn’t love something created just for you?
Better financial management
It’s challenging for an SMB to keep up with the financial side.
With subscriptions, manual invoicing alone takes up a huge chunk of an accountant’s time. And they’re also expected to:
- chase sales and customer service for contract terms and usage
- create and send invoices
- change any incorrect invoices
- collect and chase payments
- reconcile back to the ledger
- recognize revenue
- create reports for strategic decision-making
- predict cash flow trends
- assure financial compliance
- prepare for audits
- pay inbound invoices
All this accurately and on time.
And take reliable numbers to stakeholder meetings. That’s a lot for a small team with no tools.
But automation can take care of all these tasks and ensures it’s all on time and error-free. And on top of that, you’ve got numbers you can take to the bank. And your business will stay compliant, so those vulnerabilities to fees, fines, and lawsuits are no more.
Automation can completely change how your SMB operates and bring you all these benefits.
But we know you’ve still got one big concern about it.
The Problem of Money
It’s likely that you love the idea of automation, but you’re worried about the cost. After all, your budgets and resources are already stretched.
And making the leap is a lot easier than you think when you consider ROI.
Here’s what you get in both the short and long-term (insert links to relevant articles on the site):
- Lower costs – Automation reduces the need for additional staffing related to the automated processes (even if you scale). It minimizes payroll and sales expenses. It spots cost-saving opportunities thanks to data analysis.
- Efficiency gains – everything runs more smoothly, and all repetitive tasks are taken care of.
- An end to revenue leakage – because invoicing is correct and timely, you’ll never suffer from the revenue leakage caused by forgotten invoices and under-invoicing.
- Better sales – opportunities are spotted and created, so your inbound revenue is higher
- Higher customer satisfaction and retention – personalization and data insight give your customers the experience they want and stick around for. You won’t have to rely on high-cost acquisition because your churn will be lowered.
Saving money and boosting inbound revenue in both the short and long-term is an irresistible prospect.
If you can see the value, which solution should you choose?
What Dynamics 365 Business Central + Bluefort Automation Does for You
Business Central is the perfect ERP system that automates so much for SMBs. It’s also flexible and it grows with you.
Bluefort are experts in automated recurring revenue. We can implement Business Central for you with all the customization you need to get the most out of everything the platform automates.
We’re here to help you:
- free your time and resources
- cut costs and churn
- build your customer base
- bring in more revenue
- expand your business
- make your life a lot easier.
D365 Business Central and Bluefort are a comprehensive solution that delivers the best that automation has to give to your SMB.
By implementing these powerful tools, your SMB can not only reduce churn but also foster long-term customer loyalty and growth.
Conclusion
The constant pressure of running an SMB with stretched budget is stressful. There are so many challenges you must solve, without the resources that you need to do so.
But it doesn’t have to be like this.
You can get so much out of automation. Like enhanced efficiency, cut costs and churn, higher customer satisfaction, optimized processes, and better productivity.
You’ll get a sense of predictability and stability, and the time you need to focus on the future.
If you’re ready to take the next step and find out how Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central + Bluefort can change your SMB for the better, book a discovery call today!
Let’s chat further.
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