How Can Flightdeck Help me?

Where is your pain?

Business leaders will invest in a business system to address issues they have either experienced or issues that are anticipated in the business.

Although an analysis of return on investment often becomes appropriate, it would be very rare, other than in larger companies, for the return on investment to be the motivation for a business management system investment.

Issues existing or anticipated in a business vary enormously although there are a relatively small number of issues which come up all the time in businesses of a particular size and at a stage in their development.

Are You:

  • Bothered – Losing customers as quickly as you are gaining new ones? If you think about your “average” customer and about the money they spend with you in a year, anything you can do to stop that customer moving to a competitor is well worth doing. Many businesses implementing Flightdeck can easily recover their investment if they can stop even a few customers from doing this – even a single customer in some cases! By managing the customer relationship effectively it can be straightforward to dramatically improve customer loyalty. Flightdeck helps to differentiate you from your competition and allows you to give customers the sense that they stand to lose something by going somewhere else. It will also make sure that you never forget to keep in touch with your customers again! A company with solid CRM is a company that will win and retain Customers.
  • Worried – Don’t feel in control of what’s going on? Better and tighter control leads to better and more informed decisions being made. To run a business as effectively as possible really requires that you know what is going on and that you can get at any information you require easily and quickly. Indeed you need to be made aware of anything you would feel is relevant, automatically, and without having to ask the right questions. Flightdeck essentially prevents you from dropping the ball. It hands back control through providing seamless integration of every area of business that touches the customer – in particular marketing, sales, customer service, administration and support. Budgets are then spent in a much more targeted way, sales resources are put into the most appropriate opportunities and business planning, sales forecasting and so on are all much more reliable and accurate
  • Frustrated – Held back by not having info you need at your fingertips? Business leaders become frustrated that, although the business is doing well and is growing, they know it is being held back because everyone can’t get at the information they need in the right way at the appropriate time to inform decisions and drive forward. There are various manual processes which are time-consuming and repetitive and represent inefficiencies within most businesses. Time-consuming, repetitive, logical tasks are what computers are good at! Having information all over the place is also not great. Not only does it take a while to hunt around for the information you need but often it is inconsistent or duplicated across systems, no single system is really up-to-date and over time often it is easier not to bother to look for it. Flightdeck will provide you with all the information you need at the right time. It is able to present the information in a layout that suits you. This can be configured on a user by user basis.
  • Embarrassed – Staff can’t differentiate between your customers? It costs, on average, 8-10 times as much to find and recruit a new customer as it does to sell something to an existing customer. Therefore, it is vitally important to do as much as is reasonably possible to improve customer loyalty and retain customers, valuable ones in particular. Usually over time, the number of contacts will grow within a business. Perhaps there are several contacts within a customer’s organisation, and it becomes more difficult to remember to get back to someone or to remember who it is that you have spoken to and what you last talked about or did for them. Flightdeck enables you to differentiate between your best customers and somebody you’ve never spoken to before. When a customer or prospect calls a display is instantly activated on screen and you are presented with the caller details and history. You are then in a much better position to anticipate the nature of the call, what the caller might want, who should answer the phone, what information they need in front of them and most importantly, how the caller should be dealt with.
  • Anxious – Don’t have a firm grip on the sales pipeline? There’s nothing worse than thinking you might be letting business slip through your fingers or feeling like you can’t quite believe everything members of your sales team are telling you. Unfortunately, this is not uncommon in business. Flightdeck helps by opening up countless sales opportunities that you may otherwise have missed. Opportunities for cross selling, analysing customer preferences and forecasting buying times. Flightdeck allows Sales Managers to stay in control of their team, monitor whether leads have been chased up and evaluate the performances of individual team members. Your staff can improve their sales performance and your turnover can increase, pleasing your customers who will feel professionally looked after by staff who are armed with the all the information they need.
  • Tired – Feeling disorganised with mountains of paperwork? Having mountains of paperwork to deal with can lead to serious disorganisation with files all over the place. This means not being able to get to the right information at the right time. You are able to store a wealth of information about each company you deal with. Flightdeck can even link in with your back office systems to display information such as accounting data, which is relevant to that company. Flightdeck’s attachment facility allows you to store a virtually unlimited number of files with a lead, contact or company, these may be diagrams, technical specifications or anything else. This means that not only do you have all the contact details but also any associated file you want at the click of a button.

Here are some typical issues faced by different types and sizes of business:

The Sole Trader

  • Increasing need to maintain details of growing numbers of relevant contacts.
  • Dealing with several contacts within a customer’s business.
  • More difficult to remember to get back to someone or to remember what was last talked about or what you did for them.
  • Growing realisation that opportunities are lost because it is difficult to work out who needs to be approached and about what and when.
  • Often a growing feeling of wasting time and being a bit disorganised.

The Early Business

  • Unprecedented need to share information.
  • Frustration that everything is still dependent upon founder being around.
  • Issues around communication between employees.
  • The ball is dropped occasionally.
  • Promises made to customers not always kept.
  • Potential customer has to ring in several times and go through the whole story again with someone new.
  • Concern that customers and potential customers may see them as disorganised and inefficient, perhaps presenting the impression that their custom is not valued.

The Established Business

  • Doing OK but there is a growing concern over lack of control.
  • Awareness that somehow the business has vulnerable areas.
  • Frustration that the business is being held back because people can’t get the information they need as and when required to inform decisions.
  • Grappling to get a grip on the sales pipeline and the sales processes.
  • Sales Director is concerned that he doesn’t quite believe everything he is being told by his sales people.
  • Bothered about having information all over the place in spreadsheets, databases, systems, etc and no joined up information strategy.
  • Feeling they really ought to have a 360 degree view of their business, their customers and what they do for them.
  • The Larger Organisation
    It bothers the directors that they may be losing customers to the competition just as fast as they are finding brand new customers.
  • Begin to focus much harder on operating costs and efficiencies and have a burning desire to work smarter
  • Nearly always a realisation that there are huge opportunities in the existing customer base in terms of up-selling or cross-selling and being really effective at not letting leads go cold.
  • A drive to qualify opportunities more objectively so as to focus resources as effectively as possible.
  • Need to raise understanding of marketing effectiveness and understand what is working and what is not, what the costs per lead are from various sources, what sorts of conversion ratios are they getting etc.