By Danny Estrada, CRM Practice Director

As we roll through another summer and look at our mid-year scorecard many of our clients keep asking the same question disguised in many different formats. "How can we get more out of our employees?" or "Why can't we increase profit margin as we increase revenues?" The question posed back to those clients is, "Are you still doing things the same way you were a year or two ago?" Inevitably, if the answer is yes, an operational evaluation is in order.

The first step in an evaluation is to get a paper representation of all of your labor intensive processes. It's not that all processes are not important but you only need to make one or two changes to see significant impact to profitability. Don't make this complex or you will never get your feet off the ground. Start one morning at the desk of a Sales Person or Customer Service Representative and write down where information is entered initially in your organization. Separate the information into three categories (Company, Contact, and Project/Opportunity).

Take your most frequent Sales activities and find out how they are logged. (Notes, Proposals/Quotes and Sales Orders) and find out if there is any redundancy between information that is written or typed that was already entered in the previous section. Now follow the Sales Order or Project flow back to Finance and Operations. Find out what information is once again entered or duplicated in the Accounting system and/or Project Management system. By now you may have identified in less than a few hours where all the profitability is hiding in your operation.

If you are still unsure go through the same process when it comes to reporting for Sales, Finance and Operations and look to see where information documented earlier is again re-written or put into another format (spreadsheets are a great example) for further scrutiny. This small exercise will give you a few focus areas to concentrate on for further evaluation. The question now on the table is an obvious one. How much of what you just uncovered existed six months or a year ago? If you have not addressed eliminating duplication of efforts it may be time to discuss automation.

There are certainly costs involved in eliminating redundancy but the reality is that you're already spending the money. When most of our customers begin to scale and grow they have added resources along the way to mirror what they were doing months or years ago. When you look into automating a few of these processes the picture will be much different in probably just a few months. The key in scaling is to invest in a few pieces of automation that enable your revenue per employee to increase without adding head count.

Remember, you pay for automation once and it never gets sick, asks for a raise, or goes on vacation.