Finance tech

Helping CRM usage? Sales managers, do you micro-manage your sales teams from details in the CRM? If salespeople sense that entering all their leads and all the data points they know about every customer and deal in the CRM will bring down waves of criticism and micro-management FAR beyond what they would deal with just tracking their prospects in an old-school manual way (even including getting into trouble for not using the CRM!)… again – they will act in their own best interests. In this case, sadly, that self-interest will be completely opposite company-interest.

Recent incidents should serve as sufficient motivation: Yahoo – 3.5 billion account details were hacked in two different breaches. Every single account on a system serving nearly half of the world’s population in 2013-14 (not fully disclosed until 2017). Sony Motion Pictures – hacked by a group working with North Korea and used sensitive stolen data to force Sony to cancel the release of a movie about Kim Jong Un in 2014. Anthem Health – 80 million customers’ identity and health insurance records were breached in 2015. Equifax – 146 million customers’ detailed credit records and social security numbers were breached in 2017.

The real power comes when you know how a customer will best interact with YOU. Beyond understanding a customer or client generally, the real benefits come to companies who know how customer needs overlap with the company’s offerings, and to companies who can predict the timing of those needs more fully. This can be challenging when you’re not doing business with a customer yet, but to fill this gap myriad data brokers and aggregators offer data which can be harvested and combined for useful insights. One critical prerequisite for combining multiple outside sources (and later integrating internal data) is to identify a unique key for each record, which ideally can be obtained automatically from data generally complete and accurate in each source. Don’t be dissuaded if this step does require working through exceptions using outsource data cleansing services or temp/intern help. If you’re going to leverage multiple sources of data, it’s a critical step to develop and nurture this unique key; many companies who skip this step end up in a nightmare of duplicate records. See more details on CRM insights.

Every business should want to have an IT consultant! One of the greatest concerns when adopting new business technology is data security. IT experts can advise a business on the safest technologies to use. The experts can also help businesses identify loopholes in their current systems that may lead to a security breach. Hiring an IT consultant is the right move whenever a business experiences or suspects a data security breach. Internal IT professionals may be too busy managing daily operations to monitor data operations keenly.

An advice any CEO should know about cybersecurity: Cyber-attacks and security breaches will occur and will negatively impact your business. Today, the average cost of the impact of a cyber breach is $4.9 million. Further, it is incumbent upon CEOs to learn more about cybersecurity to ensure their company is taking appropriate actions to secure their most valuable information assets. This does not mean that every CEO needs to become a Certified Information System Security Professional (CISSP). Rather, CEOs should increase their knowledge of core cybersecurity concepts and leverage their own leadership skills to conceptualize and manage risk in strategic terms, understanding the business impact of risk.

Trust is a universal Human Need Turbo-charger! Although we apply this approach to IT-driven transformation, it is truly in effect in every aspect of our lives. Myriad leadership studies have proven the connection between success/efficiency/effectiveness and trust. And each of us can confirm in our own lives the “difference” between situations where trust was absent vs. present; it is not difficult to recall in which situations we were at our best. As with many things, the impact of trust may be seen more clearly by examining what happens when it’s absent. There is something deep in human nature which causes us to hold back, maybe in subconscious self-preservation, in these situations. Discover extra info at https://innovationvista.com/.