There are four trends right now, not industry-specific that can really help your organization pivot during this pandemic. It’s more about how quickly you react today instead of planning post-COVID times.
Strategically pivot your business with an emphasis on protecting cash and building a multi-stream revenue strategy. Take a look at all planned expenses for the year and don’t be conservative with making change.
- Planned investments, future hiring, travel, and entertainment are things you can put on hold right now
- Unfortunately, you’ll need to put aside events and team-building exercises so you can put that cash towards employees you need now to keep your company running
- Ask your team to volunteer to work reduced hours before furloughing to get through these times; this can help them also balance family requirements, etc.
- Identify technology tools and software packages you can save money on that you won’t need right now with a reduced workforce
- Look at your planned service or product expansion and compare if this makes sense to do now to accelerate increasing revenue or if the cost is too much investment with no ROI; then make a decision
- Look at building out a revenue strategy that has multiple options for bringing in revenue, not just one. Then, make it actionable quickly and turn the strategy into an execution exercise.
Data integration across business systems for quick business decisions.
- Defining which data comes from where across your business helps you identify sources of truth and then build an integrated approach to reduce manual reporting
- Integrating Finance, Sales, and Customer service gives you a full 360° view of your customer which allows you to sell better, invest, and divest as needed
- Integrated finance and sales data allows transparency in sales activities for commissioning and up-sales activities
- Integrated finance and sales data allows you the ability to see who’s paying and when. You can then determine where you need to collect or adjust net payment terms to meet your immediate cash flow needs while honoring your customer’s challenges as well
Move from on-premise to cloud solutions for cost savings and efficiency in ongoing support and administration.
- Moving from an on-premise to cloud solution allows you to support a system without necessarily needing specialized fulltime talent onsite. No ongoing maintenance is needed from IT: instead, there is a System Admin role which can be internal or external to your organization
- Lower operational costs: low upfront capital investment, which means no hardware purchases along with the ability to scale by subscription models and users
- Growth is easy to manage and scale with the ability to add virtual infrastructure as needed; you do not need to buy ahead, so this maximizes cost
- Remote working and flexibility to log in from anywhere: which is HUGE right now given the state of the global economy
- Easier to connect interfaces from vendor to vendor as it is all SaaS-based
Rightsize your cloud-based licensing within your SaaS architecture to ensure you are using what you paid for so you can maximize your investment or divest.
- Subscription models allow a cost-effective and customizable entry approach
- Highly adaptable and maintainable with less money spent on resources (on-premise infrastructure and talent): there is no need for big servers and hard-wired infrastructure
- Rightsize the number of licenses you are using today to ensure you are maximizing your cash investment in the product and not overpaying for licenses you aren’t using
- If your renewals are coming up negotiate different payment terms or contract duration so you can manage the risk and keep cash now. Many product companies are happy to work with customers to help them stay adopted into their investment now
Reach out and I and a member of our leadership team would be happy to have a 1:1 conversation and offer some quick win recommendations as an investment. We are all in this together and if we can offer some quick feedback now this could save you money.
Y’vonne Sisco – Ormond
CEO | 5P Consulting
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