Choosing Providers

How to build a business case for new multichannel sales software

If you’re a sales manager or director, and you see the strain your current system is placing on keeping your teams and customers happy, how do you convince those with a tight hold on the purse strings to loosen their grip slightly – and invest in realising the true potential of your sales success? 

Here we lay out the business case for new multichannel sales software and three key points to include in your pitch: consumer centricity, ease of control, and automated compliance. All of which combine to improve sales beyond business-as-usual. 

Keep customers on side at every touchpoint 

Firstly, multichannel sales tech stops customers falling through the cracks. Some will never talk to a salesperson on the door or phone, others will never make a purchase decision online, and many won’t stick to a single channel.  

According to McKinsey, over 50% of customers seek three to five off and online sales channels on their way to making a purchase. If you want the loyalty of that 50%, you need to break down the silos and create a seamless customer experience across all sales channels – and to do that you need the right tech.  

Keeping tabs on all channels is vital if they’re going to work effectively in harmony. This can be a difficult task, though, particularly if to generate the data you need you’re relying on your sales teams’ manual reporting – which equates to less time spent closing sales.  

The right sales software will be intelligent and efficient. It’ll keep your sales teams focused on their primary task and, at the same time, make them better informed with data captured across all sales channels. This helps them to close sales that would otherwise slip away – and this creates a significant ROI over time.  

Automated multichannel compliance 

Compliance with sales and data regulations is a major selling point when it comes to building a business case for investing in a multichannel sales solution. While the initial outlay for buying into a new system may seem like a large investment, it would pale in comparison to the cost of a fine for mis-selling a product or service, or mis-handling personal data. 

Automation is key to a successful multichannel sales solution; removing some of the manual admin processes in closing a sale can save time between sales, yes, but more than that, it means your compliance is on autopilot, ensuring that nothing is being mis-sold. The right multichannel sales solution can also do the heavy lifting for you as regulations change around selling in your industry and being able to react quickly means your teams can keep selling. 

The extra level of control is important for compliance, but also for customer retention; customers who are mis-sold products and don't come away with a positive experience are likely to look elsewhere. 

Ease of control 

The right multichannel sales system will give you control of sales and onboarding processes, territory management, and lead capture.  

Sales managers can get a real time overview of sales data across all channels via a dashboard. This means they can identify inefficiencies easily, allowing them to make adjustments and see the impact of those adjustments in real time. This is an invaluable asset when trying to hit targets and KPIs, rather than having to wait for a reporting team to collate data and react based upon historical information. 

For effective territory management, routes can be sent automatically to different representatives, ensuring no crossover or miscommunication. This also cuts down on the resources needed for assigning territories to sales representatives. Data collected and centralised within one system,  means campaigns can be driven by business intel to improve overall conversions and results.  

A watertight multichannel sales system will enable you to focus efforts in a strategic way. Without it, your sales teams can be knocking on all doors and calling all numbers, only to discover people who don’t want to buy or aren’t in a position to buy yet. Likewise you can miss potential customers who are ready to purchase. 

The right multichannel solution will enable your teams to capture missed sales opportunities. They can then schedule a follow up at the right time from the right channel, whether that’s email, a phone call or showing up at their front door – ensuring no opportunities are ever missed.  

Ultimately, that’s what multichannel sales software is unless you invest in it: a missed opportunity. It’s an investment, of course, but the return on that investment can be felt from all angles as you close more deals, waste less time, capture missed sales, ensure 100% compliance, and gain the ability to track that ROI in real time. 

To learn more about how PSI’s multichannel sales software might help your business grow, take a look at the case studies of how we helped SSE Airtricity and Ogi. Alternatively, get in touch and see how our team can help you to build a business case for investing in multichannel sales tech. 

by Nathan

Should you build or buy multichannel sales software?

This is the era of the frictionless customer onboarding experience, and companies can no longer opt out. All organisations are going after more personalised, more consistent and bottleneck-free experiences across multichannel sales and onboarding. Those who don’t get ahead will inevitably fall behind and get their customers stuck in the sales pipeline.

When your goal is to keep shuffling people through your sales funnel, the question is not if you should adopt better technology for customer acquisition and onboarding, but how? If the software already exists as an off-the-shelf solution, you can buy it - but should you? If you have the resources in house to build it, you can do so - but what are the implications?  

We’re specialists in sales software for customer acquisition and customer onboarding, and we have first-hand insight into what it’s like to build, buy and customise software for this purpose. So here’s a brief overview of what we’ve learned. 

Build: control your buyer experience 

Building your own sales software has several distinct advantages: 

• You don’t need to pay up front for new software 
• Your organisation is in complete control of what you build 
• You can build the software around very specific requirements 

The build approach leaves your organisation with all its cards in hand. Your in-house developers can build the software to an exact design based on your sales goals, and your organisation only needs to pay for the upkeep.  

So, if your organisation can spare the time and resources, can avoid the costs of purchase and get a platform that meets the needs of your entire team and customer base perfectly, why wouldn't you? 

Well, the catch is that this perfect scenario can be difficult to attain.  

First, it is a rare thing for an IT project to stay in scope, on time and on budget without a few unexpected hidden costs. In a Harvard Business Review study of 1,481 IT change initiatives, the average cost overrun was 27% and one in six projects had a cost overrun of 200% and a schedule overrun of nearly 70%.  

You can’t blame it all on project management though. It’s often just a hazard of the field. Software focused on customer experience is constantly evolving – and the goalposts are too. 

At PSI we’ve come across many companies that spent two and sometimes up to four years building the same type of software. By the time it is deployed, there's a whole new market of modern buyers and the company has moved on, along with competitive standards, often making the technology no longer fit for purpose.  

Buy: Get sales software up and running fast 

Purchasing software has its own advantages: 

• Get it in the hands of your sales teams quickly 
• Reserve your in-house resources for your core work 

• Make the most of time-sensitive opportunities 

When you choose to buy off-the-shelf sales software, you inevitably sacrifice some control and customisation. The software might not be ideally suited for your industry, and it may not perfectly suit your ideal customer journey for every channel. 

What you lose in perfect fit, you gain in speed. When the need is time-sensitive, it’s often best to choose a quick off-the-shelf buying process so you don’t miss your window of opportunity.  

You’re also purchasing peace of mind when it comes to compliance and watertight security. When you need to navigate GDPR or CCPA, or other data privacy regulations, it’s often worth buying software simply to avoid the risk of non-compliance with its associated fines and PR damage.  

If existing software out there meets 60% or more of your requirements, it’s likely worth buying, even if it’s not a perfect fit. You may not have complete influence over the product roadmap but many vendors will collaborate extensively with potential customers to build or improve their products. If the software is designed to be customisable, you’re also far more likely to find a good fit for your organisation. 

Typically building software from the ground up is best reserved for when the technology is at the core of your offering. For us at PSI, the beating heart of what we do is multichannel sales software, so it makes sense for us to devote as many in-house resources as possible to the task. But it also makes sense for us to purchase software that lies outside our core business.  

While it can seem like a cost-saving to have your in-house developers reimagine how you approach customer acquisition and customer onboarding - you sacrifice much in opportunity. Every moment your developers spend on looking for potential solutions to your sales software is a moment they are not working on developing your core business, whether that means creating digital products for 5G or key infrastructure for analysing your company data.  

Configure: Tailor existing software to your multichannel sales strategy 

A third option, which isn’t always considered, is to buy highly customisable software. This is effectively a middle ground between building and buying: 

• Get a sophisticated system fit for multichannel sales in your industry 

• Configure the software to your unique requirements, and apply branding  
• Do more projects in less time, with the same resources 

Developers are used to finding a wide range of ways to stop reinventing the wheel. They’ll use open-source tools to build complex architecture or they’ll use “headless solutions” that provide backend functionality, so they can focus their expertise where it matters most. In other words, they source generic software from specialist vendors, and then use APIs to connect it with the unique elements of what they’re building in real-time.  

Similarly, with customer acquisition and onboarding you can find highly customisable software that can be configured to your organisation’s unique vision and set up. This means you don’t need to compromise on off-the-shelf software that’s not designed with your industry or organisation in mind. And you can also get set up in weeks not years - which is how long you’d need to wait if you tried to build the same software in-house - so you can fast track the entire customer journey to accelerate business growth. 

This customisation and speed is exactly what our Touchstone and Fusion products offer. “We’ve built features to enable us to build and change customer journeys without reinventing the wheel each time,” says David Costello, CEO of PSI Mobile. “This is the low code/no code scenario, and these products provide our customers with powerful tools to be able to do more complex projects in less time, with the same resources.” 

If you're a business owner and want to learn more about how you can configure sales software to meet your sales goals, see our article on multichannel sales tech and how it fits together to give you a competitive advantage. 

by Nathan