In an age when more professionals are choosing to explore alternative career paths rather than just diving headfirst into the corporate world, plenty has succumbed to their entrepreneurial spirits. With the promise of being their own boss and managing their own people, what more could they ask for?
This is especially true considering that there are numerous technologies and innovative solutions available in the market for anyone’s taking. You can use this to manage your business more efficiently. But of course, no technology can be successful without a comprehensive strategy to back up its implementation.
Keep in mind that technology and business strategy must work hand in hand before it can get anything off the ground. That said, here are three software systems that you can use to run the different facets of your business, namely administration, sales and customer service, and marketing:
For Administration: Database Management System (DBMS)
The database management system (DBMS) is used to optimize the storage and retrieval of your data. It can also be used for administrative operations such as performance monitoring, disaster recovery, change management, and compliance. This is a great alternative to traditional database applications.
The reason why traditional databases are being phased out is that they are prone to data redundancy, isolation, constraints to integrity, and inaccessibility of data. All these challenges were then overcome by newer DBMS solutions that allow fast and efficient collaboration between their users.
For your business, you can look into SQL servers or relational database software that you can use to store your information so that it remains accessible when you need it for your other applications. Your chosen DBMS should allow you to manage, store, and analyze your data whenever you need it.
However, it’s important that your SQL server can perform at an optimal condition at all times because if not, it can compromise your business intelligence and productivity. It can help if you regularly fine-tune your SQL server database performance so that you can rest assured that you wouldn’t encounter any troubles during operations.
For Sales and Customer Service: Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
When it comes to running a business, you have to remember that your priority must always be to put your customers first. After all, your business won’t exist without their continued patronage. Therefore, you must do everything in your power to make sure that you become a customer-centric business.
A good way for you to manage all your business relationships and interactions with customers is by using a customer relationship management (CRM) system. The CRM approach will allow you to build better relationships with your customers in the hopes of improving their brand loyalty.
Aside from helping you gain new customers and retain your existing ones; your CRM system can also increase your company revenue and reduce your operational costs. This is because CRM systems can use data analysis to study large amounts of customer information taken from your marketing, sales, customer support, and feedback departments.
CRM combines all your customers’ data in one place, such as their phone numbers and email addresses. By having this information, you can hone better relationships with your customers because you’ll know what marketing, sales, and customer service strategies or techniques will actually work on them.
For Marketing: Content Management System (CMS)
At a time when everything is flourishing in the digital landscape, you must learn how to adapt to the demands of your market, such as dabbling into digital marketing. Traditional marketing strategies no longer make an impact on a consumer base that continuously demands more from the brands they support.
To keep up with their growing demands, you can use an integrated content management system (CMS) that will allow you to create, edit, publish, and store digital content that will reach your target audience. In essence, the CMS is a platform that you can use for your business, such as WordPress or Wix.
With a comprehensive CMS platform, you will no longer have to build your official business website from scratch, which can help you reduce your overall costs. And since there are plenty of established CMS platforms that are also easy to use, update, or scale, you won’t have trouble managing your site.
You can find lots of innovative solutions and technologies that you can use for your startup if you know where to look. For starters, you can begin by staying on top of the industry trends and see if any of them have the potential to become game-changers. But for now, use these three software solutions to get your business up and running.