Imagine the scenario; 

You've researched your heart out and are fully armed with information and statistics, ready to walk in to the sales meeting with your head held high and an enthusiastic grin. There's no way you can't come out of this with a signature on that service contract in your briefcase, right?

It's easy to fall into the too-smart or too-confident category when making a sales pitch. However, with a more innovative mindset and less aggressive tactics, you can make your point without making your next potential clint want out before they're in. 

Here are 6 ways you can avoid bombing the next pitch you make, without underselling your product, service or skillset.

Protect and grow the top line

Rapidly identify and respond to changing customer needs with data-driven marketing, sales, and pricing.

Develop agile operations

React quickly and manage disruptions in supply chain, logistics, facilities, manufacturing, development, and corporate functions.

Enable people

Empower employees to be more productive, collaborate effectively, and stay connected in all circumstances. Adapt with new approaches to talent management and development.

Accelerate data and digital platforms

Increase the modularity and availability of core IT infrastructure and applications. Make insights more accessible to enable data-driven, AI-enabled decisions across silos.

Enhance cybersecurity

Safeguard digital assets and react quickly to security breaches in an increasingly distributed environment.

Strengthen financials

Ensure financial liquidity with an operating expenditure-driven cost model, reduced total cost of ownership, and data-enabled policies to manage cash and working capital.

In addition to helping our customers mobilise their workforce, at Customer Consulting Group, we "drink our own champagne" so to speak, by having several employees who have been successfully working from home most days since they joined the organisation, and as such have become somewhat experts on 'telework'.

Here are our top tips to help you work from home amidst the current situation to help do your part in preventing the spread of COVID-19 and helping our Aussie economy stay afloat.

1. Develop a good routine. 

Get up early, like you normally would to head into the office. Have your breakfast, make a coffee, then head down the hall into your office. Set yourself up, fire up the laptop and get stuck in. 

Creating a good morning routine for yourself that is similar to that of working in an office will help you to maintain solid working habits and motivation as you get used to seperating your home life from your work life within the same environment. 

2. Manage yourself. 

Set up your day like you normally would. Check your calendar, schedule your meetings and write a to-do list using an app like Microsoft Planner or Zoho Connect. By micro-managing yourself, you will learn to become accustom to completing your tasks efficiently. Making sure you use the best technology to do this will also help you to focus on how to make the most of being more mobile.

You'll also need to give yourself some ground rules to prevent the quick Facebook check up from becoming an hour of mindless scrolling because noone is there to look over your shoulder. Consider promoting productivity by rewarding yourself with a quick walk around the block or five minutes in the kitchen to grab a snack on completion of a task or after 20 minutes of solid effort.

3. Communicate frequently. 

Make sure you and your team have an effective comunication platform such as Microsoft Teams, Zoho Cliq or even WhatsApp to be able to communicate regularly and as quickly as needed. You won't be able to quickly duck by a colleagues desk to ask questions from home, so you need to ensure you have an effective means of communication. 

It's also a good way for those socialites among us to continue getting the positive human connection that working from home can lack in.

Remember you will need to practice extra courtesy as you can't see what others are doing and want to prevent interrupting others work. 

As a side note, CCG can help you to set up your communication systems right from the beginning. We also have partnerships with telecommunications companies that can ensure you have accessible phone systems that connect to your home office. 

4. Take regular breaks. 

Many people forget self care when working from home and will work from dawn til dusk everyday just because they are in the comfort of their own home. Burning out is possible to do even if you are working at home, so you need to ensure you take your lunch break and you finish on time. The boundaries of work life balance are easier to cross when you're home, so set alarms or reminders to take breaks or finish working by 5pm if that's what it takes to give you a routined work day. 

5. Set up your space. 

One of the major upsides to working from home is your actual office/working space. Often we aren't able to express ourselves in our working space, but freedom of expression can be quite motivating to people as they tend to feel more comfortable and confident surrounded by things that make them happy. Put up some artwork, hang some cool curtains, plaster your wall in photos of your children and dog... Make your space your own, inviting and warm, full of your favourite colours and textures that make you feel energised and enthused to be in your home office. 

Just remember to keep a professional space for when you've got those corporate meetings with the CEO or VIP clients... 

Quick Tip: With Microsoft Teams you can even blur your background to give that extra professionalism and tech-savvy feel to your home office meetings.

6. Plan.

Finally, create a plan for each day and commit to getting it done. 

If you can say it aloud, as though you are reporting into your manager, 'I will be getting XYZ completed today', then you are making a silent goal for yourself. You know you can do it, you've told yourself you will do it, now do it.

All in all, it takes a little discipline and a lot more focus to work from home. Heed the above advice and you will have a much better experience working from home during the COVID-19 situation.

If you want some help optimising your technology to work from home more effectively, send us an email to find out how we can help: 

info@customerconsulting.com.au.

We are putting together some training and information sessions for anyone to attend to help you navigate the current economic climate. Take our survey to tell us what you would like to learn about most: https://survey.zohopublic.com/zs/54CN8J

Templates can save you time, effort and resources when set up properly. It's a set and forget kind of feature with capabilities that allow businesses to use similar branding and formatting again and again at the click of a button.

Check out the below to learn about using Email Templates within Zoho Desk:

As a small business owner, you may, or may not, be familiar with the term ‘Digital Transformation’, but in the world of big business and tier one organisations, CIO’s and CTO’s have been pondering this term for a few years now. Board members and shareholders often get excited by the possibilities that are presented as a result of taking on a ‘Digital Transformation’ project.

Actually, digital transformation is not so simple to define, if you ask 100 CIO’s what digital transformation means, you will receive just as many different answers. The reason being, is that for each business, the challenges they face are generally unique to that business; it’s culture, it’s people, it’s customers, it’s products or services, and it’s industry. To some it means digitising internal forms to improve internal processes, to others it could be as diverse as automating and expanding sales channels, as well as empowering customers through online portals.

Other examples include:

· Streamlining your billing to reduce time and errors

· Improving your ability to remain compliant to new regulations

· Updating your inventory management into the 21st century

· Upgrading your spreadsheet of customers to a powerful Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. 

These often ultimately lead to increasing your bottom line through:

· Reduced operating costs and errors

· Increased productivity with less staff that produce more

· Better business insights through analytics

· Improved customer experience, which then leads to more customers that stay with you longer and spend more.

Digital Transformation is already happening right under your nose in many industries. Think of your local video hire store vs Netflix, taxis vs Uber, and hotels/motels vs Airbnb. We kind of know how those stories go, so I won’t bore you with a long list of others already in the market or about to launch. The wheels are in motion in almost every industry on the planet. For example, a visit to the Sydney Royal Easter Show last year blew my mind with the plethora and versatility of farming robots that have already hit the agricultural sector. This is all digital transformation.

Until recently, most of the tools required to digitally transform businesses have been out of the reach of most small organisations. They generally needed highly specialised niche skills, coupled with expensive software & infrastructure and near crippling ongoing support & maintenance costs. The good news is this has finally changed in your favour. It is now generally well within the budget of many small businesses who recognise the value of investing in the future, and the associated pitfalls of ignoring it.

Many do not realise that with the top end of town investing millions, if not billions, into digital transformation, that strategic deployment of cost-effective technology tools will be essential for small to medium operators to stay alive in the increasingly competitive marketplace.

You might think that if you’re selling something niche or legacy/retro such as VHS tapes and cassette players, you might be safe. In actuality, to reach your target markets and keep up with the levels of customer service that is required these days to maintain happy customers, you’re probably not safe at all. Technology will still be required to stay afloat.

Whether you’re a B2B or B2C business, digital transformation can help reach more customers and build strategic relationships with them, implementing feedback loops so that you’ll know exactly what your customers want and can respond before your competitors do.

We’ve briefly discussed the benefits of streamlining business, but can you imagine your business without the administrative overhead, data entry, and errors associated? Some find this hard to do, I’d like to let you know that it’s no longer a pipe-dream for small businesses. So how would you spend the extra time? Many organisations that have taken the first steps on their digital transformational journey have told us that they spend it on key core business activities and further enhancing customer service.

Is there something in your business that just drives you nuts? Keeps you up at night, or makes your gut sink just by thinking about it after I’ve asked the question? The job that no one at your office likes to do, takes a long time, or even makes people dislike their role? Chances are that we can digitally transform it, automate it, and turn it into a process that no one has to think about ever again.

If some of this has got you thinking, got you excited, has you a little anxious, and it’s not the 5 cups of coffee you’ve had this morning before you smash out that undesirable task we’ve reminded you of - We like that, because our customers are the ones that surprise us with the innovative ways in which they conjure up ideas to revolutionise their businesses. Chat with us, let us know about your business, your awesome journey so far, what might be holding you back, and the ideas you have, and we’ll work together to map out the course from here, so you can enjoy running your business again in 2019.