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We can all feel customers’ hesitancy to buy right now. The impact of the economic downturn will impact purchasing decisions from prospects and current customers for the foreseeable future. But executives still want to see growth, so CROs are getting creative about how they can grow effectively given the state of customer spending.

Many are finding answers in their operations. 

What we know is inefficient processes, excessive meetings, and siloed workflows cause unnecessary spend that affect the bottom line. In fact, some studies show that a company loses up to 30% of their revenue to inefficient processes. What’s more, organizations that decreased the number of meetings required of their employees saw up to 70% more productivity. 

Why is this important? Because operations is entirely under your control. Optimizing best practices doesn’t require any approval or spending from outside your organization. You can make changes right now that will add value and revenue to your company. 

Here are a few ways to increase revenue by improving internal processes. 

Start with accurate data

One major factor driving the productivity conversation right now is the lack of data. Executives wonder if their team is being productive. They want to know if their processes are the most efficient they can be. In truth, most don’t know the answer because they don’t have the right kind of data. 

The metrics that many teams use to understand productivity is output. Leaders track the number of activities completed by any given organization, they look at their profit margins, and make assumptions about productivity. Assumptions, however, are not great for building operational strategies. 

Successful companies start by defining what productivity is for each of their teams and map measurable metrics to that definition. Next, they measure those metrics accurately, meaning they capture the data automatically and across all work applications. Self-reported data allows for too much human error and lacks the granular visibility you need to build efficient workflows. 

With the right workflow data, you can see what’s working, what’s not working, and start to make decisions about how your teams should be spending their time. 

Identify best practices for all customer segments

After building a productivity report with accurate data, the next step is to identify the highly valuable activities that your team must accomplish to keep customers and drive expansion. Look for activities that drive outcomes that the larger organization cares about and ones that can improve your bottom line. 

At the same time, you also want to identify low value activities. Most of the time, these are things like recurring internal meetings, time-consuming tasks that don’t involve the customer, and tasks that result from a lack of support from your tech stack. These activities reduce overall productivity and can be a drain on your potential profits. 

Note that not all high value and low value activities will be the same across customer segments. We know that enterprise customers often require a different journey than a smaller customer. When developing your best practices, make sure that you are segmenting the operations based on which team will use the playbooks, and which customers they engage with. 

When all your customer teams work from a data-driven operations strategy, you can feel more confident that you are working towards being a more productive team, and that all the work each individual is doing is important and impactful.

Use automation to create space for your employees 

You won’t be able to eliminate all low-value activities while building your best practices. That’s where automation comes in to help your team be more productive and profitable. For all low-value activities that are still necessary, consider if you can automate them for your team members. 

Remember, the goal for automating tasks is not to replace your workforce. Instead, you want to use automation to free up their time to focus on high value activities. Tasks like writing emails, building daily to-do lists, updating reports, or sharing knowledge with the wider organization can all be done with automation. 

Empowering  your employees like this not only leads to more productivity, but it also helps create a more rewarding work day, which leads to higher motivation. And if there is anything that can result in a more productive team, it is the motivation to do their most meaningful work!

See how Retain.ai can help boost productivity for your customer 

To start the new year with a more productive and motivated team, start using Retain.ai! With a single browser extension, you’ll have immediate visibility into what activities drive the best results, and what your team should stop doing in order to be more productive. You can grow through these turbulent economic times. All you need is a tool to support your most efficient operations.