In an age where the customer is the main priority, and cutting edge technology is rising to the forefront of businesses’ minds, new and innovative ways to leverage data about software products to acquire more customers is becoming increasingly important.
So, how can you use document management software to walk your customers (no matter what industry you’re in) through the buyer’s journey?
Well, you need to understand how the buyer’s journey has evolved within the past 5 years—for it demonstrates how buyers are exhibiting different kinds of behaviors, and adapting to these behaviors has become a very difficult task without the right technology.
Customer Acquisition Paradigm Shift 1: Content Matters
Now more than ever, less time is spent with a sales person and customers rely less and less on salespeople to solve problems, answer questions, etc. Most people already know what they want to buy by the time they’ve begun interacting with the salesperson.
How it Pertains to Document Management
Using a secure and encrypted web portal to increase your web presence can draw more organic lead generation to the content on your domain.
Not only is this a double-edged sword in the sense that you will be gaining more web traffic, it’ll also drive your brand’s image through the security it provides to your clients, particularly if you work in the financial services, insurance, or accounting industries.
This way you’ll be able to create content that answers questions on your website before anyone ever calls in to explore what you’re selling. This puts the customer farther down the sales pipeline before even having to talk to you over the phone.
Customer Acquisition Paradigm Shift 2: Tools Are More Important Than Strategy
Concern with best practices is no longer as relevant as analyzing data and customer research specific to your user base. Although the term “strategy” holds a sacrosanct place in the world of business, it needs to take a back seat to the technology you choose to cultivate strategy.
How it Pertains to Document Management
Tools are more important than strategy, because they set up the means to identify the most effective strategies. Did you know that on average it’s 5-25x more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to retain one? If you increase customer retention by as little as 5%, you can increase profits from anywhere from 25 to 95 percent.
There is so much data in the world that it doesn’t even matter what strategy you take to approach it if you are approaching that strategy with manual, outdated internal processes. Document management technology touches every aspect of business, making information retrievable, liquid, and usable.
Businesses must develop, independent of best practice notions, ways to acquire and analyze customer data post-sale to drive future acquisition efforts.
Customer Acquisition Paradigm Shift 3:
Forget the sales funnel. Focus on how the entire sales cycle is essentially an hourglass instead.
How it Pertains to Document Management
It’s worth thinking about how document management can alter and improve your own sales hourglass. Given that it expedites internal processes and reduced turnaround times for documents, you can increase the speed at which things go through the hourglass. This also coincides with the idea of customer retention, irrespective of industry in which your business is placed.
We don’t have to look that far outside of how you use eFileCabinet to see this at work
WalkMe lets you find your way around our app, and is integrated within our framework to help you discover what you need to do.
If you move customer communications to within an app, you can get more engagement than you can with email. You have to go beyond demographic data to achieve the level of segmentation in app communications will require.
In the multi-channel approach, the app is the most powerful place to position a message.
You have to understand usage data. Identify the features that matter, ones that are linked with retention.
Target in-app campaigns to users that don’t use features you want them to use. If you increase usage, you increase retention.
How to Generate These Results
Zonal OCR
This is a data entry, file storage, and file retrieval automation tool. The best automated document organizer on the market.
Templates
Imagine your business has one filing cabinet and a single customer. This filing cabinet has different drawers, folders, and files with the customer’s information.
If you got a second customer, re-creating that same structure would be time-consuming with a traditional filing cabinet.
It would also take a long time with a typical Windows folder structure. Templates let you automatically replicate and apply the structure in the first filing cabinet to additional cabinets, saving you an unfathomable amount of time over the span of your business’s life.
File Versioning
Make sure a single file is never duplicated, but its different versions (including those who changed it) are associated with it—a great way of tracking what happens to documentation in your organization.
Full Text Search
You don’t need to know exactly what’s in the document to find it immediately. Responsive full text search for freaky fast file retrieval.
SecureDrawer
Want to share without sending a document anywhere? That’s security, and it’s exactly what SecureDrawer does—it’s bank-grade encrypted file sharing at the highest level and volume.
Role-based User Permissions and workflow
This is essentially employee management automation. If you currently work in an industry where management is time-consuming and paper-based, you’ll need a document management solution to square your efforts away.
Retention
This helps you specify when documents are no longer needed, and they’ll automatically be deleted to reduce clutter based on how you specify their importance and when they’re no longer needed.