There are always so many ideas for how you can use technology to make your customers happier, team happier or improve business outcomes (usually financial).

But which of the ideas should you spend time seriously considering and what can you use to filter to find the best ideas?

First let's look at the filtering process, and then let me give you three case studies on tech investments that generated happier customers, teams and profits.

3 Questions to Ask to Find Your Best Technology Ideas

I always think of it as a venn diagram... with customers, your team, and business outcomes as the three overlapping circles.

Some technology investments improve the bottom line, but there's no customer or team benefit. Or they make your team happy, but they don't improve any other business measure or positively impact your customers. Or your customer love it but it makes the lives of your team harder, and may not produce many other business benefits.

The best decisions tend to tick all of these three boxes:

1. Will the investment make our customers happy?

2. Will the investment make the lives of our team easier?

3. Will the investment produce good outcomes for the business?

3 Case Studies

Case Study 1

"2x the revenue per sale with (almost) no incremental cost"

I looked at buying an education and training business. They sold 1-day training courses to white collar professionals in corporates for about $650 per day. Courses like communication skills, leadership, front line manager training, active listening, and change management.

They were doing about 15,000 days of training per year across many sites nationally and were doing about 10m in revenue, but were only selling an average of 1.2 courses a year per participant. Each participant therefore spent about $800 per year, but they wanted to improve this average revenue per sale.

So what did they do?

They built a platform that allowed the customers to attend as many courses as they wanted, for $1,700 per year. Sounds amazing for the customer right?

But the big issue in cohort-based training is you need a minimum number to break even, in their case, they needed 3 participants. So you don't want to run any courses where you have 1 or 2 enrollees - and you will quickly lose customers if they book, you only get 2 students, and then you cancel the course.

Goodbye customer! They won't be coming back. Ever.

So they built a customer platform that showed them not the public schedule of "possible" course start dates, but only courses that had already secured 3 enrolments and therefore were guaranteed to run. This meant every additional enrolment carried almost no incremental cost (just a tea/coffee charge) - it just added to the gross profit of each course.

All of a sudden they had fuller classes, which created a better experience for all students.  And within a few years about 50%-60% of students were taking up this $1,700 "all you can eat" option instead of buying 1.2 courses per year (for a total of about $800) and therefore the average revenue per enrolment went up 2x, but their costs stayed almost the same.

They ended up with happier customers who were now doing 4 to 5 courses a year for $1,700, not $2,500 to $3,500 - great for them. And a huge EBITDA improvement because they generated a lot of extra revenue, with very little extra cost. Win-Win!

Case Study 2

"2x the average sales, per person with no extra worked hours

I led sales for a global education business, and I was looking to improve the productivity and output of the sales force. My sales operations leader sat and watched people work for two days, and just documented minute by minute what screens they clicked on, the workarounds they'd come up with to get around annoying things we had in place, and where they were losing time.

In a contact centre every single minute doing call prep, post-call follow-up and admin is a minute not spent on the phone. We had people doing an average of about 1.5hrs of talk-time each workday in our contact centre sales roles. 3hrs+ when it's outbound is best practice.

What we discovered was that two key things were impacting their productivity materially; pre-call preparation (looking through lead lists to see who they'd call next), and leaving voicemails like "Hi it's Sean from XYZ, I'm just following up on an enquiry you made, love to have a chat with you, you can call me back on XYZ phone number". 

That might seem like small things, but the three-to-five minutes they spent figuring out who they'd call, and the two minutes letting the phone ring out, listening to the voicemail announcement and then leaving an almost-identical voicemail for each customer was being repeated 30-50 times a day. That's almost three entire wasted hours on those two tasks, per day, per person!

What was the solution?

We noticed the time spent looking through lead lists was just cherry picking. They were looking for what they thought were the best leads. So we changed the system to only show them 2 leads at a time and until they'd been contacted, it wouldn't show them the next two.

We then customised an MP3 with their voice, so as soon as the system heard a voicemail announcement, it would take over and leave that customised voicemail for them.

These two things together took them from 1.5hrs to 3hrs in talk time, and improved conversion rates from 7% to 11% because they treated all leads with the same urgency - no more inaccurate, personally-biased cherry picking!

Our sales results almost 2x'd from 15 enrolments a month to 27, per consultant. With no extra headcount or lead spend.  

Did this help customers?

Absolutely, because they got calls back faster. Our sales people were getting through more leads per day and the ones who weren't getting calls before, now got calls. More customers were getting served properly, and so they were happier.

Did it make the job easier for sales people?

They loved not having to do the voicemails. And their commissions went through the roof because they were making twice the sales outcome with no extra hours worked! I'm not sure if they loved the 2-at-a-time lead management model, but they loved the money and outcome so they accepted it.

Was it good for the business?

Of course! Wouldn't you like to have 2x your sales output with the same cost base? Much better looking bottom line.

Case Study 3

"1m in annualised costs saved from a one-off $300k investment"

A former boss of mine was running a division of a major telco business that focused on the small to medium business segment. They put in place a great initiative that saved 12 full-time roles worth almost $1 million in annualised operating expenditure.

This was the scenario. Field sales people would create orders in their CRM, it would go through a quality and administration team, who'd then type it all into a delivery system to get the orders fulfilled. 

The project delivered full automation from the sales person taking the specifications with the customer, through all the quality decision-making trees and compliance rules through to operations and fulfilment with no human interaction between sales and fulfilment.

Customers started getting their products more accurately (as human errors were removed) and 50% faster (because of the fewer human handoffs). Naturally the 12 team members were not happy about losing their jobs, but the extra $1 million bottom line improvement was fantastic and it allowed the company to reinvest it in 7 new sales roles to find more customers to make happy.

So overall, an incredible outcome for a project that cost only $300k on a one-off basis.

What is the right investment for your business?

So.. your turn. Which of your technology ideas ticks the three boxes? What could you tackle that would:

1. Make your customers happier?

2. Make the life of your team easier?

3. Produce good outcomes for the business?

I wish you the best of luck in using these questions to filter your ideas and creating some equally fantastic results, like the ones in the three case studies above.

What to know how else you can do more, with less?

The whole ScaleUps Roadmap program is designed to do lead you through this kind of thinking. It's not only about developing a great growth strategy, it's about stepping back and looking at how you can optimise your business model.

If you'd like to step back and be led through a series of excellent questions that will help you stack the deck for achieving amazing outcomes in the next three years, you can check out the program here and register your interest now.