4 approaches of SMBs that are poised for growth in a changed world

Tech investments are hardly the domain of large enterprises. Many SMBs are now starting as digital-first businesses, and those that began with more traditional approaches have been pivoting toward digital offerings. 

But even the savviest startup has to keep streamlining processes and adapting its offerings through tech investments – and these needs became far more urgent during the disruptions of COVID-19. In fact, more than half (57%) of SMEs say they would not have survived the pandemic if they had been using technology from a decade ago.

Tony Howlett, Chief Operating Officer of Auckland-based hospitality technology company STAAH, says they decided before the pandemic to digitise and streamline key processes across an organisation with five entities in five different countries.

“Even though we’re a tech company, we had some disjointed systems internally,” says Tony. “We were using different software for different parts of the business and no real connection across that platform.

“We began looking at Salesforce as a way to create greater connection across our systems and to refine business processes, as well as create a platform for a sales team that was spread across the world and often working remotely.”

While STAAH’s decision to transform these systems and processes came well before the emergence of COVID-19, the changes began to take shape in the early days of the pandemic. This had major implications for a company that serves hospitality and accommodation providers, especially since the pandemic has affected travel and hotels differently in each country. 

As Edwin Saldanha, STAAH’s Regional Manager of Oceania, puts it: “It’s like any household. You need to know all your sources of income and then how you’re going to spend your money. So we’ve connected parts of the business and can really analyse data reports from Salesforce to understand when, where and how we should be investing money.”

With a single source of truth across a variety of regions and markets, the business has far greater visibility into those revenue sources and spend, improving forecasting and helping them make data-informed decisions – which is vital when your customer base has been heavily impacted.

It’s no surprise that the pandemic required many SMBs to find new ways of engaging safely and remotely. While customers were already increasingly expecting digital conveniences, omni-channel experiences are now a must-have. 

The research shows that SMBs are working to keep pace with these customer expectations, and over half of SMBs in Australia and New Zealand have increased their digital presence while 89% have moved operations online in the past year. Globally,  75% of growing SMBs say their customers expect online transactions.

Nader Mitri, General Manager at PharmaPrograms, says their business had always existed in digital channels, but the pandemic still meant they needed to find new ways to help customers. 

One of their key customers, retail pharmacies, were affected massively by the pandemic on multiple fronts – Nader says that further immersion in the Salesforce ecosystem allowed pharmacies to engage with both PharmaPrograms and consumers within the digital space, gaining access to integrated information that helped keep patients happy and pharmacies open during a hectic time.

STAAH has also been developing ways to deliver for new – and often rapidly evolving – customer needs. For instance, Tony and Edwin say that they’re already leveraging Salesforce to monitor changes in each market’s domestic travel and are using automation to make reactivation smoother as customers’ circumstances shift.

Along with customer expectations, forward-looking SMBs are thinking harder about how to meet new employee expectations. Work-from-anywhere flexibility may have been borne out of necessity but it has now become an expectation among employees, and growing SMBs are much more likely to have offered these sorts of flexible arrangements. 

This new way of working also increases the need for SMBs to keep employees engaged. Businesses that incentivise, empower and bring together physically separated employees are more likely to foster such engagement. 

SMBs like PharmaPrograms can often point to earlier groundwork that helped them pivot quickly during the pandemic and empower their people from anywhere. Before partnering with Salesforce, and before the pandemic, Nader says many of their teams were frustrated by disconnected information.

“Having all information available in one place working with a consistent schema so that everyone is on the same page is really important in terms of employee satisfaction,” says Nader.

For STAAH, many employees had already been working remotely, but a trickier problem was consistency. Its decision to unify data and streamline processes across systems meant that employees had to adapt to new standardisation.

Tony says that, while some of the changes helped create less manual tasks and better visibility, employees still needed support to adopt newly standardised ways of working. Along with dedicated training sessions, the business fostered collaboration between platform ‘champions’ in different channels, ensuring each team had their own guru who could support usage and drive adoption.

Ultimately, this has meant employees can benefit from streamlined processes and the automation of lower-value tasks without being left to learn new tools on their own.