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This article provides an overview of the Digital Discovery Audit offered by Mount Arbor, as well as information about grant funding available to qualifying companies in Ireland. It explains the three main types of business audit and the various benefits associated with a digital audit, such as increased efficiency and access to technology and data analytics capabilities. Additionally, it outlines how Mount Arbor’s Digital Discovery Audit can help unlock the potential of digital transformation within an organisation. Finally, it encourages readers to book a meeting with one of Mount Arbor's experts to get started on their Digital Discovery Audit journey.

Learn how to use a new tool from our friends at Hubspot. Launched April 2021, the "HubSpot Operations Hub" is designed to help your team optimize its revenue operations with integrated tools that work together seamlessly so you can scale faster and more efficiently with your team.

Marketers see analytics and content management as key to CRM lead management success. In response, software vendors are facilitating delivery of content across multiple channels and orchestrating better marketing and sales coordination. Recently released Gartner research evaluates effective CRM lead management solutions. HubSpot comes out as a top challenger in the market - with the new Sales Hub and Service Hub platforms seamlessly connected to Marketing via the CRM, HubSpot has repositioned itself as a viable foundation for the overall growth of a company.

Unlocking opportunities in your sales pipeline so you can ensure not only the future of your company but the survival of your business in an uncertain economic climate is all CEOs and Sales Leaders are thinking about right now. We’ve all got to be on top of our game, especially when it comes to sales.

How Mount Arbor uses Twenty Three Personal for Account Based Sales

Let’s face it - your sales team is statistically likely to be lagging behind in terms of their use of technology. They’re most likely to be applying more relationship driven sales methods than data-driven - especially if your hiring pool includes salespeople with more than 10 years experience in sales. The reason for this is that digital technology has been available to Sales for years, but the systems and processes to use the technology in your sales process has been difficult to apply. Altify claim there’s a 13% retention rate on sales training - that means, essentially, that even if you were to train the sales team to follow your own unique sales system or methodology the likelihood is that after training is complete, most of your salespeople will put the manuals on the shelf and do what they were doing before. The same is true of your CRM - statistically salespeople spending too much time on data entry and not enough on sales. From 'The State of Inbound', a report commissioned by Hubspot:

There is an imbalance between the state of digital marketing and digital sales. Proportionally, the marketing stack is bigger and better, and marketing teams are more savvy. Digital marketing got a head start, but sales is catching up. For sales leaders, this presents an opportunity to introduce the same sort of digital innovations we have seen develop in marketing over the past 5 years. It also means many sales organisations are being left behind as they cling to traditional ways of selling, just as marketers stuck to traditional forms of marketing until they were forced to move. Digital selling involves the use of data, sales automation, an inbound sales process and inside (a.k.a. remote selling) as part of the mix.

Selling software to businesses has changed a lot in the past 5 years. In the old days, sales people could approach a prospect, do a demo of the software, give a couple of examples of how it’s worked out for other similar customers in the past, then whip out the 12 month contract to close the deal before retiring to the bar. OK, maybe it wasn’t that simple - but for the majority of sales people, they at least knew what they were selling when they were meeting with a customer. These days, it’s a little more complicated. Most modern software systems are now based in the cloud. SaaS (Software as a Service) is now the preferred solution for most businesses. Instead of software to solve unique problems, more and more we are seeing investment in platforms - platforms for marketing, platforms for sales, platforms for business growth…

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into force May 2018, replacing the existing data protection framework under the EU Data Protection Directive.

Do you find it difficult to create a predictable revenue stream for your business?

At Mount Arbor we work a lot with innovative startup founders as well as global leaders in the use of technology. According to a study on Digital Transformation by IDC published by Forbes, by 2021 one-third of CEOs and COOs of Fortune 2000 companies will have spent at least 5 years of their career in a technology leadership role. The key to their success will not be their technical expertise. This'll help, but it will be in their ability to unite technology, operations, marketing and ideas across a distributed organisation that will determine whether they make it in an increasingly fractured and fickle technology market. Business leaders of the future will have to find ways to unite a workforce that no longer ascribes to a traditional model of hierarchy and reward.

Engineers like to solve problems. Show me an excited engineer and I’ll show you a man with a problem. Noodling with algorithms and figuring out how to connect one thing to another excites a problem solver like nothing else. In technology companies, it’s always an advantage to have people who love the challenge of diving into complexity and emerging with simple, elegant solutions. These can then be sold to customers - provided the solution is actually something the customer wants.

New concept businesses can’t sell like others with more familiar products. Selling a pair of jeans in a department store requires a particular type of selling, emphasising the value of something already understood to be useful and desirable to the customer. Selling a platform or product that does something that's never been done before requires two extra steps...

Sometimes selling a solution or product feels like you’re sitting on a goldmine, yet no-one around you seems to understand. Often the value remains hidden, no matter how many ways you tell your story.

If you're still sending out generic offers to your customers in 2017, something's wrong. However, according to a recent article in The Wall Street Journal about personalization using data, "banks, including Chase, know they are sitting on a large deposit of gold—and they intend to mine it." The same is true across every industry, particularly larger institutions with both legacy data from historical transactions. They're trying to find ways to combine that data with real-time, behavioral data (from their website, for example) so they can use it to personalize interactions with their customers. This will improve customer experience and has been proven to increase loyalty, retention, and revenue.

Leadership is a group effort that is marked by the risk of taking the first steps forward. To be an effective leader in any industry, especially in technology - you need both a knowledge of the domain (e.g. business and technology) and a connection to your customers and partners. It is a curious mixture of academic prowess, diligent application of methodology and passion.

Today’s visionaries have an obligation to lead and they feel it. They’re finding new paths for those in the world who believe in positive change. As a friend of mine recently said, “follow the Hansel & Gretel method, but instead of breadcrumbs, leave a trail of happiness wherever you go”.