All-In-One vs. Business as Usual

If you’ve been shopping around for a CRM you’ve probably noticed something. All the different providers have “CRM plus Something” whether it’s Project Management, Invoicing, Workflow Automation, or anything else. The reason is simple, businesses need less systems doing more things.

Previously what companies did was connected their software via integrations, which was usually enough for most businesses. You connect your CRM to your email marketing, connect that your email account and so forth. But integrations means juggling a lot of moving parts, and nobody like jugglers. One thing goes out of whack and everything else falls.

Having your services on different systems creates more than a few problems:

• Splitting up your data – Is the info I’m looking for on this website or in this program?
• Constantly switching through apps while trying to complete a task
• Getting all these apps to communicate with each other
• Staff must be trained on  multiple apps, using up valuable resources
• And many more.

So why is All-In-One the solution?

All-In-One deals with these issues by treating the business in a holistic way. Not that type of holistic, there's no crystals or tea, but these fully integrated solutions think of the business as a whole when working. This also allows you to see where you want your business to grow and gives you the tools that you'll need once you do. It's like chess, those who are good at it are always thinking several moves ahead.

Transparency

They offer far more interconnectivity than having several programs integrated. With regular integration you’re going to have only predefined actions that can affect the connected systems. You may also have to wait for one of the systems to go through a scheduled refresh to update the rest of the system.

With an All-in-One you can make sure the connection to the data is instant and that you have full functionality of both features.

Timesaver

Time, so much time! Think about it, you’re working on a task or project and you need a piece of information, but it’s not on the software your using right now, you have to stop what you’re doing, figure out which software it is on, remember your login details, find the data and then go back to working on the task.

While the difference with an All-in-One is obvious the real time that can be saved is the interruption. Breaking a worker’s concentration or train of thought is far more wasteful than having to go quickly to run an errand.

While that’s the time working there’s also the time invested in learning the systems. Do you  really want your employees learning 3 or 4 different systems or learning 1? While All-in-Ones take longer to master than a single system, simply because of the sheer size of them. They are more efficient than having to learn multiple systems, once you have the rhythm of one

Better Business Insights

An overlooked aspect that can stunt a company’s grow is the lack of communication between departments. The accounting department may work in a silo, while the sales do their own thing and the production teams just put their heads down and work.

The lack of end-to-end understanding of the business can really crush efficiency. By merging all of your systems into one, your managers and executives can get a much more holistic view of how the business is working. With proper transparency you can see where your business needs improvement, your employees can see and understand what other departments are doing, and you can prepare your business for rapid growth.