With The rise of the COVID-19 Pandemic, more of us will be working from home.  Telecommuting is different that working in an office situation, and with the economic impacts of school and business closings, it will be more important than ever to work as a team to support your coworkers to be cognizant and meet customer and project deadlines.  Now more than ever customer service and responsiveness will be critical to business success as most experts believe a recession is likely. 

Moving to the cloud isn’t about the money, it’s about optimizing your core business, increasing efficiency and effectiveness, driving new revenue and growth.  When you think about it, the benefits are there:

SAP has been a leader in business management software, and they have maintained their leadership by staying ahead of trends to meet customer needs.  The 2019 SAP SMB Innovation Summit held in Orlando June 18-20 was focused on how companies are starting to use big data, coupled with artificial intelligence to create the Intelligent Enterprise.  

If you’ve heard it once, you’ve heard it a thousand times, “I can’t afford a new ERP” or “I can’t afford to change ERPs”!  When you add the cost of purchasing a couple of servers, racks to house the servers, backup systems, firewall and security, and hiring expertise to manage the equipment to the cost of implementing a new ERP system, it can get really expensive really fast.  It can almost seem overwhelming to a lot of small business owners.  Yet, the cost to implement a new ERP doesn’t have to be that overwhelming if you take an Operating Expense (OPEX) approach instead of a Capital Expense (CAPEX) approach.

When people think of SAP they typically think huge software for huge companies with huge budgets, and they would not be wrong!  However, SAP has grown and evolved into one of the leading cloud software companies and has developed products specifically designed for smaller businesses.  SAP Business One encompasses all of the learning from the Fortune 500, where SAP dominates, and rhas made it less complex and costly for Small to Mid-Sized companies.

In business, your ASPIRATIONS are a key factor in your success or failure. Let’s say for an example that you just finished a very successful implementation or you closed a large sale. Everything went perfectly...you did all the right things, the client loved you, you finished on time and on budget, your product produced an immediate ROI and it was a pleasure working with the client. This recent success will impact how you approach your next implementation or sale. The positive outcome will affect your ASPIRATIONS and carry over to your next engagement.

Yet, we don’t succeed every time do we? Let’s say you just had a horrible implementation or a horrible support session with a client. If you let it, this negative outcome will affect how you go into your next support call or engagement. Or let’s say you lost a big sale because a competitor dropped their price. This negative outcome can have an affect your next sale and you’re more likely to go in offering a discount based on your past experience. Or worse, you go on your next sales call believing there’s no way this prospect will buy what you’re selling. More often than we’d like to believe, we let our negative ASPIRATIONS control our outcomes.

Only you control your ASPIRATIONS. If you believe that a current client is so tough and unreasonable and no matter what you do you can’t satisfy them, you probably can’t. If you believe that a customer won’t buy at your current price, they probably won’t. If you believe that a competitor has more flexibility than you, they probably do. If you believe that your competitor’s product is better, it probably is. So before you’re next engagement, whatever it is, check your ASPIRATION level. Sometimes it’s good to ignore that little voice on your shoulder.

One thing is for sure, if you don’t believe your product can compete, if you don’t believe you can work with a client, if you don‘t believe you can reach a positive result, you won’t even try.

About the author: Bob Tobey spent over 20 years teaching managers, customer support and sales people how to be better at their craft. These blogs are intended to help the I-BN partner community improve their business.

I-Business Network has been managing cloud infrastructure since 1999, long before the cloud was even called the cloud. We specialize in hosting SAP Business One, Sage 100cloud, Sage 300cloud, Sage 500cloud, Sage CRM, Sage HRMS, Sage FAS and Sage BusinessWorks in two SSAE 16 data centers. For more information about hosting your Sage ERP in the cloud, contact Bob Tobey at btobey@i-bn.net.

I have never disagreed with a mainstream media more than I do with the CEOworld Magazine Article by Tyler Constable. Whereas the article’s author claims that running SAP on the cloud “May be More Complex Than You Think,” he is actually making the argument of why you should run your SAP-Based Business on the Cloud!

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