How well is your B2B business navigating the skills shortage? Like most other Kiwi and Aussie organisations, you're probably finding it challenging. You're facing a skills shortage that's been exacerbated by limited immigration over the past couple of years; quite simply, the demand for skilled workers is fast outstripping supply. The NZTech Report, Digital Skills for our Digital Future, estimates that by 2025, as many as 149 million new tech jobs are expected to be created worldwide.
Well, the borders are open now, but it's still an extremely competitive marketplace - a bit like trying to fill a swimming pool with a garden hose. Qualified and experienced jobseekers can take their pick, and it will probably take a good year or so before the labour pool deepens once again.
Bernard Salt, a leading commentator for the Australian and Managing Director of The Demographics Group, recently said:
"In the slower-growth world that lies ahead, in a world where the rate of growth in working taxpayers is either plateauing or shrinking, a different kind of thinking needs to emerge within Australia and beyond. Here is one of the great demand drivers behind digitisation. Business must get greater productivity per unit of labour if labour is indeed scarcer. This is best achieved via automation, mechanisation, AI and digitisation. We need to lean into this way of working and living."
The skills shortage impacts on B2B organisations by slowing down sales processes and keeping customers waiting. That's because if you're still using manual processes for emailed purchase orders, your staff are tied up on manual data entry, swivel-chair integration and fixing the inevitable errors.
And of course, they have to deal with a variety of different systems, since your customers will all have different methods of managing their POs. This is beyond your control - you can't ask your customers to change to suit your ERP - meaning your sales and customer services team have to spend a lot of time and resources dealing with how their customers prefer to do business.
What this means is they're spending less time on customer relationships, nurturing leads and in general, growing the business. And of course, in this fiercely competitive recruitment landscape, you're going to find it difficult to hire extra staff to fulfil/interpret orders.
Right, so what you need to do to not only survive, but to thrive, is to do more with less. A slow PO process is detrimental for any B2B business, but especially now when you really need your sales and customer services teams to be focusing on tasks that grow your business, not just on treading water. And that means automating areas of your business that are time-consuming, repetitive, and prone to error. One of the quickest ways to set your sales team free is to automate your order processing by bringing an automated B2B order processing solution on board and letting technology take over.
We know you're worried about the cost of investing in innovation, but trust us when we say it's not as expensive as you think. Not only that, but you'll realise a significant ROI through cost and error reduction - not to mention those precious HOURS your staff will be able to reclaim.
The idea with automating your PO processes is not to replace your sales and customer services team. Rather, you're setting them free to focus on the kind of relationship-building, growth-focused tasks that will ensure your B2B business remains competitive, even with less staff on board than you'd like. While you're navigating the skills shortage, an automated order process will help you gain efficiencies, save time and money, and provide an enhanced customer service.
Right now, you have to do more with less - and automation is the way to achieve that.
A key solution to the skilled worker shortage is to automate wherever possible. We’ve got all the details covered in our eGuide, Automate your sales team and set them free! Download the automated PO processing eguide today.
It may not seem like it, but the skills shortage means now IS the time to invest. You have limited options when it comes to staffing, so your team needs to be as productive as possible - and that means minimising, as much as you can, the hours they spend managing emailed POs from different systems. Not only will your business save time and money, but you can rest assured that your business will continue to be competitive and to grow - you've given your teams the tools they need for future success.