I use free software on a daily basis, I believe in its potential and above all I think that it is a mass integration mechanism where access to information is not conditioned, where the community contribution makes us grow rapidly and in which regardless of our capabilities we can help create better things.
I started with a kind of series of How to grow our business with free software, in it stated that the main objectives of business should be increase profits, create a brand, build loyalty to our customers and reduce expenses or losses, our goal is to continue providing knowledge so that these objectives are met in an accelerated manner by SMEs and large companies.
Many of the companies believe that the only way to increase profits is to increase sales volume, although it is true that the main source of increased new income is more sales, this does not necessarily impact higher profits, due to the cost structure in many cases it is not favorable or the conditions and manufacturing capacities decrease as production is maximized. Regardless of the case, we are convinced that the increase in profits is directly influenced by our sales capabilities, our logistics capabilities and our strengths to prevent the end consumer from having to return our product, which is obviously associated with the decrease in support. , post-sale control or simply to optimize the use of resources.
Process to increase profits
The process to increase profits is based mainly on detecting opportunities to reduce expenses associated with the manufacturing, marketing and distribution process of the product, which must be complemented with an excellent control of product quality and appropriate strategies to carry out new sales conversions with negotiations where margins are more favorable.
Free software can directly influence the process to increase profits since it has tools that allow optimizing the control of the manufacture, marketing and distribution of products, in the same way, there is a large amount of free software that is intended for marketing and sales control which impacts on an increase in conversions, likewise thanks to the variety of tools for managing clients and workers we can optimize our services.
The correct combination of all these tools leads us to a technological superiority that will probably make us better competitors, give us better production prices and provide our customers with easier ways to acquire our products with better satisfaction guarantees.
The easiest way to increase profits with free software is by identifying tools that allow optimizing the aforementioned processes, in general the tools that we know that can help you in this important work are:
- A variety of specialized CRMs that have been explained in detail in the article top 6 open source CRM tools.
- Open source ERP that allow the management of the company's production processes, which with proper implementation can help save costs and standardize production procedures, which also mostly include crm and post-sale modules. Among them we can name invoiceScript, Odoo, Idempier, Adempiere, Liberty ERP, webERP, ERPNext, MixERP among others.
- Excellent tools E-commerce as Magento, PrestaShop, osCommerce, OpenCart, Spree Commerce among others, that allow us to attract new customers and make sales in less time with lower operating expenses.
- Content management, statistics and communication tools such as WordPress, ghost, mephisto, seo panel, socioboard, piwik, mautic, discourse, among others.
Regardless of the tool used, the important thing is to understand that the ability to generate profits in a company is really linked to the management of its processes, the quality of its products and the improvement in the procedures to produce better quality products with low consumption of resources.
In my personal case I usually use tools such as ERP Odoo that helps me improve and standardize the processes of my clients, this in the first instance gives me control of the expenses and income of a company, identifies the organizational and procedural failures of organization and allows me to visualize opportunities for improvement. Mainly I focus on optimizing the production process of the company (Odoo's production module helps me a lot in this task), then I focus on making logistics a procedure to add added value to the product and not continue to be seen as an expense in the supply chain, last but not least I create adequate policies to improve our sales channels and so that the purchases of inputs are more efficient.
All this is not a task that should be followed to the letter, but it is a proven demonstration that improving our internal processes regardless of our cash flow will save our organization more money, which is directly proportional to the profit generation.