Latest insights

Listen to Pavlo Phitidis interview with Sam Clarke, CEO of Honeybee (Skynamo), about the challenges of scaling a business internationally, as well as a special offer and call to action to all Xero users. Click here to listen to Pavlo Phitidis and Kieno Kammies’ follow up interview with Sam Clarke about Skynamo’s progress in scaling our business internationally.

How to manage the transition from co-worker to sales manager without burning bridges, losing sales or feeling miserable. One day you’re sharing smokes and laughing about the boss’ ‘when I was a sales rep’ stories filled with fax machines, Rolodexes and large heavy catalogues, and then the next… you ARE the boss – wondering if your colleagues are sneaking cigarettes and laughing at you. The prospect of having to manage people you’ve always considered peers is enough to prevent many of us from even applying for the sales manager role, but don’t let it! The “new-boss” issue is a short-lived one. How do we know this is

The greatest thing about living and working in 2018 is that we don’t have to know everything. We just need to know how to find out about everything. This is Skynamo’s list of four essential books for every sales manager. With these four books, you will have access to what you need, right now. 1. “The Accidental Sales Manager” by Chris Lytle Click here to buy. Why we like this book: It’s got a 21st century approach to sales, which means it takes the wisdom of the greats like Dale Carnegie and Zig Ziglar and brings it into the world of the internet. It has good ideas, tactical advice and lots of anecdotal stories to

Trust is important in sales. Yeah, we know, a bit of an obvious statement to start with. But we aren’t talking about the need for trust from the consumer, which is very important. Instead, we’re talking about the importance of trust between you and your sales team – which is critical to collaboration and improving sales performance. Imagine what would be possible if you weren’t spending time double-checking information, stalking (ahem… our apologies ‘checking up on’) your reps, trying to determine whether customers are being visited on a regular basis, or whether sales figures and sales activity are correct. Instead

Skynamo launches an internal campaign to incentivise and enable employees to save water at home and at work during the Cape Town water crisis. Cape Town is expected to become the first major city in the world to run out of water as we approach the day when our taps run dry: Day Zero. Whether this day comes or we manage to pull together as a city and drastically reduce water consumption to avoid it in time, a drier future for Cape Town is a definite reality. Businesses all over the Cape are reducing water usage in their day-to-day business and arranging for alternative sources of water in case the city’s taps run dry.

1. Using a mobile data collection tool: Every bit of data gathered by teams in the office and in the field, from orders placed to routes travelled, has the potential to be very valuable to your business. Having access to the right data can shed light on where and why teams are under-performing and how this may be corrected. Therefore, capturing data in an accurate and timely fashion is very important. Effectively analysing this data is a challenge on its own, and all too often one that is overlooked. 2. Using Analytics to make sense of data: As the amount of available data increases so does the potential to see new

The urgency of mobile adoption has been a topic of discussion for many years. Businesses and people who have not yet adapted to a mobile environment will soon be left behind and look on as their competitors thrive. The ever-growing trend of mobile applications are increasing by the minute. Making use of mobile sales apps is a great way for your business to increase sales productivity for example. By making use of the right apps, your sales personnel can stay connected and have the information they need right at their fingertips, no matter where they are. In the business world, the “going mobile” trend started as a

“Transparency in business” is a phrase that is becoming more and more common under managers, owners, and leaders. “We need more transparency in our business processes”; “There isn’t enough visibility on the ground!” they say. But, what does all of this actually mean?In its most basic form, transparency in business means honesty in the way we operate. It stands for a “lack of hidden agendas or conditions”, the availability of all information needed in order to collaborate, cooperate, and make collective decisions effectively. Thus, from this, we can establish that the sharing of business data is key to business

Most sales manager dream of a more effective and more efficient sales team. Luckily, every now and then a new tool surfaces that has the ability to nudge that team further in the right direction. Strong sales managers usually jump at this opportunity. These tools are called sales acceleration tools and are by no means a new phenomenon. They are technologies that are designed, or can be used to, increase the velocity of the sales process. The fax, email, even chat applications have all served their part in facilitating better internal communication and streamlining the sales process. For the last 10 years, CRM

By the year 2020, it is predicted that analogue data will have been phased out entirely and that there will have been a 100-fold multiplication in the digital data connected by an IP address, meaning it could be connected to any other data via the internet. As the amount of available data increases, so does the potential to see new patterns that was previously not noticeable. However, with such a drastic increase in the amount of data available to us, it becomes much harder to sift through and patterns become more difficult to discern. Sales optimisation and information gathering tools are providing companies with a