By Marlon Madden
Recognising that companies could be losing customers and failing to capture new ones due to poor customer service, Lyndon Brathwaite set out five years ago to help businesses across the region turn things around.
After working for several regional companies, the sales professional started what he describes as a sales and enablement firm OPAAT-SWY, which stands for ‘One Person at a Time – Starting with Yourself’.
“It’s really along the line where it focuses on three things – people, process and technology. And it works towards helping organisations create better sales experiences for their customers. That involves giving the sales representatives the right type of tools, the right type of training, the right type of resources and collateral and technology to help them,” Brathwaite told Barbados TODAY.
OPAAT-SWY provides training, and through a partnership with HubSpot, provides a range of marketing, sales and customer service solutions to help companies to boost their operations.
“We help customers identify where the gaps are and then help them build a process and use the technology to fill the spaces,” the business owner explained.
Brathwaite, who holds several certifications spanning areas of sales and technology, said at a young age he had to figure out quickly what he wanted to pursue and be able to pivot quickly in order to provide for himself and his daughter.
He told Barbados TODAY he was propelled to start his business because he saw a need to fill several gaps related to sales training in the region.
“So up until 2018, you couldn’t find a sales trainer in Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, Guyana or Jamaica who would be doing what we do – not just sales training, but helping companies, sales reps and managers be better at what they do for the sake of their customers,” he explained.
While OPAAT-SWY has been working closely with entrepreneurs and small and medium-sized businesses in Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana and Jamaica across a range of industries and sectors, Brathwaite said he was seeking to provide services to companies in Barbados.
“We definitely intend to do so in the near future,” he said.
Brathwaite lamented that too many companies have been operating without a solid strategy to deal with inactive customers, recapture those who have been lost and even tap into potential new customers.
He said while some businesses were investing in training, that was “not being transferred for the sales development” because trainers were often not fully with the local or regional market.
Brathwaite contended that international trainers brought to the region should at least understand the culture and the people.
Some gaps, he said, include a lack of proper leadership to grow the organisation, outdated techniques that have not been adjusted to meet the customers’ demands and underutilisation of technology.
“So, we have a leadership gap in terms of some leaders not doing the right things or putting the right things in place or setting the right culture in the organisation for it to grow and develop the way they are supposed to,” the sales professional said.
“Sometimes you have some very outdated techniques. Customers you had 15 or 20 years ago are not the same customers now. So, instead of now having the same process from 15 years ago, the process should now change. The process has not been evolving to meet the way customers do business. We still have companies that don’t have an e-commerce platform, for example, and customers have to go in to do certain things.”
He added that companies could generate a lot more revenue if they paid more attention to the customer service component of their operation and at least touched base with customers who have been inactive for several months.
In relation to technology use, Brathwaite said too
many businesses were still using outdated technology or simply did not have the technology required to respond to customers’ needs.
He said he believed customer relationship management systems were critical to the region, and that could be assisted through greater use of technology.
A customer relationship management system is one that uses a combination of tools and strategies to analyse and manage relationships between companies and their customers.
With Barbados and many other regional economies depending heavily on tourism, Brathwaite said it was critical for them to have such customer-focused strategies in place.
“So having the strategy and using the technology to help execute that strategy can really help the tourism sector and they can do that by automating certain things,” he said.
“Having a customer relationship management providing service like customer experience services and sales could be beneficial to the tourism industry in a number of ways.”
The father of one said the biggest lesson learned during the life of his business so far is the need to stay vigilant and be able to pivot quickly.
“Sometimes when people are saying that business is slow, it is not because the business is slow, it is because we are not paying attention to the customer and the customer is going elsewhere,” Brathwaite said.
He explained that in order to stay relevant, he often has conversations with customers to find out their needs.
“I had to do that for myself. Not because I lost customers but because I wanted to gain more customers and fine-tune. I think the biggest thing that has helped me to be a little bit more successful in 2022 coming into 2023 was that I took the time to revise my entire plan and then just have a customer-focused approach,” he said.
The 48-year-old said he operates by the mantra “change, create, difference and achieve”.
“It means to change your routine to create opportunities that make a difference for yourself and others, and achieve your goal,” he explained.
“The more we are open to making changes as a region, I think we will start seeing so many other things happening in terms of the opportunities we create for ourselves,” Brathwaite said.
