Are you a business owner? Those entrepreneurs that succeed in business take charge of the company’s direction and innovate. These individuals rely on a team to help the business succeed, along with their skill of managing employees, business directives, and money.
Most entrepreneurs are always looking for a competitive edge in the marketplace. As a result, they’re willing to experiment with activities, as long as there’s a reward for the business. If your company is doing well, you’ll want to increase your profits and market share. There are a few strategies you can use to improve the reach of your business and increase your bottom line.
We put together these strategies, but it’s up to you to implement them in your business. We recommend that you execute on each of these ideas, and then track your results. By testing, you get a clear indication of whether or not the strategy is working.
When you do come across a strategy that works for you, refine it until you receive the results you want. By continually tweaking your business, you find out what works, and what you should leave behind.
Give Your Business a Customer Service Audit
Your customers are the lifeblood of your business, but are you doing everything you can to maximize customer satisfaction? If you don’t know what your customers think of your company and tour services or products, then sales are the only method of tracking this metric.
Good companies audit their internal systems to look for signs of improvement or customer dissatisfaction. These businesses analyze the data and use it to enhance or improve their customer experience.
Start implementing customer satisfaction reviews. Build a list of all of your customer’s email addresses, and they send them a quality survey. Some of the questions you can ask in your review include;
- How was your experience in dealing with the company?
- Did you find what you wanted?
- How happy are you with the service?
- Would you recommend our company to someone else?
- What can we do to improve our service to you?
Generally, people hate answering surveys. If your email arrives in your customer’s inbox, they are more likely to delete it than read it, and the chances of them replying are next to zero. Therefore, you need to incentivize your customers to leave their feedback.
Instead of titling your survey email as “Customer satisfaction survey,” or something similar, take a different approach. Title your email as “Answer our survey and get a gift card!” By incentivizing your survey, you’ll receive far better results.
After receiving the results, look a6t the feedback and see where you can improve. There are many different ways to incentivize customers to take your survey. Try offering discount codes for their next purchase, a cash prize, or entry into a sweepstakes competition.
Read: How to Get Funding for Your Business: Complete Guide
Optimize Your Website
Every business operating in today’s modern economy needs a website. If you aren’t online, then you are missing out on opportunities in the market. Many companies have a website, but it’s doing nothing for them other than take up cyberspace.
The idea of starting a website for your company is to start a lead generating machine. If the site isn’t bringing you any leads, then you need to meet with an SEO team. Search Engine Optimization uses techniques to improve your ranking with the bots on Google, Bing, and Safari. At the same time, an SEO firm will work on building your site into an authority, by linking it to others that the search engines view as credible authorities.
By optimizing your website, you can build sales funnels, automate customer service, and enhance the online shopping experience for your customers. SEO takes time to implement before you start to see results. You can expect to have to wait around 6-months before the leads start flooding your inbox.
Are You on Social Media?
While having an online presence for your business is fundamental for the digital age, you also need to register social profiles as well. Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter offer tremendous marketing opportunities for business owners.
However, similar to SEO, many companies have social profiles that are doing nothing to bring them new leads. Social media marketing has two options; paid campaigns, and organic campaigns. With the organic approach., you post content and let the leads come to you.
Unfortunately, with social platforms being busy places with billions of users, the chances of you getting any attention are slim. Therefore, you’ll need to invest in paid campaigns to increase your company’s visibility on these platforms.
Facebook ads are a fantastic way to reach your target market. Facebooks ads manager allows you to create custom campaigns where you can choose the specifics of your ideal target market. With Facebook ads, you can target local communities if you run a brick-and-mortar location.
Eliminate Unnecessary Business Costs
Many business owners spend more than they need to on expenses. Analyze your reporting to look for areas where you can cut back. Some CEOs and managers think that cutting back on your internal costs means that the business is not doing as well as it should. However, this is not the case. Streamlining your company into an efficient money-making machine is a vital task for any entrepreneur.
Do you know where you’re spending money? Analyze your cash flow report and look to identify areas where you can save money. Are you spending too much on raw materials? – Look for another supplier. Do you have too many people on your team? – Look to cut back on employees.
Wherever you can save money will help boost your bottom line. IF you’re struggling to identify key areas where you can cut back, then visit with your accountant and get their input.
Read: Business Expenses: Tax Deductions & Filing Your Returns
Hire the Best Talent
Great entrepreneurs work with great people. Every business owner understands that to achieve success, they need to work with the right people. Your employees are a vital part of your organization, and they are often the first point of contact between customers and your company.
Ensure that all of your team members have adequate training on their job description. Arrange a training session once a month to help improve your employee’s performance. The best employees will want to show up for training sessions, and they implement what they learn.
Working with a professional team is how you build a great company. However, you also need a team of advisors on your side as well. Every business owner needs an expert accountant and a qualified lawyer, to look after their legal and financial affairs. A good accountant can save you thousands of dollars at tax season, and a proficient lawyer ensures that no-one ever takes you for a ride.
Use Your Business Plan as a Guide
Do you remember your business plan? You know, that proposal you used to get investment into your company? Many business owners write a business plan when they are searching for finance, and then throw it in a drawer after they get the funding. This behavior is a mistake.
Keep your business plan updated with your company’s progress. No business achieves its targets and milestones precisely as planned. Therefore, you need to adjust your plan to the situations and circumstances you experience as the business unfolds. This strategy helps you keep an eye on your primary aim, allowing you to make adjustments to your plan as they develop.
Keeping your business plan up to date is necessary if you’re thinking about finding a second round of finance. Investors want to know that you have your finger on the pulse of the company, and you understand the direction in which you and the company are moving.
Find a Mentor
When you first draw up your business plan, you head swims with thoughts of success. However, as you start your journey with your company, inevitably, you’ll eventually hit a few unexpected circumstances that derail your plan.
More than 95-percent of businesses don’t make it through the first five years. The last thing you want for your company is to be another statistic. Find a mentor that has experience running a business in your industry. You could meet this person through social events, or at business functions. You’re looking for someone to take you under their wing and provide you with advice on your business actions.
You might think that successful business people want nothing to do with mentoring you. However, you are wrong. Many successful business owners are willing to share their experience with you. Mentors realize that you are going through the same pitfalls they had to endure. As a result, you’ll find that they are more than willing to offer you advice.
Implement Logistics Tracking
Are you dealing with customer returns and complaints about late delivery? The chances are that your logistics system needs streamlining. Employing drivers to deliver your goods to customers is a staple for most businesses. However, do you know what your employees are doing on the road?
If you’re dealing with more late delivery complaints than usual, it might be because your driver is playing around with your time and assets. Some drivers will take longer to reach a customer because they use your vehicle for tasks that aren’t related to your business.
Implement a tracking technology in your employee’s cellphones. Numerous apps let you keep an eye on your employee’s behavior when they are at work. These apps can track your driver’s position in real-time, and let you know if they are diverting off of the route to your customer.
The app can also monitor calls, texts, and emails, as well. If you suspect one of your employees of leaking company secrets to the competition, this app can let you know about their transgressions.
Build Systems
Systems are the backbone of your business. The idea of opening a company is to sell it for a profit in the future. Eventually, you’ll want to retire, but why close your company when you can sell it to another entrepreneur. Building a business takes a lifetime, and letting it go can be a challenge for many entrepreneurs.
However, the key to building a successful business is in the development of systems that govern all of your company’s procedures. Every business task has a set process from start to finish. Capture these systems in a procedure manual. By implementing this strategy, you create a set of policy manuals that you can pass on to the next owner of your company.
Procedure manuals allow you to create a self-sustaining business environment. For example, let’s say your production foreman resigns and says he’s leaving in 4-weeks. Losing a key employee could ruin your business – how will you train their replacement and still manage your business affairs? By creating systems and policy manuals, it doesn’t matter if your people decide to leave.
The policy manual gives the new employee everything they need to know about the job. They refer to the manuals instructions and procedures, and they don’t need any outside training. As a result, your business becomes a self-sustaining machine that does not require you to be around to manage the company.
Entrepreneurs that build systems into their businesses are far more likely to succeed, and sell their company for a healthy profit when they retire.
Read: Sage Business Cloud Accounting Review: Complete Guide
The Final Thought – Figure Out What’s Working and Replicate Your Success
As you implement each of these strategies, take notes on the improvements they make in your business. After a few weeks or months of tracking your new idea, you’ll have enough data to make an informed and unbiased decision on whether the strategy is working.
Don’t hold onto strategies that go nowhere. Cut your loser, and try something else. As an entrepreneur, you need to be flexible and never commit yourself to any strategy until you have proof that it’s working.
Once you discover strategies that benefit your business, replicate your success. Scaling your business to include the new policy is not as challenging as you think. Once you identify what’s working, it’s as simple as increasing your output to meet the new demand for the strategy.
2 Comments
outstanding ideas….
“Perfection does not depend on magnitude of life”