By guest author Sheza Gary, project strategist
Are you an online business owner looking for new opportunities and a means by which to improve your operation? Is maximizing your small business success on the top of your list of things to accomplish this year?
Whether your online business is a small startup company working on minimal funds or a mid-sized operation looking to expand across state lines, you have an opportunity to grow your business optimally. The main goal for any business looking to flourish should be to improve efficiency and capitalize on effectiveness in the most affordable manner possible.
Regardless of whether your goal is to boost sales by gaining expert insights, more effectively promoting your content, enhancing your skills or any of the many other ways to improve business operations — you might find yourself in need of a little direction. Here are eight strategies you can implement to help maximize your online business success rate.
1. Implement New Technologies with Useful Realities
There is seemingly no limit to the power and potential of the new technologies available in the business world today. Technology can promise many things, and the appeal masked behind a good sales pitch might seem to make perfect sense to you and your business. However, investing in technologies that have no useful benefit in the scope of your business reality will ultimately only drag you down. There is oftentimes a large disconnect between the promises that come along with digital technologies and the actual realities of what they can deliver in the physical world. All technologies that you integrate into your business model must therefore be logical, advanced and, most importantly, useful on a large scale.
2. Take Advantage of the Cloud
Following in line with the idea of integrating new digital technologies with useful physical realities, the next strategy is to take advantage of the cloud. Cloud-based technologies have much to offer a business in terms of improved connectivity, enhanced accessibility, increased efficiency and decreased costs.
3. Integrate Automated Phone Systems into Your Operation
The next strategy to help maximize your overall business success rate is integrating an automated phone system. Did you know that automated systems will help improve your customer service and reduce operating costs? Some benefits associated with these systems include:
- Automated phone systems, or auto-attendants, are designed to handle the workload of a receptionist and can operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week and 365 days a year, allowing you to keep your customers informed.
- They are used for greeting, routing and advising callers.
- Additionally, they have a way of enhancing the professional aspect of any business, because they improve efficiency by ensuring that calls are answered promptly and swiftly directed to the right department, office or correct person that the callers are trying to reach.
4. Operate with a Purpose
Customers like to see that the businesses they support also play a role in supporting their local community. That being said, a business (whether online or brick-and-mortar) should operate with a purpose. Make charitable donations, participate in local fundraisers and volunteer. These efforts will not go unnoticed among customers.
5. Invest in Your Sales Team’s Skills
Regular meetings and workshops aimed at improving the skills of your sales team are imperative. Bring in motivational speakers, experienced reps and knowledgeable experts that can direct your team toward success. Share your experiences and offer your team the tools that they need to actively achieve goals.
6. Build Strategic Partnerships
Strategically select, build and invest in worthy partnerships. The number of projects that you are able to handle will ultimately determine the amount of growth that your business is able to achieve. Selecting and building valuable partnerships, as well as developing strategic business relationships, will allow you to outsource your team’s non-core competencies to other industry moguls. This will propel growth by maximizing efficiency and creating value. Take advantage of your partners’ skills and expertise in a way that allows you to integrate creative and unique services, in addition to your basic offerings.
7. Do Not Discount the Past
Looking to your business’ historical performance can be very useful in promoting growth in the future. Never discount the usefulness of revisiting past company setbacks. Instead of viewing such setbacks as failures, consider them learning opportunities that will allow you to reevaluate strategies and better utilize resources. Looking at past strategies and evaluating what worked and what did not work will ultimately help to outline your team’s strengths and weaknesses. Once you are aware of how your strategies benefited your organization or did not benefit the organization, you can then begin to develop new strategies that utilize past proven successes and reinvent your “failures.”
8. Utilize Analytics
Thanks to the increasing use of technology in every sector of our lives, we now have access to very valuable business data. The importance of utilizing the data available in order to leverage potential and existing customer engagement cannot be stressed enough. The most difficult part will be evaluating what data is the most useful to your operation, as well as how to effectively respond to your findings. You will find it useful to monitor numbers, make charts and perhaps even outsource an expert to help translate the data. Turning this data into an aggressive strategy to propagate sales is arguably the most effective way to build business and propel company growth.
When it comes to maximizing your business’ success rate, these eight strategies should help immensely in focusing on your organization’s development. Though there are many other factors that will ultimately influence success, these valuable tips may serve as a great starting point for prepping your business for optimal growth.
About the Author:
Sheza Gary has been a project strategist since 2009 and also involved in the launching of startups and tech companies in New York for over five years. She has a keen interest in writing about her own experiences with business plans and upcoming business supporting technologies. She loves public speaking. You can follow her on Google Plus.