Growing your business is a seemingly simple task, seeing as how all that’s required of you is to be vigilant when it comes to planning your strategy and executing your tasks. However, it’s more than clear to everyone that this is easier said than done. First of all, there’s no such thing as a guaranteed growth and second, these trends constantly evolve. Sure, there are some concepts and ideas that remain constant but instead of fixating on them, you need to understand that there are some business tips and strategies that you should definitely abide by. Here are seven of them.
Get to know your customers
The concepts of customer retention and customer lifecycle are pivotal to the survival of your industry, however, in order to be able to fully exploit them, you need to get to know your customers a lot better.
Their age, demographics, education level, average income and similar traits may determine more than just your approach. During the cross-selling and upselling, it might be great for you to know their budget in order to offer something that you know for sure they can afford. Other than this, you need to make a sizable investment in market analysis, seeing as how 42 percent of all small businesses fail due to the lack of market need.
Transparency
The next thing you need to keep in mind is the fact that the transparency of your business isn’t something that you need to take into consideration. The very last thing you should take into consideration is the fact that transparency requires far more discipline and integrity than you might have assumed. For instance, it requires you to be honest and forthcoming about your own mistakes. It also makes you avoid the scenario where you get to seemingly lower your prices by not showing the cost with delivery and taxes included on the website.
Staying in touch with technology
One of the most interesting and rewarding trends that you are likely to encounter is the concept of staying in touch with technology. For instance, instead of just going for a generic platform, why not reach out to an agency specializing in manufacturing software and have a digital solution that is tailor-made for you. Due to the fact that you’ve already gone lengths to get acquainted with your audience, this gives you the privilege of making a tool that will greatly increase customer satisfaction. It will also help you streamline all of these processes into one.
Lenient return policy
Customer satisfaction always comes first and sometimes this might put you at a slight loss. You see, unless you’re in a one-purchase type of industry, the truth is that about 40 percent of your entire profit comes from just 8 percent of regular customers. This means that customer retention and satisfaction are paramount. This is just one of the reasons why you want a lenient return policy. No sale, regardless of the value, is worth permanently losing a customer. Another reason is the fact that a lenient return policy tends to be the most effective crisis management technique.
Increased use of social media
Another thing you need to focus on is the increased use of social media. What this means is that you can use your social media in order to grow your network of contacts, as well as increase the reach of your content marketing. At the same time, you can increase the use of social media in other ways and, for instance, use it in order to establish a direct line of communication with your audience. Thus, you can turn it into an unofficial customer support platform.
Better time management
One of the major productivity killers in the present-day office is poor time management. What this means is that, with better time management, you can get your team to do more work in less time. In order to get there, what you need to do is follow a simple two-step plan. First, you should either implement interval working into your business structure or start using specialized tools like time-management apps or employee monitoring apps. Second, you need to learn a thing or two about Parkinson’s law regarding deadlines. The more time you give your team to do something, the more it will take them to complete the task.
Improve your communication
Perhaps the thing that leads to the downfall of the majority of the business world is their inability to properly communicate with their staff, customers and investors. Sure, we’ve already talked about transparency, however, telling the truth is not all that it takes for you to become more efficient at communication. For instance, when it comes to bad news, you need to learn how to properly tell the bad news to investors or how to give negative feedback to your staff without offending anyone. Other than this, you also need to improve your active listening skills.
The last thing you need to understand is the fact that abiding by this penetrates virtually every layer of your enterprise and helps you out in more ways than you can possibly imagine. This, nonetheless, is merely the tip of the iceberg of all you have to manage in order to get what you need.
