Your business is growing. You’re forging ahead into new markets, meeting new customers and encountering new competition as you go. It’s an exciting time for your company, but to meet its challenges your employees are going to need to find a way to do more with less.
As your success takes you into new markets, it’s a good idea to keep an eye out for solutions that give your staff the edge they need. Here are five great ways to maximize productivity as your business flourishes.
1. Collaborative selling. If you’re suddenly flush with new sales opportunities, it’s important to close each deal efficiently and effectively. Think about giving your sales team tools that allow them to collaborate on the fly. This way, no matter what questions a customer comes up with during a sales meeting, your team will be able to find the answer then and there. Good communication within your company not only helps get customers the information they need to make a purchase, it leaves a great impression too.
2. Unified customer profiles. As your customer base expands, your team won’t have the luxury of getting to know everyone you do business with one-on-one. By building profiles that include each customer’s history with your company and personal preferences, you’ll be looking out for everyone’s best interests. Make sure your entire team can access these profiles and you’ll be able to greet every customer like an old friend.
3. Mobile technology and the cloud. Make use of today’s mobile technology and take your point of sale (POS) out from behind the counter. You’ll empower each employee to function as both a knowledge base and a cashier. If customers have questions about your products, your staff can find them the answers they need on the spot. By connecting these mobile devices to the cloud, you can even have items that might not be in stock in one store shipped to your customers from other stores nearby—and if their profile already includes an address they won’t even have to fill out a shipping form.
4. Social engagement. Whether you’ve just started marketing to a new audience or want a better picture of how your existing customers are receiving your message, social engagement is a fantastic timesaving tool. Tracking keywords in multiple languages lets you quickly see how you’re coming across on social media. By detecting and addressing negative sentiment early on, you’ll save your team the time and effort of fixing bigger problems down the line.
5. Integrate your software solutions. Looking at the other items on this list, it might strike you that all this streamlining could come at the cost of added work. Thankfully, there’s a solution to that too. While some productivity solutions out there function independently, the newest trend in customer resource management (CRM) is a new, holistic approach to compatibility. Shared data and single-click connectivity between your data management software, your CRM system, and your office tools means that every one of these solutions can be implemented virtually seamlessly with the way you do business right now.
The more of these solutions you implement, the more they work in concert to provide an even greater boost to your productivity. To see just one example of how to put it all together, check out this video.