Whether you started your business as a challenge to create something new or to be a solution for something old/existing, most businesses share a common goal: profitability.
Knowing how to improve the profitability of your business is essential for long term sustainability, and as a CEO, you’re in the drivers’ seat. Unfortunately, many businesses with large customer bases fail due to financial struggles that can be mitigated with focused, strategic planning. At the end of the day, creating business processes and procedures so that your team has defined roles and responsibilities is pivotal to the growth and success of your company.
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Want to increase the profitability of your business? Here’s how.
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Document each step of your business’s day-to-day processes.
No matter if you’re a single-member LLC or a publicly-traded company, start by documenting each step in your business’s day-to-day systems and processes. First, identify the areas of inefficiency for the roles that you currently have.
Generally, there are three ways to determine what processes need to be mapped: reactive, strategic, and customer-focused. Start with reactive, where you know a process has failed, or a role is majorly underperforming. Focus on fixing a critical issue that slows down your team member’s work or your overall business goals. Next, think strategically about these overall goals and look at a chosen process from a high-level perspective. How can you revise the process for maximum efficiency? Finally, map processes that are critical to ensuring improvement in customer satisfaction. This will fix problems or inefficiencies within their process that should deliver visible growth in customer satisfaction.
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Set specific, achievable goals for core team members and outsource the rest.
Most businesses are great at what they do best, but where they struggle is the day-to-day management. Every team member can be utilized to increase profitability. Start with making sure your revenue-generating tasks are covered by the team, and spend the majority of your talent’s time, and attention on promoting your most profitable products and services. Then, you can outsource smaller day-to-day tasks to a qualified virtual team.
When looking at your team, ask yourself, “How can my core team maximize efficiency in their role?” Get granular and review their day-to-day tasks. For example, if a manager is still writing meeting agendas and recaps, their time can be better spent moving the needle forward. Set specific goals and actionable KPIs and build each role around these metrics. Once implemented, you then need to properly monitor the improvement of your processes. Only through constant monitoring and optimization can you expect your processes to improve.
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Map out a strategy to focus on boosting sales.
Whenever you’re implementing something new with the goal of increasing profitability, you want to implement the new processes on a smaller scale by focusing on one department. One of the most agile and important is the sales department. Whether it’s lead generation or converting prospects to customers, sales are the lifeblood of any business.
Evaluate the way the sales process works and ask yourself, “Am I empowering the sales team to be as efficient as possible?” Find their pain points – are they able to get on the phone with prospects or do they spend too much time sourcing leads? Map out systems to help your customers consume your product or service more rapidly, increasing purchase frequency through upsells or bundles. Make sure your sales team has opportunities to educate customers on the ideal use of your services or products.
When you have designated sales team members for each part of the sales process, your business will have a continuous flow of highly targeted traffic that converts into valuable leads, subscribers, or sales..
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Get social, get qualified.
Having a strong, credible social media presence is non-negotiable. Take your reputation online and ask customers to do reviews of your products and services on social media or Google. This will build trust, and brand awareness and authority. It’s important to respond to all comments or inquiries from comments or email.
Your business can also position itself as a leading authority by providing actionable, informational content through thought leadership blogs or articles. In addition to customer-facing social media, things like accreditations, licenses, and certifications can set you apart from your competition.
From startups to Fortune 500 companies, businesses of all sizes outsource some of their processes. As we continue to push towards a digital future, business process outsourcing provides an opportunity to utilize global talent for both back office and front office services.
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