admin | smallbizdream blog

Increase Productivity with These 2 Important Principles

Increasing sales is the number one priority in nearly all kinds of businesses. However, in order to increase productivity, they also tend to put a lot of stress to their workforce, especially when they require everyone in the team firing on all cylinders 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week.

People on top – the management – are often caught in a dilemma between increasing the company’s productivity and preventing a high attrition rate caused by too much wear and tear to their workforce or being forced to take desperate measures to accomplish their goal.

Is it really possible for companies to increase revenue without increasing the amount of work? Is there a better solution to hiring more people working for less pay, or laying off half of the employees and let the other half do twice the amount of work?

Principles to Live By

Economists and business experts have looked into this and found out a recognizable pattern that holds true in almost every aspect of life. Two of the most important principles that apply to productivity in work, business, and management are known as the 80/20 Rule and the Parkinson’s Law. These two will serve as the overarching principle throughout the discussion in increasing productivity in sales.

Principle #1
PRIORITIZE
The 80/20 rule

Management consultant, Joseph M. Juran believes that quality work deserves more attention than menial tasks because they have the greatest impact in the overall output. He borrowed this idea from Italian economist, Vilfredo Pareto who noticed that only 20% of the population makes 80% of the money.

Using the same principle at work, this means that out of all the work we do, only 20%of it produces most of the results we see. Hence, you will need 80% of your effort in 20% of all your tasks that deliver most of the results in order to achieve maximum efficiency.

To put things in perspective, imagine that you have two lumberjacks and both of them need to fell ten trees for that day. One of them came right at it and started chipping off small bits for hours with a dull axe head while the other one sat down and spent an hour sharpening his.

In terms of multiple tasks per day, this means that if you have ten tasks, you need to find the first two that have the greatest impact to your productivity and concentrate on them first. This applies not only in sales, but in almost any kind of work.

Principle #2
SIMPLIFY
The Parkinson’s Law

Another principle that was found to have a great impact to productivity came from a British author and historian, C. Northcote Parkinson – known for his adage, “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”

Essentially, what he meant is that in most cases people are just using up their time doing things that could have otherwise been accomplished in a short period of time if they have simplified the task.

He also believes that, “expansion means complexity; and complexity decays.” People can do a lot of things at a given time but achieve so little because most of it is just ‘fake work’, or things that don’t necessarily contribute to productivity and are only meant to fill the time.

Unlike the first principle, this is actually something you want to break away from. But knowing, as they say, is half the battle. You need to discern what is ‘real work’ – which is the first step to being more productive – and what are those that are just ‘time-wasters.’

Its Implication to Sales Productivity

These principles can be applied in sales for increased productivity. But first, here are some common ‘time-wasters’ companies and sales reps need to be aware of.

Whenever possible refrain from these activities:

taking calls or responding to emails in the middle of a highly cognitive task (tasks that require focus and concentration)
chatting with co-workers while doing work at the same time
spending too much time on low-quality leads
doing tasks manually and repetitively
starting from scratch every single time
going back and forth from one task to another (task-switching)
frequent meetings and seminars
‘majoring on minors’

Most of the things mentioned above can be done more efficiently if we block our time and focus only on the task at hand. Studies have shown that task-switching (others call it multi-tasking which is more appropriately said about CPUs than the human brain) is actually counterproductive to work and can have financial and psychological consequences.

Most of the tasks in the office can now be accomplished much faster and with less effort using technology. Millennials, generally speaking, have no problem adapting to modern technology since they live and breathe technology by the time they were born. And this is why they are the most sought after employees in today’s highly competitive atmosphere.

Best Practices to Increase Productivity in Sales

Now that we have a clear understanding about the underlying principles that govern productivity, let’s look at how we can apply it to sales. Here are some of the best practices employed by sales team to boost productivity and the company’s revenue.

Plan and prioritize. This may sound simple until you realize you can’t prioritize everything. You need to take a step back and reflect which part of your job needed more time and concentration and which ones can be done on autopilot.

List down all your tasks and rate them according to importance, urgency, and repercussions if not met within that day. In this example, we have arranged the task from A to E; A being the greatest and E being the least.

Example:

A. Following up on prospects and customers

B. Sorting out and evaluating leads

C. Identifying problems and customer needs

D. Creating possible solutions

E. Clerical work

You may also need to trim down your list or delegate tasks, especially the ones which are not directly related to your line of work or expertise. If your focus is lead conversion and you have a marketing department which specializes in qualifying leads for sales, let them do the job for you.

Read: Time Management Skills for Increased Productivity

Set your goal high. Remember Parkinson’s Law about work? If you plan on using 40 hours to accomplish a certain amount of tasks, you are bound to think that you have plenty of time to spare so you end up using most of it on trivial matters.

But if you set the bar higher for yourself, and restrict yourself by finishing the task earlier than expected instead, you’ll realize you can actually do more, and, in the context of sales productivity, convert more leads than what the company sets for you at a certain period of time.

By having a self-imposed deadline, you are challenging yourself to be more efficient and clear your list of useless, unproductive tasks that gets in your way.

Utilize technology to your advantage. Most of the tasks that were done by a small team of employees can now be accomplished by single person with the right tools and skill sets at his disposal.

This rids the company a significant amount of time-consuming and repetitive tasks and instead focuses on things that really matter like creating a system to better improve customer service, and help sales and marketing teams achieve more without sacrificing quality time.

One great example being used by accomplished sales and marketing teams is CRM app which features customer acquisition tools, sales and marketing automation and sales funnel for collecting customer information, tracking down customer activity, conducting automated and semi-automated follow-ups.

Read: How Technology Is Changing Sales Forever

Increased productivity doesn’t always mean increasing the amount of work or workforce of a certain company. Technology and human ingenuity have already gone a long way to cut down the amount of work and time spent on task.

Perhaps you need a modern approach to increase the efficiency of your sales and marketing team in your small business. If so, having good CRM with the right features and easy-to-use interface could be your best option.

Small Business Dream is a sales and marketing app aimed at increasing productivity by simplifying tasks and unlocking the power of sales and marketing automation for your workforce. Learn how at www.smallbizdream.com.

How Technology Is Changing Sales Forever

Technology has shaped the way we do business, especially in the last fifteen years. Over the course of its transformation, the sales and marketing aspect of business has evolved from one mode of customer engagement to the next.

This paradigm shift has had a lot of implications in many of today’s small to medium enterprises. Accessibility to products and services coupled with the growing number of online users also meant that the competition for customer attention will be more relentless than ever.

There are number of ways our recent technology in sales and marketing has affected the business sector. However, our focus will be the most prominent ones and have the greatest impact to customer engagement and sales on a global scale.

Major Shift from Traditional Marketing to Omnichannel Marketing

Before PCs and smart phones were adapted for consumer use, customers had no way of interacting with the businesses since everything was basically a one-way communication between the company and the audience (also known as traditional outbound marketing).

But as more people are starting to gain access to online services, this type of customer engagement had slowly become a thing of the past.

Some companies took their old marketing approach and moved it online (YouTube commercials, online ads, online stores, etc.). However, unlike traditional media, online consumers are able to make their voices heard through the social media, comments section, forums, online reviews, vlogs, and the list goes on.

This sparked a new era of customer engagement and the birth of omnichannel marketing. Businesses are continuously harnessing the potential of social media, blogs and online sites, using the latest CRM technology to manage their contacts and maintain customer relationship.

Bigger Opportunities for Small to Medium Enterprise

Big companies used to occupy a large portion of the market until the Internet reached full status at the turn of the 21^st century. They stayed top-of-mind through promotional ventures and ads, while small businesses struggled to make an impact.

But with the major shift from traditional marketing to online customer engagement, things are about to change. Today, it is not uncommon to find multi-million dollar businesses with a solid online presence coming from the lower echelons of the business sector.

Social media, email marketing, content marketing — to name a few — enable business owners to expand their borders far beyond the reaches of traditional marketing.

However, unlike TV ads and other promotional material, it is by far the most cost-effective method when it comes to promoting brands and maintaining customer loyalty, so much so that even long-established companies followed suit and retrofitted their businesses with online marketing strategies.

More Businesses Competing for Online Space

Competition is the natural outgrowth of this technological innovation in customer engagement.

During its infancy the Internet relied heavily in physical servers to create a virtual space for users worldwide. When cloud computing went full swing, this limitation was done away with.

Consequently, competing businesses have also grown by the millions using the Internet as the battleground for online supremacy.

To see just how much competition we’re dealing with, try searching the word ‘car’ in the Google search bar and you’ll find over 5 billion search results just for the word.

Assuming that you’re doing car sales, this meant that establishing your online presence would be an uphill battle unless you have the technical know-how to outmaneuver and bury your competitors.

Because competition is so fierce, businesses must continue to innovate and find new ways to stay relevant. Content marketing has become a buzzword and now businesses are flooding the market with blog posts, podcasts and videos. But because there is so much content, it is hard to stand out with a simple 500-word post.

Kijiji featured some up-and-coming rap artists in one of its campaigns. A Montreal rapper made a song called “Gotta sell my stuff” which received over 830,000 views on YouTube. This is the type of content marketing that will be successful — fun, entertaining, and inclusive. Content marketing is not about talking to your customers. It’s about including them into the conversation.

Improved Customer Service through CRM

Since the advent of customer relationship management tools, customer service has improved by leaps and bounds. Companies don’t have to pull numbers out of thin air when trying to figure out their customer’s specific ‘pain points,’ creating value for their customers, and improving customer experience.

Mobile CRMs such as Small Business Dream features customer acquisition tools, including sales funnel, card scan function, survey engine, Google Analytics, coupled with an efficient follow-up system to keep track of every customer engagement, upcoming calls, or scheduled appointments.

By emphasizing a customer-driven approach to sales and marketing, businesses are able to keep a steady flow of qualified leads and repeat customers.

Visit our site at www.smallbizdream.com and experience the power CRM technology for your small business.

Digital and Physical Customer Engagement, and Why We Need Both

The Internet’s rise to power in the late 90s has changed the way businesses interact with customers in an unprecedented way. Online stores and e-commerce websites started a new trend in customer engagement which enabled all kinds of businesses to link up with customers worldwide.

It leveled the playing field between small businesses and large companies by introducing automation and digital customer engagement which replaces many of their routine tasks, and lessened the impact of promotion expenses by harnessing the power of the World Wide Web.

This begs the question whether or not this movement would replace the human aspect of customer engagement. Is it possible for all businesses to be run entirely with automation in the near future?

Pros and Cons

To answer this, we need to look at the possible outcomes of using just one method of customer engagement.

Consider the following pros and cons of relying solely to one method of customer engagement:

PHYSICAL CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT

Pros

The ability to communicate with customers on a deeper level. This can be accomplished personally, over the phone, or online.

Businesses interact with their clients in a meaningful way, providing answers to specific questions, issues, and concerns.

Cons

A high volume of customers could also mean hiring additional personnel to improve service. This translates to higher costs in running the business (hiring, training, employee benefits, etc.).

Slow response compared to digital customer engagement. Everything is basically a one-on-one engagement.

DIGITAL CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT

Pros

Repetitive and time consuming tasks are accomplished quickly and easily through automation and CRM tools and applications.

Highly efficient and scalable. Businesses can accommodate a growing number of customers and adapt to their needs without having to hire additional personnel. This translates to lower operational costs and a better chance to compete in the marketplace.

Cons

It requires some experience and technical know-hows of customer relationship management.

Tends to be ‘robotic’ because it lacks the human aspect of customer engagement.

As it turns out, ‘digitizing’ customer engagement is not everything. There are certain aspects of customer relationship that could never be replaced by complex machines and IT services. By the same token, relying only to physical customer engagement will yield an equally unpleasant result.

Avoid Both Extremes

Relying on just one mode of customer engagement is a recipe for disaster. There has to be a delicate balance between the two and they should be used to complement each other.

There are many examples of companies that suffered enormously because of their inability to adapt to the changing trends, particularly with the way they interact with customers.

Tower Records is one example of a business empire that succumbed to the Internet’s rise to power. Online music stores slowly ate up their dwindling customer base until its eventual collapse in 2006.

A post-mortem analysis showed that they failed to anticipate the emergence of online stores like iTunes which sold digital music and music files at a cheaper price. Tower Records overstretched their resources in physical stores and outlets and was unable to come up with a digital alternative in response to the customer’s changing needs.

On the other end of the spectrum, Sears Holdings did the exact opposite with the same catastrophic results. Most of its resources had been used up for e-commerce and other online ventures and left a small portion to its brick-and-mortar business.

As a result, other companies took up that space and the company had lost a substantial market share to its competitors. In seven years time, stock price had gone down by 75%.

We Need Both to Succeed

A perfect blend of digital and physical customer engagement is the key to become a successful business in a highly competitive environment. Whatever shortcomings digital customer engagement has are completely wiped out by its physical counterpart, and vice versa.

To learn more on how you can incorporate the digital aspect of customer interaction to your brick-and-mortar store, visit our website at www.smallbizdream.com and learn how you can grow your business with our suite of tools designed for small business owners like you.

Stay in the Lead – KNOW Your Customers Better

As a business owner, spending some time to know your customers can make a big difference in reaching out to them and improving your sales. More people — millennials especially — are starting their own businesses, whether it’s home-based or a small brick-and-mortar store.

Starting up a business is never easy, much less running it. But with the right tools and know-hows on how to get the job done, you can accelerate your growth and not be left behind.

One of the most effective ways to achieve phenomenal growth in any kind of business is by taking a customer-centric approach to marketing and by putting the customers first.

What’s at Stake

Companies who fail at communicating with their customers have been known for making the worst marketing flops. They assume customers will like a certain kind of product or service when the fact is, they want something else. The result is often a totally useless product that completely misses the target market.

To make up for this, companies will try every trick in the book just to get people to like it. They would spend millions of dollars on ads and promotional materials to no avail in hopes of recouping their investments.

If all people care about is how they can take advantage of the business opportunity with little or no regard to customer satisfaction, they have to stop and rethink their strategy; otherwise they go out of business.

The key is to know your customers first and foremost, and define your unique value proposition. Spending some time to know your customers and making them your priority will always pay off in the long run.

Why Businesses Fail

The vast majority of businesses that failed are those that are just starting up. Bloomberg reports that for every 10 startups, 8 will crash and burn within the first 18 months.

In a study conducted by Peppers and Rogers Group, 70 percent of the customers leave a company because of poor service and 60 percent fail to convert into customers because they felt customer service is indifferent to their needs.

Some of the reasons why businesses fail include:

Failure to innovate

Customers can grow tired of the same old stuff. If you’re stuck with just one particular product or style, your chances for growth and expansion is very slim. When it comes to your marketing strategy, innovation is also key. If you don’t have a web portal, a landing page, or even just a social media account to your brick-and-mortar business, you’ve already lost a substantial amount of potential customers to your competitors. The time you stop innovating is the time you start losing ground to them.

Failure to differentiate

What is your unique value proposition? Customers tend to remember brands or companies because they are among the few who stand out from the rest. If you’re trying to compete with an already existing market, you’re going to have a tough fight ahead of you. Find your own niche, do something new from time to time, but try not to go overboard. Otherwise, you might actually get the opposite of what you want.

Failure to communicate

This, perhaps, is the most crucial part and where most companies would either float or sink to the bottom. The majority of traditional outbound marketing practices are just one-way communication. They don’t care if you’re listening or not; they’ll just say what they want you to hear. We all know how that turned out in some companies — and it’s never cheap.

Keeping your lines of communication open for your customers enables you to stay ahead of the competition by knowing exactly what they want and by giving them the right products and quality service that they deserve. To be successful, you need to have the right tools to bring your business closer to them and accomplish the task much faster.

Small Business Dream’s Survey Engine is an amazing feature that allows business owners to create their own customized surveys with very little effort. Or, they can interact with their customers via email, social media, or on the phone using its automated and semi-automated features.

Small Business Dream simplifies the work for you by providing a CRM designed specially for small business owners like you. We provide you with a suite of tools to know your customers better and boost your sales in ways you never thought possible.

Doing It Right: Integrating Social Media with Email Marketing

When talking about online marketing, these two will always come up in people’s minds: email marketing and social media marketing. This is for good reason.

First of all, email marketing has been around for nearly three decades since it was first used in the 90s as a cost-effective, direct response method to generate massive leads. It still does today.

2002 saw the birth of social networking sites like MySpace and LinkedIn. As more and more people started using them, social media marketing came along. It was an instant success, and for a time many companies began using it to promote their brands.

But now things have changed. The online space has become extremely competitive, and we don’t see them being used by online marketers the way they used to. They knew their previous tactics won’t work anymore and so they started to rethink their strategies just to stay in business.

Why is this so?

Common Issues with Social Media Marketing

The problem with most online marketers today is they took something very powerful and useful, and turned it into a mindless lead generating tool with no creativity, and no real intention of creating meaningful connections or establishing good relationships. They took “the old-school” method of advertisement and simply moved it online.

Most of the bad rap social media marketing got into is the so-called ‘pay-to-play’ tactics used to create a superficial (or even artificial) ‘likes’ or ‘followers’ with little or no interaction whatsoever. This obviously doesn’t work with today’s savvy consumers.

Read: How All the Social Media Experts Got it Wrong

However, some social media marketers use legitimate practices to get results, but it takes a lot of time and effort (try responding to all the comments to your posts or tweets and you’ll get the idea). It also takes talent and creativity just to get people to ‘like’ or ‘follow’ your post in social media.

Another issue with social media marketing is that you’re piggybacking on somebody else’s platform. If for whatever reason the social networking site decides to take down your social media account, goes under, or loses popularity, you’ll lose all your connections and you’ll have to start over from scratch. And as they say, ‘Own the racecourse, not the racehorse’ — don’t go all out on something you have no control over.

Why People Still Do Email Marketing Today

When social media marketing took off with just a million users to 1.7 billion worldwide, some believed it’s the end of the road for email marketing. The fact is, email marketing still ranks first as the marketing tool preferred by companies to conduct their businesses online.

Research shows why this is the case.

77% of consumers are more likely to respond to promotional messages in their emails than their social media accounts
66% of consumers purchased their products because of promotional messages and follow-ups from emails
44% of users go their emails to check with a company they know as opposed to 4% in Facebook

But here’s why email marketing still ranks first:

58% of people who go online check their emails FIRST, followed by search portal (20%), Facebook (11%), news site (5%), company website (3%), and others (3%).

Email marketing is still the online marketer’s best friend when it comes to lead conversion. If you’re into social media marketing, you might consider having an email marketing strategy as well.

Using Two Different Approach

Using social media and email marketing all at once is like having two different kinds of tools. Although very different, they can work together towards the same goal. Mostly, however, people have been using them for the wrong reason.

Online marketers need to understand the difference between communicating and mass sharing. Social media has always been used for sharing good reads, an interesting find, or anything that would start a conversation. Emails are most effective when following up with your fans or followers.

Here are 5 simple tips that you can use to integrate social media into your email marketing strategy:

Create a group on social media and invite people to join in. Spend some time on your social media home page’s look and feel. Run contests, or give freebies, and discounts for active fans and followers.
Time your posts well. Make them as ‘catchy’, relevant, and timely as possible. Hint: research have shown the average life span of a Facebook post to be around 3 to 5 hours.
For Facebook users, they can use ‘call-to-action’ (CTA) buttons to lead visitors and fans to their landing page.
For Twitter users, they can use Twitter cards to display their photos, and links to their landing page, app or downloadable content.
Export your friends’ and followers’ email accounts to your mailing list for your email marketing campaigns and follow-ups.

Small Business Dream is a sales and marketing tool designed to seamlessly integrate social media and email marketing for your small business. Visit us at www.smallbizdream.com and learn more about our Small Business Profitability Blueprint