Digitizing Your Business to be More Efficient
Many small local businesses like their “old-school” traditions and would rather stay away from digitizing their business. They go door-to-door asking if their services are needed. They get more business through word-of-mouth. Their customers refer new customers. They fill out contracts by hand and file in a locked cabinet. They’re successful, in their comfort zone, and have no desire to adopt modern processes.
But the world was suddenly disrupted by COVID-19 and many business owners can’t go to a prospect’s home or their office to pick up a contract. Wouldn’t it be a relief if your business were digitized? Digitizing your business not only brings your processes online but it helps an entire organization become more efficient. While traveling to a prospect’s home is more personal, in a period where you can’t travel at all, you can use online tools and technologies to have meetings. You can also save time on travel and have all your employees working under one “cloud-based roof” where all processes are tracked.
Are you a business who hasn’t digitized your organization yet? Let me walk you through 5 actionable steps that will help your business to be more efficient and productive.
5 Steps to Digitizing Your Business
1. Create a plan
It’s vital to consider how digitization will impact your business and its processes. Research the market, read reviews, and learn from other like-minded businesses. Ultimately you’ll want to create a plan that will make your organization more efficient. Ask yourself these questions as you’re building a plan:
- How will I go from paper to paperless?
- What programs will support my business digitization?
- Are there technologies that interact with one another?
- Is there one platform that incorporates everything I need?
- Will the results make my team more productive?
- Will the results create a better customer experience?
2. Provide mobile support
An important component of how to digitize your business is mobile support. About 80 percent of Americans own a smartphone and roughly one-in-five adults are “smartphone-only” internet users. This emphasizes the need for a digitizing plan that incorporates mobile-friendly support. If your employees, customers, or prospects are unable to access your business’ information on their mobile devices, that could reflect negatively on your company’s profits, growth, and productivity.
3. Incorporate technology
Ignoring new technologies and solutions will cause you to fall behind more modern companies. By digitizing your business, you no longer have to rely on physical items for doing the job, like notebooks, ledgers, or printed out excel spreadsheets, which can be easily lost or destroyed. Cloud-based technologies can help solve traditional business challenges and you can even find software that interacts and links with one another.
For example, you can adopt a CRM like Salesforce and make sure it “talks” to your accounting software, like Quickbooks. Integrating Quickbooks with Salesforce will allow you to share your financial data with your sales team. Not only will you be able to view customer information, but by connecting with QuickBooks, you can also track expenses, create customer reports, and gain insights so you can create a better forecast.
4. Align technologies with your team
To increase productivity amongst your employees, you must implement the necessary upskilling and training. Your current talent base must be dedicated to learning and utilizing new programs to make the organization succeed. If your team doesn’t buy into them, your business won’t be productive. And if your employees aren’t using your technologies properly, data could be completely inaccurate. However, spend time thoroughly training your team on the technologies put in place to streamline your processes and productivity.
5. Use customer feedback
What are your customers saying about you? Ideally, your Net Promoter Score (NPS) is the best way to learn what your customers think of you. Your score measures the willingness of customers to recommend your company’s products or services to others. It is used to gauge a customer’s overall satisfaction with your products or services and the customer’s loyalty to your brand. If you know your NPS, you will be able to make rational decisions based on data to improve your customer experience.
Another way to listen to your customers is to see what they are saying about you online. For example, in the Surefire Local Marketing Platform, you can view your online reviews from various platforms like Facebook, Google, and Yelp all in one place. There’s no need to waste time searching for your business online when you have one platform to see everything you need.
Take Part in the New Normal
Today’s businesses must be agile and quick to adapt to unexpected changes in their environment, like the COVID-19 crisis. We’ve emerged into a new normal and with a digitized business, you’ll likely be ahead of your competitors. If you’re willing to make the investment, you will see a return and transformation of your operations.
An all-in-one local marketing software gives you more capabilities than you could imagine. Instead of a suite of digital tools, it can be your “go-to” platform for your entire business. The Surefire Local Marketing Platform is just that. With many integration abilities, you can have all your digital tools “talk to each other”. Schedule a demo to discover how you can digitize your business, become more productive, and see your return on investment.
