Business transformation refers to any fundamental changes within a business, whether it’s in the financial side or the technical side of the company.
Ultimately, transforming your business can lead to three outcomes: your business won’t be able to keep up with the changes and revert back to the old ways, or the company can keep up but there won’t be any considerable benefits from the changes, or the business transformation will lead to tremendous benefits.
Naturally, you’d want the third outcome to happen, but that’s not going to be easy, especially if you don’t have much experience in coming up with successful business models.
This guide will show you the most effective ways to transform a business and create a part to success. Without further ado, let’s start with the first way to transform your business:
Image Courtesy: MartechAdvisor
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Step Up Your Outbound Calling Game
Outbound calling is one of the best practices of sales-driven businesses. It’s where an agent calls a number, usually the number of a prospect, to introduce the company and hopefully convince the person on the other end of the call to purchase the business’s products and services.
However, due to the technological advancements over the past few years, people wonder if outbound calling is still worthwhile, especially now with all the new marketing techniques.
Contrary to common belief, a business’s failure is mainly due to its inability to adapt to new outbound calling strategies, but that shouldn’t be the case for you. If you genuinely want to transform your business, an excellent place to start is your outbound calling system.
Below are some examples of how you take your outbound calling strategy to another level:
- Consider Investing In Tools: As usual, the best way to instantly improve a particular strategy’s performance is to invest in tools. Two of the best outbound calling tools include an Auto Dialer and a Predictive Dialer.
- Prepare Drafts/Scripts: If your agents don’t have much experience with outbound calling, it might be best to prepare scripts for them in advance.
- Follow-Up Prospects: Once you finish the outbound calls, remind your agents to follow up with the prospects by sending emails, instant messaging, or sending text messages.
With this, it should be possible to generate more sales through outbound calling. However, cold calling can only do so much for customer retention. If you want to nurture your relationships with your customers, focusing on CRM might be your best bet.
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Create Customer Personas
CRM, or Customer Relationship Management, manages the business’s interactions with customers, and this involves both customers and prospects.
Many experts say that CRM and outbound calling go hand in hand, which is why the industry sees an increase in tools like Call Cowboy that can integrate CRM into cold calling. Nevertheless, this is mainly because of the importance of CRM.
For starters, if you know a lot about your customers, it’d be a lot easier to relate to them, and as a result, convincing them to buy your products and services would also become easier.
One of the best CRM strategies is creating a customer persona—a fictional profile of your ideal customers. The primary purpose of a persona is that it allows you to visualize your targets more easily. For example, your customer persona may have the following information:
- Age: 30
- Social Status: Single
- Preferred Channels: Text Messaging
- Location: California
- Hobbies: Travelling
- How Can We Help: Make travel booking easier
By setting a target, you can save a lot of money and effort into looking for customers. People with the characteristics of your persona usually buy your products immediately.
Hence, you can consider removing prospects that don’t possess any of these characteristics and focus on those that do. However, take note that customer personas can only do so much.
Besides, there are also cases where agents can successfully convince prospects that don’t have these traits, especially if your employees are skilled at what they do. Speaking of which, if you’re going to transform your business, you may as well include your employees.
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Spend More Time With Recruitment
More and more employees are starting to quit their job in search of better ones. Unfortunately, there’s not much you can do to prevent this mindset of employees, or can you?
There are actually many things you can do to prevent employees from leaving your business.
After all, if there are ways to maintain customers’ loyalty, there should be one for employees, and they call it ‘employee retention,’ as opposed to ‘customer retention.’
Contrary to common belief, employee retention starts immediately during recruitment:
- Before anything else, you should carve into your mind that employee retention starts with recruiting. Without recognizing this, you won’t go far with your efforts.
- Most candidates are just thinking of your business as a small step to further their career, and you don’t want that. You need employees that stay for a long time, not for a few months.
- Try to become as transparent as possible. Avoid mentioning only the benefits of working with you. You should also say the problems your business is facing. If they still join you amidst that, it’s a sign that you hired the right people.
- Even if you hire the right candidates, they won’t stay in your company if you don’t give them enough reason to. One way to do that is to remind them that they can advance their career by working for you. You can do this by hinting at promotions or even simply organizing training that can develop their skills.
You’ll find that hiring the right people can do a lot in transforming your business. Ultimately, you’ll need to maintain your employees’ enthusiasm throughout their journey with your company, but that seems to be a bit difficult with the pandemic and ongoing shift to remote work.
As such, you might want to consider looking into conferencing tools.
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Try Out Conferencing Tools
Video conferencing has been around for many years, even before the pandemic, although it wasn’t as popular as before. Perhaps it’s because it was optional in the past, but it seems that it’s become an essential tool, especially if your business involves a lot of conference meetings.
For that reason, it would help a lot if you can invest in these tools, but it’s also essential to look for the most suitable conferencing tools for your business.
More precisely, you have to look into the capacity of the tool.
Here are a few examples to get you started:
- Zoom: Allows up to 1000 participants with the Large Meeting option, but Zoom bombing is prominent, where strangers randomly join the meeting to ruin the meeting.
- Skype Meet Now: The Skype Business subscription has a capacity of 250 people, which, although a lot less than Zoom’s, is still enough for regular meetings.
- Google Meet: If the meeting is one-sided where you, or someone in a high position, discusses the topics and the rest listens, Google Meet is the perfect app as it allows for up to 100,000 people to view the meeting.
- GoToMeeting: Another tool with a vast capacity is GoToMeeting, allowing for up to 3,000 participants depending on the subscription.
Conferencing tools have multiple benefits to businesses, especially now that physical contact is more challenging than ever before. Still, as much as possible, you shouldn’t spend your entire budget on one tool. Try to invest in information technology (IT) systems as well.
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Consider Investing In Cloud Computing Solutions
Information technology systems refer to any system that involves using technology such as hardware, software, and databases to store information.
There are several ways a business can use IT systems, but one of the most effective methods is the use of cloud computing solutions—technology that stores information on the internet.
Cloud computing solutions are famous for the same reason as conferencing tools; it doesn’t require physical contact. Before, you’ll need to use a flash drive and pass it on to everyone else to share necessary files, but that’s no longer the case today.
Examples of cloud computing solutions include:
- Google Drive
- Microsoft 365
- Salesforce
- Slack
- Dropbox
Besides accessibility, cloud computing also provides businesses a way to manage and store data securely, meaning there’s a minimal chance of that data leaking to the public. Another notable feature about cloud computing is that it can help in many business operations, including your efforts to build an eCommerce business.
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Put Effort Into Creating An eCommerce Website
Sales-driven businesses often create eCommerce websites to increase their sales. While you shouldn’t imitate the market all the time, this is the one time that it’s indispensable.
eCommerce websites are places that manage transactions involving goods and services. You may be familiar with this kind of sites if you know:
- Amazon
- eBay
- Etsy
- Target
- Walmart
Building an eCommerce website may have been a difficult task in the past, but today, such a project is within reach of everyone, as long as they have the necessary tools. You should consider the following steps when building an eCommerce website:
- Think of a domain name for the eCommerce website
- Look for a reliable web hosting provider
- Opt for a trustworthy payment gateway
- Use a comprehensive website builder
- Make sure you have the necessary capital for the entire project
- Prepare appropriate packaging for the products
Of course, if you’re not running a sales-driven business, building an eCommerce website may just be a waste of your resources. At the end of the day, the decision for this project is up to you.
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Encourage Positive Vibes Within The Company
Company culture is the set of beliefs, values, goals, and practices of the company. At first glance, it might seem insignificant, but company culture actually has a lot to do with how employees work and how managers lead them. For example, if the company values communication over others, employees will naturally tend to send updates to the higher-ups.
If the company encourages socializing, employees have one more reason to interact with each other, which will promote a social workplace. Either way, company culture can change how employees think, which in turn can increase their productivity.
The question is, if your company isn’t positive from the beginning, how can you turn it around?
Below are a few things you might consider:
- Create a reward system for employees to encourage thankfulness
- Smile every time you enter the room, as it may also push your employees to smile
- Nurture your relationships with your employees and make it feel like you’re not the ‘boss,’ but the leader
- Resolve conflicts as soon as possible as it may put all your efforts in vain
- Don’t overstep your boundaries
Being sentimental isn’t enough to be successful, but respecting your employees’ sentiments will go a long way in creating a positive workplace.
Now you’ve dealt with your customers, employees, and even the whole workplace, but aren’t you forgetting something?
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Don’t Forget About Your Product
Many business owners tend to get occupied with thinking about their customers and employees that they forget about one thing that’s extremely important in running a business—the product.
Your product is what keeps your business afloat, so if you’re planning to transform your business, you shouldn’t forget about your product. So, this time, you’ll be learning about product development—the process of improving your products for your customers.
Product development isn’t as simple as making improvements to your product. In fact, there will be times when what you thought was ‘improvements’ are actually things customers don’t like. To begin with, you have to make sure you understand the market and your customers.
Below are a few steps that you need to take to accomplish a successful product development:
- Empathize with your customers
- Define the pain point of your target audience
- Gather feedback from your existing customers
- Create ideas according to what you’ve learned
- Product prototypes of the products that you’ve developed
- Test the new product to identify any issues
Your product defines your company. Simply put, if you transform your product, it’s similar to transforming your entire business.
Wrapping Up
Transforming a business is challenging and sometimes even impossible, but there will come a time when transformations will become necessary to keep your business afloat.
Perhaps you’re seeing a decrease in sales. Maybe your employees are no longer as motivated as before. Either way, your best option is to transform your business if you want to experience drastic changes. With this guide, you can at least make the process easier.
