A business that is well-managed has a competitive advantage. They can move more quickly, make faster decisions, and have a better idea of exactly where they stand at any given time. Taking the time to invest in planning, management, and analysis pays out in the long-term, as you well know if you are interested in increasing the manageability of your business. Below are the best strategies for doing so in 2019.
Make the Most of Advanced Analytics
Every single day your business has hundreds, thousands, or even billions of things going on. Products are sold, ordered, returned. Decisions are made — sometimes more than once or by more than one person. Customers request information, some cases are escalated, and outcomes will ideally be tracked.
All of these things should be analyzed and mined for insights into how your business is doing now and exactly what can be done to make it better. Today there are a variety of solutions out there to help you manage this data and choosing the right one for your business is key to optimal manageability.
Take, for instance, Devo. This program not only makes the most of your data, showing you visually -driven insights, but it does so with 80% fewer resources than much of the competition. For a business trying to stay lean and still compete with the best, this is the kind of solution you should be keeping a watch out for.
Have a Plan and Use It
For new businesses, just having a business’s plan increases their chances of sticking around. For established companies, however, business plans, growth plans, and plans for the worst-case scenarios are often created and then left alone.
Even when they might be needed, these plans are often so out of date that they’re entirely useless. Within well-managed businesses, procedures are used on a daily basis. These are valuable resources that should be regularly updated and useful as a reference to anyone within the company or even outside of it.
It should also be noted that your plans should be realistic and correlate with the most in-depth and recent data you can put together. These days there are even analytics suites can help you do this, lightening the load for anyone in charge of creating or updating these plans.
Define and Follow Best Practices
Best practices keep your business consistent. These are the protocols you have written down and distributed to whoever needs them throughout the company, in a given department, or in a specific position. These outline the best ways to accomplish a particular goal, how a given situation must be handled, or show your employees a way to take a viable shortcut.
The right protocols decrease the time it takes to train, helps drive a consistent customer experience, and increases overall business manageability. This is not a strategy that has been vastly improved in recent years, but it bears repeating. Further, individual programs can make it easier to test protocols and analyze what should be kept and what should be removed from your systems.
Make the Most of Your Digital Tools
If you have digital tools and use them on a daily basis but haven’t integrated the tools you use well within your processes or the other tools you use, you have an inefficiency. Those inefficiencies have, historically, caused businesses to lose their competitive edge.
A solution that is already integrated end-to-end or integrates with other tools and resources easily is optimal. In 2018, these solutions are all around you. From the analytics solutions mentioned above to subscription and newsletter management or solutions that cover CRM as well as billing at the same time. The less friction there is and the more time you save, the more manageable your business will become.
Leverage Your Community
If you haven’t built one up yet, a community will in the short term make your business less manageable. However, for anyone that has invested in this strategy at all, finding ways to leverage the community you have built can make your company significantly more manageable. The better and more prominent the community, the bigger the benefits.
Advocacy and Customer Support – Members of your community are more likely to become resources and help those that are new to your brand or in the market for your products or services.
Content and Resources – Further, community members may create content and resources for other members of the community to use. This further establishes them within the community and gives you valuable assets.
Feedback – Making the most of the customers and fans you have is a lot easier than finding new ones. Feedback is one of the best ways to find new opportunities.
Written by:
Susan Ranford
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