If you want your company to earn some serious revenue, you’ll need to go beyond run-of-them-mill ways of operating your business.
Using the best-fitting tools, adopting the right strategies, and following tried and tested tactics are some of the ways to get ahead in business.
However, it’s not always easy to know what to do or where to start.
The good news is, we got you covered.
In this guide, we’ll look into five tried and tested tips to help you optimize your business operations to boost your sales.
1. Use cloud-based apps
Efficiency is critical to seamless business operations and, in turn, earning more revenue.
However, if you’re stuck using manual, paper-based processes, you’d be hard-pressed to operate your business efficiently.
For example, if you operate an equipment rental company, you’ll need to conduct daily inspections before and after renting out your assets.
Using manual inspection methods could lead to slow rental processes, and you’d be buried in mountains of paperwork.
Plus, manual tools mean your staff will need to be at your physical office to conduct inspections, which is not only time-consuming but will also eat up a chunk of your resources.
The solution? Use cloud-based apps.
Property inspection and asset condition reporting software Record360 allows you to digitize your inspections and workflows with equipment inspection software.
You can use the solution to perform asset assessments right from a mobile app anytime and anywhere, as long as you have an internet connection on your compatible iOs or Android device.
Your staff can create custom checklists and workflows, fill out the electronic equipment inspection form, capture asset damages by taking photos and videos and attach them to the record, and send off everything to designated recipients for their e-signatures.
The inspection records are stored in the cloud, allowing your managers and admin staff to sort, track, and access all the data with ease.
Cloud-based apps give you the flexibility and robust features you need to speed up your processes for better productivity and profitability.
2. Automate manual tasks
Manual tasks eat up a chunk of your productive hours and resources — which can seriously impact your company’s ability to grow your sales.
For instance, one of the ways to ensure seamless business operations is to schedule the right staff with the appropriate experience and skills for any given workday.
If you create staff schedules manually, such as using multiple spreadsheets, things can get overwhelming and confusing quickly.
An excellent way to address these issues is to use cost-efficient and free employee scheduling software to streamline assigning shifts.
You can use Deputy, an employee scheduling, time clock, and timesheet software that lets you create staff schedules quickly and easily.
The software’s auto-scheduling features help you predict the number of staff you need in a shift, including letting you auto-build schedule templates to manage foot traffic, forecasted sales, and other demand trends.
You can then fill shifts with the best-fitting team members and automatically factor in staff training, availability, cost, etc., with one click, saving you loads of time and money.
Plus, with Deputy’s timesheets feature, you can seamlessly link your payroll system to automate your wage calculations and payroll processing.
Automating your employee scheduling simplifies your legal compliance, ensuring you have suitable team members working in each shift. This helps improve your business operations efficiency and, ultimately, your bottomline.
3. Adopt AI technology
One of the best ways to make your workflows as efficient as possible is to leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools.
For instance, you can use powerful AI chatbots for customer service to optimize your customer service processes.
One such platform is ActiveChat.
The solution offers smart AI chatbots to automate your mundane customer tasks and repetitive client conversations.
ActiveChat’s chatbot builder allows you to create feature-rich conversations and integrate them easily on your website, social media, and other channels and business frameworks.
You can build smart AI chatbots that understand human language, detect customer intents, and deliver value, even if you don’t have the technical knowledge or coding skills.
Using AI helps you automate and supercharge your repetitive and tedious tasks, streamlining your workflows and taking a huge load off you and your team’s shoulders.
This helps increase your business’s productivity and efficiency to deliver services faster, improve customer experiences, and ultimately increase sales.
4. Gather and analyze performance data
It’s challenging to improve your current business operations if you don’t know what you’re doing wrong. This includes gaps that slow down your processes and keep you from growing your sales and your company.
Consider these useful tips to help you use data to optimize your business operations.
- Determine what you want to achieve. Understand your immediate and strategic objectives to assess whether your current performance is helping your business reach these goals.
Set quantifiable and measurable metrics. Track and assess the metrics over a specific timeframe to evaluate your business’s performance and whether you are meeting your targets.
- Gather data. Specify the data you need to evaluate your business operations and performance. Invest in a reliable solution to streamline your data gathering and storage, and ensure information accuracy.
Run regular data backups to ensure all your business-critical information, project wikis, work items, and repositories are secure and intact.
For instance, if you use Azure Devops for building apps, use Backrightup — a service that allows you to run an automated Azure DevOps backup daily or whenever you prefer.
Running automated backups helps keep your data safe in case of errors, server crashes, and other issues that can lead to data loss.
- Analyze your data. Extract valuable, actionable insights to improve your workflows and amplify your operations by analyzing your data. This includes analyzing your sales, marketing, and customer service processes.
Use your data to identify workflow bottlenecks, address gaps, optimize your business processes, and make better, more strategic decisions that increase your company’s profitability.
5. Leverage user friendly tools
Don’t underestimate the benefits of using simple tools to streamline your workflows, bolster your business operations, and get more customers.
After all, the easier it is to use the tool, the faster you can learn to use it and deploy your strategies.
For instance, you can make marketing and other business videos and content faster by leveraging easy-to-use, intuitive video editing tools.
With a user-friendly app, you can customize stunning templates, apply filters and special effects, speed up your videos, and easily use other editing features to create your video.
Canva’s free online video editor offers a library of pre-made templates and drag-and-drop tools to help you create compelling videos within minutes.
You can add audio clips, texts, backgrounds, royalty-free video clips and images (or upload your own media), and other elements.
With a user-friendly tool, you can simplify and streamline your workflows and make your business operations more efficient.
Supercharge your business operations and increase your sales
Know the best strategies to address gaps and workflow bottlenecks within your processes that keep you from running your business seamlessly.
Try the tips in this guide and see if they help you get your expected results. Your business might have unique needs, but you can use these time-tested tips and build on them to refine your strategies, grow your sales, and, in turn, your company.
