Growing a business can involve new staff, new equipment, and even new premises to deliver service to your new customers. But before you even get these new customers, you are often faced with the need to hire more sales and marketing staff (and support administrators) to lay the groundwork for growth.
This puts many small businesses in an impossible position: you can’t afford not to grow but you can’t afford to invest in new people either. The problem isn’t unique to small businesses but comes down to two fundamental problems faced by all businesses, namely:
- There is always more work to do than there are hours in the day to accomplish it, and
- There is never enough money available to be fully resourced, all of the time.
The following three steps will help you target and streamline your resources, to overcome these hurdles and grow without hiring more staff:
1) Invest in automation
If the average staff member has a never-ending to-do list, invest in automation so they can spend more time on the most productive (and money generating) tasks without becoming bogged down in low value, repetitive and inefficient tasks.
When implemented correctly, automation does two things.
- Firstly, it minimises unnecessary tasks, such as reducing the number of meetings and emails required for efficient communication between colleagues, or reducing the hours needed to update spreadsheets or CRMs. This allows team members to specialise in specific technical roles, instead of diffusing their efforts across general tasks.
- Secondly, automation saves your employees time on their remaining tasks, helping them complete more each day – and thereby making your company more money for the same expenditure.
What automation is varies from sector to sector. In engineering and manufacturing, for example, automation may involve investing in new plant and equipment, whereas service businesses may wish to focus on automation software that reduces the burden of data administration.
2) Targeted outsourcing
Employing people in house is expensive. You have to pay for space, recruitment, training, supervision and management, equipment, salaries, employment taxes, holiday, pensions etc – the list for employers can appear endless. The solution is to get another company to pay for these overheads by sourcing certain business functions from an expert third party on a contract basis. Outsourcing everything is expensive, too, but targeted outsourcing is an excellent way of saving money and boosting productivity, by giving you access to expertise, accreditations, and equipment you may not have in-house, without having to invest capital in upskilling your own business. By choosing your outsourced partners carefully, both parties benefit from a simplified service delivery model, better communication, and an increased ROI. You can then focus your in-house resources on a highly skilled and motivated core team, reducing your recruitment needs and improving output from each team member.
3) Use self-service online tools
When growing a business, a lot of sales time is spent responding to routine enquiries that could be fielded efficiently by self-service online tools. Chatbots are a prime example. These sophisticated online software programmes provide responsive answers to a wide range of sales and customer service queries, and can be customised to give information about prices, opening times, payment terms etc – and can even be linked to your salespeople’s online calendars to arrange telephone appointments. Investing in chat bots means you spend less time taking calls about mundane matters and can focus on closing deals, reducing your need to hire new salespeople during busy periods.
Find out more
Our aim at the JDR Group is to help small businesses grow and develop their revenues in a way that suits them, irrespective of their size, resources, and outside economic conditions. To find out more about our services and how our proven sales and marketing system can help you reach and exceed your goals, please call 01332 343281 today.
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