Opimization strategies

Before you start optimizing your business, there are a couple of things you need to put into place.

1. You need to be able to measure your success (or failure) at keypoints in your business process. The statistics shouldn’t be overwhelming, indeed the simpler the stats, the easier it is to identify what you should be doing. Ideally anything you are tracking should have a direct impact on your profitability.
2. Get your key employees onboard. Optimizing can be a challenge at the best of times, if your key employees aren’t aware of what you’re doing they may well feel threatened, and make it more difficult to come up with meaningful results.

Once these are in place, you will need to work through your business process, stage by stage. Once you have optimized one stage, you can move on to the next one, confidently of a firmer foundation.

This is an iterative process, in other words, you don’t just do it once, you keep on doing it until you are at an optimum level for your business.

Sales Optimization

Sales Optimization (you may well want to think of it as marketing optimization) has two distinct elements to it:

Attracting new business.

New business is notoriously expensive to gain, yes it is still remarkable how many businesses don’t know which elements of their sales and marketing efforts are profitable. Once you do have an enquiry, how do the sales team work with it? Is it responded to effectively? What are their conversion rates? In this stage we are trying to establish the effectiveness or your sales team and find areas they may need training in.

Client retention.

Once you have a client, how are they managed? It is more economical to maintain an existing relationship well, then try and establish a new relationship with a new client. Yet many businesses decide to ignore their existing clients.

Process Optimization

Once you have a sale - what happens to it? For many businesses this can be a stumbling block, particularly if this is an existing client, we can take it for granted that they will continue to order, and so you don’t need to pay too much attention to how orders are being satisfied.

Financial Optimization

How you spend your money, as well as how you make it, is vitally important for an business. If your business has a good cost tracking system in place, and is keeping it’s finger on the financial pulse, then you are in a much better position to ensure you ongoing success.