December 20th, 2021 | Updated on June 28th, 2022
You’ve successfully navigated your business through the perilous start-up waters, and now you’re sailing on calmer seas and are ready to take the next step and scale up your operations.
But what’s the best way to go about this? The five tools below can help you optimize your processes and easily expand your business.
Make The Most Of eCommerce Opportunities
Getting your products or services available to buy online is vital, and there are lots of eCommerce tools on the market to help you do this.
An eCommerce platform will allow you to take payments via your website, and many are scalable; this means that even if, right now, you only have a small number of products to sell, it can grow with you as your range expands.
Incorporating eCommerce into your business processes can provide the best user experience possible for your customers by making transactions seamless.
It allows them, for example, to pay in several different ways and in a manner consistent with a visit to your physical store. This tool will also enable you to manage sales from various locations via one dashboard.
Finally, eCommerce platforms usually offer analytical tools as part of their package, helping you to assess customer behavior and route to checkout.
Perfect Project Management
Project management tools can help your business scale up effectively. Using Kanban style boards or other task management tools, this software will allow you to take on larger and more complex projects.
Some options allow for the configuration of task dependencies so that you and the team can see what jobs are currently underway and which of the uncompleted assignments are causing a hold-up.
You can read more here about Click Up, which is an example of a project management platform that provides this facility as well as a wide range of other features, including a user-friendly drag and drop interface, Gantt charts, mind maps, and timelines.
Project management tools also optimize collaboration and team communication in general, regardless of whether team members are in the office or off-site – as long as they have been given access to the platform and have an internet connection, then they can continue with their tasks via the platform.
Reporting features are another important advantage that this tool can offer; budgetary and financial reports can be easily produced as and when required, freeing up staff time for other tasks.
At the end of a project, reports can be created to analyze its successes and where improvements can be made next time.
Email Marketing Solutions
To build up your business, you’re going to need to bring into play an effective marketing campaign, and email campaigns are a consistently good way of doing this.
Consider incorporating email marketing software into your business to automate a significant element of your processes.
Before choosing a platform, think carefully about the type of business you run and the aims of your marketing strategy to get the best fit, and be aware that some eCommerce solutions feature marketing tools, so you may not require a stand-alone option.
Some of the most popular email marketing software for businesses right now offer templates, bespoke landing pages, personalization, and tools for building contact databases.
Online HR Systems
If your business has grown to a point where you need to start thinking about an organized HR strategy, then an online HR platform could be a really useful tool to help you take the next step in your journey.
These kinds of systems typically automate payroll and onboarding processes, as well as offer the facility to track applicants through the recruitment process and conduct performance management assessments.
When choosing the system that will best integrate with your business, consider whether you also want to access the platform via a mobile app and the extent to which you would like employee goal tracking and continuous feedback to be featured. Most HR platforms are both customizable and scalable and so can develop over time, in line with your business.
This tool is a great way of freeing up staff time, streamlining processes, and having the peace of mind that comes with knowing that all of your HR processes are compliant.
Actionable Analytics
If you want to expand your operations, then an analytical tool could be your best bet in figuring out how to go about doing so.
Use these tools to discover both the internal and external factors that could be affecting your company’s performance and to make a plan about the best way to achieve your goals, based on an interrogation of the data.
You can also incorporate analytical software to audit your marketing campaigns to date to ascertain what has worked for you and what has not.
Social media platforms can be interrogated to dig deeper into the profiles of your visitors and their demographic to enable your marketing to target key groups, as required.
The Takeaway
Scaling up your business is an exciting time and one of great opportunities. Consider incorporating the five tools above to help you get started with writing the next chapter of your business’ story.
