How MI-ghty is your Management Information
When it comes to launching and
running a small business, the less you leave to chance the better.
Knowledge is power. Keep a tight rein on your start-up and you'll
identify problems more quickly, allowing you to patch them up.
Here's how you do it.
We understand that the last thing you,
as a small business owner, want to do is drop everything and take
stock. But taking stock (and not just once, but all the time) is
one of the most important aspects of running a business.
It helps you identify problems and
rectify them quickly, or adapt to extra demand for particular
products and services in your portfolio. It tells you who among
your employees is 'making it happen', and who needs a rocket up
'em.
But how do you collect and manage all
of this information without becoming overwhelmed? Stalking your
employees and customers is one way, but much more efficient is to
use software on your desktop and on your mobile phone to access
data.
Financials
You need to be able to access an
aerial and granular view of your company finances at any single
point, no matter where you are. After all, you shouldn't be able to
make decisions without knowing how they'll impact on your bottom
line.
Get daily, weekly and monthly
financial reporting set up so you're always on top of sales, income
and outgoing. Break it down across departments, products or
individuals, or however your main revenues and outgoings are best
assessed so you can drill down to assess profitability and
performance and set key performance indicators to measure
against.
Better still, get good accounting
software so you can access all of these whenever you need and can
run numerous live or historical reports.
Customer relationship
management system
To keep track of your business, you
need to keep track of your customers and there's a range of
customer relationship management (CRM) software available. A good
package should connect you to your data seamlessly with an easy to
navigate interface pointing you in the direction of information
about productivity, sales and repeat customers.
Sales management
system
If your focus is sales, you might want
software that emphasises this. Again, there are plenty of companies
offering hundreds of products and a search online will reveal the
best ones. Sales software should let your sales team work
collaboratively, share leads, track competitors, talk directly to
each other through the system and store data about customers. Most
important, make sure you can see it all.
Web analytics
If you don't know about online
analytics software, where have you been? In this ultra-switched-on
technological environment it's absolutely essential that you track
the traffic passing through your website.
You need to know not only how many
people, but when did they enter your site, how long for, what pages
are popular, how many did they visit, did they sign up to your
newsletter, and which pages send customers bouncing away?
All of this information will give your
sales team a big advantage and will help you deliver the right
products or services to the right people, ignore it and you're
signing up to a scatter-gun approach.
Social media
Make sure you're using a cross
platform social media tool such as Hootsuite or Tweetdeck so you're
constantly able to see what your customers are saying about your
business on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn etc and join the
debate.
Use the cloud to share
docs
There's no excuse for no longer having
the right document in front of you. The cloud.
Smarta Business
Builder
You know what would be really useful?
If the most important parts of the above list were somehow combined
in one easy to manage package…To help you on your business journey,
we've created Smarta Business Builder, the complete online
tools package for growing your business. Website
Builder, Business
Plans, Accounting
Software, Legal
Documents and Email - all in one place
- from just £20 per month with no contract! Try it out today!
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