Business management is a mission filled with challenges. That’s why we’ve selected some tips that can help improve your business performance. Managing a company is a challenging mission. That’s why we’ve selected some tips for exemplary business management that can help to improve your business performance.
1. Plan and Manage Activities
One of the most effective ways to improve business management is to plan and control activities.
You can apply processes and good practices from the renowned PMI (Project Management Institute) that has compiled the already classic and very prestigious PMBOK (material that gathers the knowledge in the area of project management) or adopt small initiatives very practical and efficient, are examples:
- Define the processes and explicitly assign responsibilities to the members of your team;
- Create timelines with your team and create a framework to give visibility to activities;
- Define a Plan B for the important activities (and several others for critical activities).
- Depending on the type of activity, use programs like MS Project (to create schedules) or Timesheet applications , which is nothing more than programs in which employees point the hours spent on activities.
However, there is the warning: do not overdo the adoption of tools or the adoption of very rigid processes and beware of micromanagement – excessive supervision that causes demotivation.
2. Manage purchases and inventory
It is not uncommon for companies to settle in relation to the administration of the purchase of inputs (or acquisitions) and the use of the budget reserved for commercial and marketing actions . Procurement planning includes, in addition to the procurement process (ordering), cost management and accounting issues, consulting suppliers (budgeting), contracting, deadlines, and quality of supply agreements.
If your company’s purchasing process is not yet structured , begin by re-evaluating your suppliers and reviewing the process of managing your inventory : the amount of waste, over-contracting services, and purchases of substandard products can be an unpleasant surprise.
Also try to use metrics to evaluate your marketing actions to try to more accurately measure stock returns and invest in different media / channels. This way, you can discover ways to optimize budget use and test investment in new sales channels.
3. Utilize a CRM, manage leads and stages of sales
In a world so competitive, customers must be conquered and followed every day. Customer Relationship Management ( CRM ) is a set of practices and tools that assume that the relationship with customers should be valued and structured in the business process.
There are many web systems and applications that support the relationship management with consumers, they are commonly called simply CRM systems.
CRM systems also help in the organization of leads . To get clearer, leads are companies or individuals interested in acquiring a product or service and who, potentially, can become customers.
By being a key player in business, a modern company must invest in acquiring leads and managing the approach to those potential customers.
This approach can happen through stages that translate the phases of a sales process . Examples of possible steps in a sales process are:
New contact: a new lead that has not yet been contacted;
Contacted and with interest: a contact was made and the interest in the product or service was confirmed;
Commercial presentation: a commercial presentation was made and information was collected for the preparation of a proposal;
Decision pending: the prospect’s board has a commercial proposal in hand;
Victory: sale made;
Defeat: The sale, at some point, was aborted.
This type of structuring gives managers and marketers alike greater management capacity and greater predictability of sales.
4. Encourage innovation and continuous improvement
Today, it is the manager’s responsibility to foster innovation. Whether it is an improvement on a product or service, or even a change in some process. You need to innovate to stay competitive .
Innovation management is a new area of business management and is responsible for the life cycle of projects and their processes. If you are thinking of implanting a culture that fosters innovation, the first step is to structure the processes to receive feedback from employees and to evaluate them. Often innovation comes not from meetings of leaders with an MBA but from employees who know in detail the use of a machine or a manufacturing process.
5. Use the Internet to your advantage
Today, for small and medium-sized businesses, it does not make sense to invest money streams in their own infrastructure (servers, network equipment, backups, network maintenance technicians, and software) to locally host customer service systems, helpdesk or even Enterprise Management System (ERP ).
There are many options for systems and applications hosted in the cloud with high availability (accessible for more than 99.9% of the time), safe and with high cost-benefit.
In addition, these systems can be accessed from any device and anywhere, giving flexibility to the management and work of commercial, administrative and customer service teams. So give preference to an online ERP system in the cloud.
6. It will work, but it will give return
The extra tip is: split to conquer . The practices presented are not simple to the point of being adopted at one time, but will certainly give a return by increasing the operational efficiency and strategy of companies in the process of structuring or seeking improvements in their business processes.
Investigate the pains of your business processes and try to adopt practices and tools one at a time. In doing so you will certainly be moving towards exemplary business management: with structured processes and a focus on administrative and strategic efficiency. There are a number of human resource training courses were available online.
