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Tips For Running A Smoother Business

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StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship Article
Trying to manage a business without a strategy is an approach that simply doesn’t work. You have to have people, processes and plans in place that show exactly where you’re going and how you’re going to get there. It’s not a good idea to go into building a company blindly with hopes for what may happen.

If you’re struggling to keep your business afloat, for whatever reason, don’t give up before trying a few different solutions that may help you get back on track. The great news about having a rocky company is that there are opportunity and the ability to fix it. See tips for running a smoother business.

Have A Business Plan in Place

Sit down with your business partners and come up with a detailed business plan for your company. Look at immediate growth and where you see yourselves years down the road. Consider the various departments and what resources you’re going to need for each of the different areas. Be specific and work out the kinks on the spot, so they don’t emerge at a later date when you’re least expecting it.

Find A Reliable IT Solution

IT is super important when it comes to managing and running a business smoothly. Technology is the backbone of all you do, and you need it to work properly at all times. Choose a company based on their talent and track record, like Custard Technical Services, so that you’re confident they’ll deliver on their promise. Pick a partner who will help you become more dynamic, productive, secure and future-proof, through innovative IT solutions for your business problems.

Hire Smart

Your people are what’s going to make or break you in the long run. Avoid hiring quickly to fill voids. Take your time and do it right the first time, which will save you more money over time. Put a human resources department in place who’s going to help you succeed and fill the open roles appropriately. You need competent employees who work hard and know what questions to ask. Hiring the right people will make your life easier, the business run smoother and clients more satisfied.

Focus on Customer Relationships

You need to have a customer relationship management solution in place, so no one’s getting left behind or forgotten about. Have processes in place that new hires can follow and quickly understand how you work with clients and what the sales and onboarding process looks like. Clients should be your number one focus, and your business will have no choice but to run smoother and with fewer problems. You have to make it a part of the culture, so that no matter who’s interacting with the customer, they know what to do and say to help.

Conclusion

Your business won’t function properly on its own. You have to be willing to put in the hard work it takes to make it better. It’s all about processes, systems and implementing solutions. These are tips for running a smoother business.

How to Make Your Shipping Parcels Look More Professional

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StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales ArticleWhen sending out packages to clients and customers, you want each shipment to bear the name of your company in a neat and professional manner. In fact, your shipping parcels need to make it obvious that they are coming from the same place. You can make professional shipping practices into a habit by utilizing shipping labels. Make your shipping labels look uniform and crisp by using a bold font, high quality envelopes and closing your envelopes neatly.

Your products can be neatly placed in a box if they’re big, but you can neatly place them in mailers that bear your company name for small products. A professional-looking mailer can be an advertisement in itself.

Why Your Company Needs to Print Each Shipping Label

A hastily written shipping label is not very legible, which could lead to delivery delays. If the delivery person can’t read the zip code or make out the name of the intended recipient your shipments may end up getting returned and being marked as undeliverable. Time is crucial when shipping parcels to customers, business partners, and vendors. If you want them to have a professional impression of your place of business, you need to have each shipping label printed up neatly which you can do if you buy a printer and a shipping label set.

Most e-commerce platforms are integrated with a shipping label feature so you can print them nicely and cleanly in their recommended label printer. You must utilize this feature so your parcel will contain accurate information and will have the barcode to help track items in transit.

Ensure that your labels have your company name and address as well as the name and address of the recipient printed out and aligned prior to sending your packages.

Envelopes Count When Shipping Parcels

The envelopes your company uses to send parcels help to keep the contents of each package intact and undisturbed. Not all of your shipments are going to be made up of papers. If your company is sending a package that is fragile, use padded envelopes that won’t tear or easily be compromised. All shipping boxes and envelopes also need to be thick so that their contents aren’t visible from the outside. Include packing peanuts for added security if you think that the items inside of your shipments may shake or move around in transit.

You may also wrap the items in bubble wrap before inserting them in the envelope; this way, you can ensure their safety and protection. Better yet, a new product called bubble mailers already has the perfect cushioning inside to protect your items.


Professional Methods for Securing Envelopes

There should be a strong security tab for securing envelopes when sending out parcels professionally. In other words, you may want to avoid using the type of envelopes that you moisten and apply pressure to close the tab. Use envelopes that peel and stick so your recipient will know if it has been tampered with prior to delivery. You can also use security tape to ensure that your parcels are never opened before they get to their destination. If your company is sending out confidential papers or packages that are private in nature, your shipping methods can help to deter tampering.

When parcels that come from your company arrive looking professional and completely intact, your clients will easily identify all of the efforts taken to safeguard their mailings. Professional mailing efforts will also enable you to track packages and learn when a shipment has been diverted. Start with neatly printed custom labels and your workers can confirm that they have included the correct shipping information prior to dropping off packages to be delivered.

Use the best quality envelopes and package all parcels appropriately and they will arrive on time to the designated party. Your customers will make more purchases knowing that their shipments always arrive securely and professionally packaged.

The cost of doing business includes product presentation. This also includes wrapping your products and presenting them nicely to your customers. Often, customers put a significant deal on product presentation. Therefore, it’s best to create a lasting impression on them as this may dictate their future buying decisions. Your job as a business owner doesn’t stop upon receiving the payment. Ensuring that the items are delivered to them wholly and safely should also be your priority.

The Only Guide You Need For Creating Strong Customer Relationships

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Creating strong customer relationships is positively key if you’re going to keep them for the long run. If you don’t mind whether they run off to your competitors, go ahead and leave this article. If you want to make sure that your customers love you and stay with you for the foreseeable future, then you need to know how to create a strong customer relationship. Read on to figure out how you can go about this!

StrategyDriven Cusstomer Relationship Management Article
Photo courtesy of Pexels

Be Honest About What You Can Do

If you’re not honest with your customers about what you can do, you’ll likely tarnish your reputation in the process. You might really want to do what they’ve asked of you, but if you know that you can’t or it won’t be very good, just be honest about it. They’ll respect you far more and you may even be able to come up with a solution. Always be as honest and authentic as possible.

Go Above And Beyond Expectations

Make sure that in every customer interaction you have, you go above and beyond their expectations. Doing more than they expect will make them remember you and come back to you again and again. Look at what your competitors do and figure out what you can do that will set you apart. Always aim to offer incredible value for money, unrivalled customer support, speedy delivery, and other things that will make you stand out.

Keep Things Lighthearted

Keep things lighthearted with your customers and they’ll feel more ready to open up to you about what they need. If they feel you are rude, indifferent, or unhelpful, they’re going to go somewhere else and ask questions. Be as helpful and happy as you can.

Learn As Much About Them As Possible

Learning as much about your customers as possible is important. After all; each one is individual – they are far more than just a number. You can learn about them in various ways, and there’s even software you can get that tracks the visitors who come to your site and gives you information about them so you can start building a strong relationship right away. One option is visual visitor. But is visual visitor worth signing up for? You do your research and decide!

Email Marketing

If you’ve met a few potential clients recently, perhaps at a conference or expo, you need to make sure they remember you. Often, no matter how friendly you are, they won’t remember you or what you do right from the get-go. Make sure you follow up after a meeting immediately, so that you stick in their minds. Personalize your emails to them if possible. Remember though; people are rarely ready for what you have to offer when you first meet them. This is why getting their emails and giving free insight is a great way to stick around in their brains for when the right time comes.

Remember that happy, loyal, engaged customers will be the best free marketing you will get. They will become like sales people for you, raving about your business and making sure everybody knows what they think. Make sure you use these tips to build strong customer relationships and you’ll create exactly this for your business!

Why Your Clients Won’t Pay Up On Time, And What To Do About It

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One of the most frustrating things in business are clients who won’t pay on time. Your accounts receivable might be making your balance sheet look healthy, but if the money doesn’t actually arrive in your account, it’s no use to you whatsoever.

How Slow And Non Paying Clients Put Your Business At Risk

Slow paying clients aren’t just a nuisance. They can cause your business serious financial harm. First, customers who pay late can cause serious cash flow problems. You may have made decisions in advance, such as taking on a new employee or signing a new contract, banking on the fact that you would get paid by a specified date. But when clients don’t pay up, you can experience a cash flow shortfall, even if your underlying business is healthy. Not having cash on hand in the present can lead to serious relationship problems with your staff and suppliers, especially when they go unpaid.

The second issue is the extra administrative burden non-paying clients place on your business. Not only do you not have the money you’re owed in your account, but you also have to pay out extra administrative costs to chase people up. What’s more, the repercussions of non-payment can affect people at the senior level – the very people who should be focusing on moving the business forward. Wondering whether you might get paid takes your mind off other tasks, reducing your creativity and causing additional stress.

If you find that late invoice payments are a perennial problem for your business, then it might be time to revamp your payment collection process. The good news is that there is a lot you can do to remedy the problem of late-paying clients. Here’s what to do.

Make Invoicing More Convenient

One of the reasons why your clients might not be paying you on time is that your invoicing process is complicated or antiquated. In a world of instant gratification like ours, people don’t want to have to jump through hurdles to do something as simple as making a payment. What they want is to be able to quickly and easily pay you the money you’re owed and move on. Thus, friction in the payment process can be a real problem.

The good news is that technology has made it easier than ever to pay. Paying for your business services needn’t be any more difficult than ordering a new pair of shoes online. So long as your business has a merchant account, many accounting software packages now come with the option of sending a card payment option along with digital invoices, meaning that your customers don’t even have to do a bank transfer. If you use a cloud solution, you can make the process even easier by allowing people to pay using mobile devices.

StrategyDriven Customer Relationship Management Article
 
Use Spot Factoring

Small and medium-sized businesses regularly find themselves in the following situation. They’ve just completed a large order and used a significant amount of their capital in the process. They get another large order in from a different client, but they’re unable to fulfill it because they still haven’t been paid for the first. In short, they have nothing in the bank to pay their suppliers and vendors.

In situations like this, companies need advice on slow paying clients. One of the best pieces of advice out there is to use spot factoring, a process where a third party company buys up the invoice and immediately pays out a cash value for it. This process provides your company with immediate funding and passes on the hassle of chasing up late payments from a client onto somebody else.

Create A Better Relationship With Your Client

Another reason why clients don’t pay up on time could be to do with your relationship with them. They might not be conscious of your existence, or worse, they might not like you. Customers will find all sorts of reasons not to pay on time, or at all, including what they think about you personally.

To really get clients on your side, you need to create personal relationships with them. Ideally, you’d generate a creating great business partnerships tips, empathy, and understanding which would make it uncomfortable for the client to make a late payment. Having a close relationship with a client also makes it easier to broach the issue, should they fail to pay on time. Being able to call them up and discuss it over is often a lot more productive than simply sending them a threatening letter in the post.

Ask For Money Up Front

In some industries, the sellers of a new product or service have the luxury of asking for payment up front. But even if that isn’t how your industry typically operates, there are still options open to you.

One idea is to break up a project into chunks. Get clients to pay for small chunks of the project as you go along. This way, you have the security of getting regularly paid before spending resources to carry out work, and your client can test the waters, rather than paying for everything up front before knowing whether you’re going to do a good job or not.

Some clients might actually prefer to pay up front. By paying up front, they know that they’re not going to get smacked with a big bill later on.

Settle Payments Terms In Writing Before Carrying Out Work

Late payments or non-payments can sometimes arise out of confusion. Often, clients simply don’t know when they’re supposed to pay, and so they wait and wait until something happens. If your company is relying on good cash flow to pay staff and suppliers, then you want to avoid this situation at all costs.

When you get down to the matter of payment, establish a payment timetable with your client in writing. Although formal relationships like this might seem a little extreme, they can actually be very effective at building trust. Your customers will take the arrangement more seriously if it is in writing and will get the impression that you’re not messing around. You run a tight ship, and you expect them to pay on time.

Why You Should Consider Switching To a Direct Debit Service

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StrategyDriven Tactical Execution ArticleDirect Debit is one of the safest and most cost-effective methods of conducting a financial transaction. It is an instruction from customers to bank or building society to collect specific amounts from their accounts after giving an advance notice of date and value of the transaction.

You give the authorisation by completing a Direct Debit Mandate form that can be either in paper or in the form of an online web page. Post-authorisation, the organisation can automatically take payments from you in accordance with their scheme rules.

Direct Debit makes sure all bills are paid automatically without delays or any hassle. It saves businesses plenty of time meaning they can focus on the importance of staying concentrated on their core competencies.

Use of Direct Debit

Direct Debit is mostly used for payments along with:

  • Paying regular bills of variable amounts. You will be assured with direct debit that all your bills are paid timely every month.
  • Safest and easiest way to make recurring payments like magazine subscriptions or membership offers.
  • Companies provide Direct Debit services as an option for spreading costs or paying on an account.
  • Other than regular and recurring payments, it is also used for one-off payments.

Direct Debit Payment

It’s hard to remember when bills have to be paid, but matters can be made easier using Direct Debit that allows hassle-free payments. It is the most preferred method of payment in the UK. It is not only used for paying household bills, but also by businesses to pay their day-to-day transactions and commitments. Payments are automatically taken from your account on a regular basis.

Direct Debit Collections

Direct Debit is the easiest way for an organisation to collect payments from customers and businesses. It reduces the cost of collecting funds directly from a bank account.

Here are some reasons why you should consider switching to a paperless direct debit service:

  1. Ease of use

It is very easy to set up. Once your business signs up with a direct debit provider, customers can get ready for payment collections through a one-off process. Customers receive a link where they enter bank details online giving customers the authority to make payments from their bank accounts. Direct Debit services are also optimised for mobile so customers can sign up on the move, making it very simple.

There is also an option of paying variable amounts at different intervals without having to do anything more. This feature makes it perfect for paying those bills where you are charged depending on monthly usage. The company AccessPay offer a Cloud-based Direct Debit solution (which you can view here) that adds an advantage and ease that I found few other competitors do. With their service, they make collecting funds faster, simpler and more efficient for you. With the cloud-based debit solution they allow you to set up a number of Bacs direct debits, which will help to manage the entire payment process with ease.

  1. Saves precious time

It is very challenging for some people who lead busy lives to find time to stay on top of their bills and other finances. Setting up Direct Debit can help you pay on time without having to remember the deadlines. Everything will be done efficiently and automatically. Once your payment mandate is set up, your job is done. Forget all about setting reminders for your payments because direct debit will do all that for you without you having to lift a finger.

  1. No more late payments

If you are running a business where customers are making credit payments and you are fed up of those people who never seem to pay on time, a direct debit service can make your life a little easier. With Direct Debit, your customers will pay on time every time. The entire payment process is taken care of automatically, so your customers will not miss a payment again. You can also give better customer service this way without any disruptions or awkward chase up emails. Save yourself from embarrassment and also from the cost and effort associated with tracking your debtors.

  1. Safe and Secure

Direct Debit Services are secure and protected by the Direct Debit Guarantee. It has modern encryption and secured firewalls to protect all users personal and private information. When the information is transferred from the bank, it is encrypted at the source so customers can be assured the safe security of their data. The Direct Debit Guarantee gives customers complete coverage of payments in case of unforeseen circumstances like fraud or payment errors. From all the payment methods in the UK, this is by far the safest for users. It also guarantees to give you the rights to immediate refunds for any incorrect charges that have been added to your account.

  1. Cost effective

Direct Debit Services gives you ample time, admin and cost savings. This money can then be further invested in the business or passed on to customers in the form of incentives or discounts. This will make your services/products more attractive to existing and potential customers. At the same time, it will improve your business standards giving you an edge over your competitors.

  1. Attractive Packages

More attractive payment packages can be made for goods that are expensive so that customers can pay back easily through affordable instalments. This will also avoid late payments and the added bank charges for exceeding the overdraft limit in banks. You can make more flexible payment plans for a faster, more efficient payment method.

Switching to a Direct Debit Service reduces the complexity of payment handling, saving your time and giving you peace of mind. So, start improving your cash flow and handle your finances smoothly.

Photo courtesy of Grace Stroke