As 2018 looms just ahead, the activity du jour in our personal lives is the new year’s resolution. These resolutions usually come without much thought, and fittingly they rarely come to fruition. However, as a business owner you think about a good deal more than simple resolutions: your needs are complex, and they depend upon the activities – and indeed, the needs – of other people and things in your organization. So, your resolutions require the planning necessary to take all those things into account.
Organizing the needs of your entire business can seem like a daunting task, but we’ve put the best 10 points together to get you started off on the right foot, and to make sure your new year’s resolution for your company is backed by solid processes and reasoning, a resolution you can truly keep.
Here are 10 Tips for Preparing Your Business for the New Year!
1. Review Your Year
First and Foremost, take a look at your company as a whole. No matter what type of business you have, taking a look at your business performance and infrastructure is vital to creating a strategy for the new year. From sales metrics to manufacturing costs, it’s important to know where you’ve been to determine where you are going. Reviewing your year will help you create a secure infrastructure and better understand your company’s growth, scalability, and potential weaknesses. This could mean surveying different department heads, or reviewing past performance reports in your CRM to gauge where you might be headed in 2018.
2. Review Customer Experience
Don’t be afraid to reach out to your customers and survey them about their experience with your company. It will help you determine if there are any shortcomings when it comes to customer happiness and help improve these for the coming year. This is also a great time to ask for testimonials from your happy customers, and perhaps sending out an accompanying survey from which to gather more actionable data. Featuring testimonials on your website can improve your opportunities with future customers as it instills trust, in fact, 85% of consumer trust online reviews as much as they would a recommendation from someone they know.
3. Get Informed!
Take time to do your research on new trends for the year. Whether it be marketing or consumer trends, it’s important to stay informed and ensure that your business’ goals are in line with the rest of the market. It’s also important to do research on any new laws taking effect, and how those may affect your business. For example, in California, we have few new laws and changes regarding leave of absence, hiring practices, and workplace safety and workers’ comp. You can learn more about those laws here.
4. Start with a Clean Slate and Organize
Is your desk, or desktop, cluttered? Or maybe your emails and calendars have just gotten out of control. It’s important that you start the New Year with a clean slate. Take some time to declutter and organize! Start the New Year fresh and put your mind at ease with a clutter-free workspace, a clean calendar, and without 999+ unread emails.
5. Set Goals and Business Resolutions
We normally set personal New Year’s resolutions, but why not set business resolutions as well? With the information and data you’ve gathered from your company review, your customers, and trends, you’re perfectly within your ability to set goals for yourself and your team. Make sure your team is aware of the importance of your business resolutions, how these will affect their day-to-day work, and how these fit in with (or change) the overall vision or goal of your organization.
6. Speak with your Team
It’s important to stay in touch with your team’s needs and processes. That way you can be sure that they have allotted the right tools and resources to complete their jobs efficiently. Be sure to take note of any bottlenecks and how those can be resolved. Your team may have great insights about working out inefficiencies in the day-to-day processes that they are a part of!
7. Refresh your Skills and Those of Your Team – Training
The New Year is a great time to refresh skills! Just as systems and applications used day to day may have several updates throughout the year, it is important that your team also receives updates so no one falls behind and everyone is on the same page. Hold training sessions for your team to ensure that everyone has a clear understanding of your processes and systems. Here at ZBrains we offer Zoho CRM training – even for our own staff, on a set basis!
8. Evaluate your Finances
Take the time to compile financial reports from the past year. Review your growth and revenue to evaluate your company’s spending versus your company needs. This will help you to plan where your company can spend more for maximum benefit, and where you can cut costs and negotiate pricing. As well, make sure your payroll and accounting softwares are up-to-date to ensure those systems are running efficiently in the new year.
9. Marketing Optimization
Marketing trends change quickly, and it is important to start the year off with a fresh marketing plan and revamp your image. Create a content calendar for the year highlighting campaigns, important holidays, and events. Overhaul your social media accounts with new branded imagery and messaging in line with your new business resolutions. Looking back on the performance of the past year can help you shape your lean, mean, marketing machine.
10. Optimize Your Business
After reviewing the steps above it’s important to ask yourself a few questions. How can you improve? Are you using any outdated systems which seem to be slowing your team down? Is your CRM able to integrate with your daily apps, even on the go? Now is the time to implement changes and ensure your business is using the proper software and applications to run efficiently! Leave your outdated systems in the past and make the changes to enable your team in the new year. We here at ZBrains are Zoho Certified Consultants here to help you with Zoho implementations, integrations, or custom add-ons like our Commission Calculator or SmartScheduler.
Interested in learning more? Reach out to a member of our team! Give us a call at (888) 207-4111 or click the link below and we will call you! You can also check out a few of our past blogs listed below for more ways Zoho can optimize your potential!
Learn More
Don’t Waste Your CRM Implementation – How to Adapt Your Business and Your Team
Zoho One – A Unified Solution for your Business with 35+ Applications
Zoho Campaigns – The Power of Zho Campaigns and CRM Integration
Zoho Desk – Keep the Customer First with this Context-Aware Help Desk Solution
Zoho Sprints – Agile Project Management Software
Sales to Social – How to Optimize the Customer Experience with Zoho
