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There was a time when cold calling played an essential role in sales. The phone was the only way to establish new relationships, apart from face-to-face conversations, so cold calling had a place. Of course, door-to-door sales were a thing, too, and that has long since been abandoned.

LinkedIn is an extremely valuable platform for both marketing and sales initiatives. Here are some strategies on how to effectively use LinkedIn for marketing and sales:

1. Create a Strong Company Page: Your company’s LinkedIn page is an essential part of your LinkedIn marketing strategy. This should include your company’s story, purpose, and values. Make sure to use relevant keywords to increase visibility in search results.
2. Build Your Network: Connect with professionals in your industry and beyond. You should also join industry-related groups on LinkedIn to share your content, participate in discussions and expand your network. This will increase your visibility and credibility.
3. Regularly Post Engaging Content: Sharing valuable, high-quality content is one of the best ways to establish your brand as a leader in your field and engage your audience. You could share blog posts, industry news, company updates, or other relevant content.
4. LinkedIn Advertising: LinkedIn’s ad platform can be a powerful tool. You can target ads based on job title, job function, industry, and more, making it easier to reach decision-makers. The platform offers several ad formats like sponsored content, message ads, dynamic ads, and text ads.
5. LinkedIn Sales Navigator: This subscription-based tool provides advanced search and lead recommendation features to help you find and build relationships with prospects and customers. You can use it to save leads, send InMail messages, and get real-time updates on your accounts and leads.
6. Personalize Connection Requests and InMails: Personalize your message when you reach out to connect with someone on LinkedIn. People are more likely to accept your request if you explain why you want to connect and how it could be mutually beneficial.
7. Engage with Your Network’s Content: LinkedIn is a social network, so be social! Respond to comments on your own content, engage with your connections’ posts, and participate in group discussions. This not only keeps you visible to your network but also helps you understand the needs and interests of your audience.
8. Use Analytics: LinkedIn provides a range of analytical tools. Use these to monitor the effectiveness of your posts, learn more about your audience, and refine your LinkedIn marketing strategy based on data.
9. Encourage Employees to Become Brand Ambassadors: Employees can play a major role in amplifying your company’s reach on LinkedIn. Encourage them to share updates, accomplishments, and perspectives to showcase your organization’s culture and opportunities.
10. Use LinkedIn for B2B Marketing: If you are in a B2B industry, LinkedIn can be a goldmine for leads. Studies show that LinkedIn is the most effective social media platform for delivering content and securing audience engagement for B2B businesses.

Remember, the goal of using LinkedIn for marketing and sales is not just to sell but to build relationships, demonstrate thought leadership, and create opportunities for meaningful engagement.

How LinkedIn Can Improve Your Marketing and Sales Success

Here’s a statistic that should get you excited. 76% of B2B buyers prefer to work with recommendations from their professional network. They’re not interested in getting a sales pitch from a person or a business they’ve never heard of. They want warm connections that have been pre-vetted by trusted associates. That is why cold calling is no longer useful. It’s also why LinkedIn is so powerful.

LinkedIn is a social network built for professional and business development. Its purpose is to help business people make connections, find quality hires, and widen their network. It’s tailormade for establishing the professional network that B2B buyers prefer.

Linkedin business premium costs about $60 a month and will be your best investment that will propel your sales unlike anything before.

As a premium Linkedin account holder, you will be able to get in touch with prospects that were earlier blocked. You will be able to send precise messages to contacts that were otherwise blocked with a standard contact. Your network of contacts will expand at a pace like never before. A Linkedin premium membership is completely worth an investment into your own business.

Passive Marketing Opportunities

Businesses can use the platform both actively and passively. Setting up your profile and keeping it updated creates a passive destination that other LinkedIn users can find as they search for opportunities, partners, and vendors.

As you build your network, you can leverage connections for recommendations and testimonials. You’ll find new links, and parlay them into an even larger network.

Active Marketing Options

As you extend your network you can take a more active role as well. You can post updates and generate useful content that you can promote to your connections and others interested in your subject matter. Join groups of like-minded people and participate consistently to establish yourself as an expert in your field.

The platform also has a multifaceted advertising system that you can use to supplement your other activities. With sponsored content, you can pay to promote your updates and posts directly to your target market’s feeds. Sponsored InMail gives you a direct line to other user’s LinkedIn mailboxes. Both of these are highly targetable, more so than on any other social network.

Also offered are dynamic ads, text ads, and lead generation forms. All of these fully integrate with the LinkedIn experience, and all can be very effective for generating leads, driving traffic to your website, and creating an extensive network of warm connections.

Out With the Old, LinkedIn With the New

We said that cold calling is outdated, but that isn’t entirely accurate. In reality, it’s dead, and LinkedIn killed it. That’s because the call isn’t cold anymore when you call people after establishing a relationship with them on LinkedIn. It’s a warm call to someone with whom you now share a digital history.

LinkedIn helps with the heavy lifting of relationship building. It gives users a host of tools to find new customers and establish fresh points of contact. Referral marketing and warm market lead generation have replaced cold calling. So if sales are flagging, you don’t need to do more cold calling. You must ditch the practice entirely and throw your hat in with LinkedIn. Your bottom line will thank you.

Similar to a consumer’s credit score, a business’s credit score represents its creditworthiness. The higher the number, the better off the company.

The three business credit reporting companies are Dun & Bradstreet, Equifax and Experian. Each has its own way of gathering data and scoring your business, but they all look for information from investors, lenders, banks, and credit card issuers. Once you apply and get approved for a business credit card, you start building up a credit history.

You can view a sample credit report for a fictitious medical center on Experian’s website.

There are a number of ways to improve your business credit score:

1. Make sure to pay your bills on time.

This may seem obvious but there are entrepreneurs who think that paying bills as late as possible keeps their cash flowing. There are several reasons why this is often a bad strategy to follow, but one of the most important is that it affects your reputation and your relationships with your business partners. During tough times like these, when capital is scarce, you will seem like a much higher risk than a business that pays bills on time.

2. Be careful whom you authorize to use your company’s credit card.

Having authorized users that you absolutely trust is key in maintaining a good credit score. While it’s easy to delegate certain business purchases to your managers or even lower level employees, make sure you always check how that information is handled and disseminated. A manager may get too busy to place that Office Depot order and delegate the task to their assistant. She or he may not necessarily have nefarious intentions, but anyone could leave the information in plain sight for someone to steal.

3. The number of trade experiences is a driving force behind achieving a good business credit score.

Trade credits are loans extended in B2B agreements between a supplier and a business, based on a buy-now-pay-later arrangement. This credit extended to a company (borrower) becomes a tradeline once it’s reported to a credit reporting agency. The more tradelines you have and the more you comply with the underlying financial obligations, the better your company will look. It usually takes between 12 to 15 months to see an increase in the company’s credit score, provided all of the company’s bills have been paid on time during that period.

4. Don’t apply for too many credit cards within any given 6-month period.

Credit card issuers have to perform a credit check every time you apply for credit, which has a negative impact on your score. In addition, your account doesn’t get a chance to age.

5. Monitor your outstanding balances.

Any business can have a bad week or month, or quarter. The best way to go about it, especially when you are expecting a decrease in your AR quite soon, is to talk to whomever you owe money and explain the situation. Make sure you find someone with authority who can update your payment schedule accordingly or negotiate some sort of arrangement for the near future.

6. Don’t buy someone else’s company hoping to acquire their tradelines.

Buying tradelines is not actually illegal, but it may not have the consequences a business owner expects. Some credit repair companies sell the so-called ‘shelf corporations’ which already have an aged credit history. Your company buys this paper corporation and the corporate credit records that go along with it. The way this can backfire is that lenders, in general, frown upon this practice. They may choose to not extend credit if they discover that you use someone else’s pre-existing credit history. Even some of your business partners may see this as circumventing the system and exhibiting a deceitful, if not illegal, behavior. It can then become a huge legal problem when you unknowingly use the corporation’s paperwork, incorporation papers, tax returns, etc., to obtain new credit, if those documents are fakes that were sold along with the corporation.

7. Monitor your credit utilization.

The temptation to pay off all of your business loans and have zero debt is real, particularly when you have a windfall profit. While it’s advisable to pay down large debts, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to lower your utilization to the point where you have no activity. Maximizing your lines of credit is also a bad idea. The rule of thumb is to maintain the utilization ratio of your loans at 30%-40% which translates into owing only 30% to 40% relative to your credit limit.

8. Maintain old accounts.

Current credit scoring models look not just at how much credit you use but also how long you use it for. Even if you pay off a loan or a business credit card, keep it there. The longest you keep a credit card or a line of credit open, the more aged your credit record becomes.

9. Don’t ignore liens and judgments against your company.

These are factored into the calculation of your credit risk and ultimately credit score. A judgment tells a potential investor that not only your business can’t fulfill its obligations but it took no steps to prevent the deterioration of the business relationship. The best thing to do when you’re served with a lawsuit is to respond and try to settle outside of court.

10. Encourage your vendors and creditors to report your positive payment history.

Not all businesses notify the credit reporting agencies of their transactions, but you should make a consistent effort to remind them of the mutual benefit this can have. Keep in mind that the three business credit agencies need up to 3-4 tradelines to create a credit file for your business.

11. Take immediate action if you suspect someone has tampered with your business data.

In spite of increased security requirements and the development of data protection software, business identity theft is becoming more prevalent. A person hacking into your company’s server can gain access to more than just personal data. Important business records, such as your tax identification number (TIN) or banking information, can be used to open new lines of credit or credit cards, and even get cash or merchandise.

12. Don’t unnecessarily spread news about your company’s problems.

In addition to overdramatizing your situation, this may garner some sympathy, but it might also make creditors wary. They could become reluctant to associate themselves with you and your company, withholding support when you need help to shore up your business down the road. If they don’t want to do business with you, it’s going to be difficult to get that first positive trade reference to the three agencies or additional trade references down the road.

Depending on where you are in the lifecycle of your company and your strategic business model, you may not care much about your business credit score in the beginning. But future investors or your bank will care, if you ever need a loan. To find out where you stand, you may obtain a credit report, for a fee, from any of the three business credit reporting bureaus. Contrary to the strict privacy that accompanies personal credit reports, your business’ report is publicly available to anyone willing to pay for it. It’s up to you what you want it to look like.

Invoice factoring can be an appealing way for businesses with outstanding accounts receivables to raise needed cash quickly. Factoring companies will purchase blocks of a business’s unpaid invoices, fronting between 85 and 90% of their total value. The business is then charged a fee every week until the last invoice is paid by the customer, at which point the factoring company will release the remaining 10 to 15%.

Invoice factoring frees up otherwise inaccessible cash. But is the process right for you? We’ll go over a few of the pros and cons to determine whether or not invoice factoring is a good fit.

Invoice Factoring Pros

There are excellent reasons for invoice factoring’s success. Here is a handful of the most compelling.

Get Fast Cash When You Need It

Unlike a standard loan, which can take weeks to months to process, businesses can convert their unpaid invoices to cash quickly, often within a day or two. Instead of having to wait 30, 60, or 90 days for your customers to satisfy their invoices per your terms, you can collect the money immediately.

Approval Is Relatively Easy

Your creditworthiness isn’t a factor when you apply for invoice factoring. That’s because it’s you’re customers that will be paying back the “loan” when they pay their invoices, not you. This feature makes factoring ideal for businesses with troubled credit histories. And because your invoices provide the collateral, you don’t need to worry about putting assets in jeopardy.

You Can Factor Repeatedly

You’re not limited to a single factoring transaction. As long as your customers remain in good standing and you keep invoices coming in, you can factor as often as you like. Many businesses establish a working relationship with a factoring company and regularly use the service to keep their cash flow healthy.

It Allows You to Offer Customers More Flexible Terms

Businesses that regularly encounter cash flow issues may not be able to extend their customers generous credit terms. With invoice factoring, you can convert invoices to cash immediately, which means you can extend the length of time your customers have to pay you without adversely affecting cash balances.

You Can Offload Invoice Collection Responsibilities

Factored invoices are collected by the factoring company, which means you don’t have to think about it. And if you enter into a non-recourse factoring arrangement, the factoring company assumes your customer’s credit risk. Non-recourse agreements charge a higher fee, but the benefits may be worth it.

Invoice Factoring Cons

As useful as invoice factoring can be, it isn’t perfect. Here are a few negatives to keep in mind.

It Can Be Expensive

Fees can range between 1 and 5% of the total invoice amounts, partially depending on how quickly your customers pay the factoring company. These fees are more than what you’d generally pay for a line of credit. However, the ease of approval often makes up for the added expense.

You’ll Still Be Responsible for Bad Debts

Unlike the non-recourse factoring arrangements mentioned earlier, recourse factoring doesn’t assume responsibility for collecting from clients who don’t pay. Suppose an invoice you sell to a factoring company isn’t paid. In that case, you’ll be responsible for either returning that money to the factoring company or submitting a new invoice of equal value. Factoring companies aren’t collection agencies.

You Won’t Qualify If Your Customers Don’t Pay

Your creditworthiness isn’t a significant concern when applying for factoring, but your customer’s creditworthiness is. A factoring company will ask to look at your customer’s payment histories, and if they regularly pay you late, you’ll be less likely to qualify for invoice factoring.

The Factoring Company Will Contact Your Customers

When you sell invoices to a factoring company, they’ll contact your customers to let them know where where to remit payment. They may also communicate with them if payments are late. If it makes you uncomfortable to have a third party company calling on your clients and having access to their financial information, factoring may not be for you.

You Can’t Collect on Invoices You Don’t Have

If sales are down, you might get a loan to help float the company until conditions improve. You can’t do that with invoice factoring, because low sales mean low invoice levels, and without invoices, you have nothing to factor.

Is Invoice Factoring Right For You?

Many small businesses can benefit from an invoice factoring relationship but like with every financing option, it depends on your unique situation. Make sure to weigh invoice factoring against all other options available to you and choose the one that makes the most fiscal sense.

There are some disadvantages of hiring an invoice factoring company too. They charge between 1 to 4 percent of the net invoice amount. You are no longer in complete control of your invoices now. Additionally, all past-due receivables must be handled separately because they do not perform debt collections. For your past-due accounts, you will need to involve a collection agency separately.

Having a clear, thorough, and enforceable credit policy is critical for businesses that extend trade credit to their customers. It delineates who you’ll extend credit to, under what terms, and describes your process for collecting on delinquent accounts.

It’s intended to offer guidance to your credit department when faced with difficult decisions. It also standardizes credit practices so that both your staff and your customers know what to expect when credit is extended. A well-written policy that aligns with an organization’s mission will lead to fewer bad debts and increased profitability. This article provides tips on writing a credit policy that balances your needs with your customers’ needs.

A well-structured credit policy is crucial for managing your company’s accounts receivable, controlling credit risk, and maintaining a healthy cash flow. Here are some key steps to create an effective credit policy:

1. Establish Clear Objectives: Your policy should start with clear objectives that align with your company’s overall goals. For instance, the policy might aim to minimize bad debt, maintain healthy cash flow, increase sales, or attract new customers.
2. Define Your Credit Assessment Criteria: Your policy should outline the criteria used to assess a customer’s creditworthiness. This can include credit score, payment history, financial stability, years in business, and industry risk. Consider using a third-party credit reporting agency for this step.
3. Set Credit Limits: Based on the credit assessment, set a credit limit for each customer. The limit might vary based on the customer’s creditworthiness and your company’s risk tolerance. A higher risk might justify a lower credit limit, or terms requiring more frequent payments.
4. Outline Payment Terms: Specify your standard payment terms, such as net 30 or net 60 days, and whether you offer discounts for early payment. Also, detail any late payment penalties or interest charges.
5. Establish a Credit Approval Process: Outline who has the authority to approve credit and the process they should follow. This might involve a credit manager for larger accounts and salespeople for smaller, less risky accounts.
6. Detail Collection Procedures: Your policy should detail the steps to be taken if a customer does not pay on time. This can include reminder notices, phone calls, or escalation to a collections agency. Be clear about when each step should be taken.
7. Monitor and Review: Regularly review customer payment performance and adjust their credit terms or limit as needed. Also, review and update your credit policy periodically to ensure it remains effective and aligned with your business goals.
8. Document Everything: Be sure to document everything in writing and make sure all relevant employees understand the policy. This ensures consistency in your company’s approach to credit management.

Remember, a credit policy is not a one-size-fits-all document. It should be tailored to your company’s specific needs, risk tolerance, and industry characteristics. Be prepared to update it as your company grows and changes.

Quantify Your Comfort With Risk

Any time a company extends credit, they’re taking on some degree of risk. When setting your credit policies you need to determine how risk-averse you are. The less comfortable you are with it, the more conservative your credit policies should be.

Companies with a low tolerance for risk will establish firm guidelines for who qualifies for credit and who doesn’t, while more aggressive organizations may only restrict a limited subset of customers and establish far less rigid guidelines.

How Competitive Is Your Industry?

Businesses that operate within highly competitive industries may not be able to dictate stringent credit policies to their customers without losing them to competitors. It’s simply too easy for them to find another provider that’s more liberal with their payment terms.

Consider this when establishing your terms. You need to look out for your interests, but you also don’t want to set credit qualification requirements or payment terms that are too strict. Businesses with fewer direct competitors have more latitude to develop more favorable credit policies.

B2B Businesses Should Always Run Credit Checks on New Customers

Businesses that deal directly with consumers generally won’t require this step unless they’re engaging in high-dollar contracts. Businesses that deal with other businesses should always run a check to determine the credit-worthiness of new customers.

Normally this starts with a credit application and should include bank references, trade references, and other qualifying information. Your credit policy should then list specific metrics by which applicants are judged, and the terms you’re willing to apply to each risk category.

Consider Requiring Personal Guarantees From Questionable Credit Risks

Your policy should describe alternative ways that customers can pay when they fail to satisfy your credit requirements. This might include paying half up front, or some other arrangement that helps ensure at least partial payment.

You can also consider having the owner of the company sign a personal guarantee letter. This is a legal document that stipulates that the owner agrees to be personally liable for any debts that his or her company fails to pay. This supplies you with an extra collection avenue in the event that you need it.

Set Credit Limits Based on Your Cash Flow Needs and Your Customer’s Risk Category

Just because a customer qualifies doesn’t mean you should extend them unlimited credit. It’s wise to set limits and describe remedies when these terms are exceeded. As an example, when credit required is too high you may ask a certain percentage to be paid in advance.

These limits can and should be based on the customer’s performance during your credit check. Limits can be higher for customers with stellar credit histories, and lower for those with more problematic pasts.

Be Absolutely Clear When Defining Your Terms

A sound credit policy should never be vague or ambiguous. Payment terms should be spelled out precisely, describing exactly how long customers have to pay, and the steps that will be taken if this deadline is missed.

This may seem overly legalistic, but your credit policy exists to help you avoid bad debts that can cause major problems for your business. You can’t afford to be “nice”. But in reality, your customer will appreciate the clarity. Most don’t want to wind up delinquent and will be interested in your expectations for them.

Decide Whether You Want to Reward Early Payments or Penalize Delinquency

It’s sometimes useful to offer a carrot, in the form of a small discount, for early payments. This can entice customers to satisfy their bills sooner than they would otherwise. This can help with cash flow. However, if your customers tend to pay on time, be certain that you aren’t discounting bills without a good reason.

For delinquent customers, a late payment penalty may be the motivation they need to get up to date, lest their bill continues to rise. However, depending on your industry this may chase off prospective customers. If you choose to include a penalty, don’t make it so onerous that the threat is enough to cause business losses.

Be Sure to Control Your Disputes Procedure

It’s good to include a specific process for resolving disputes. By including this in a signed credit agreement, you gain the ability to dictate resolution terms, even if it is your customer that is raises the dispute. This can help you avoid costly litigation by requiring mediation, or other less combative measures.

Consider Steps For Collecting Past Due Accounts

It’s inevitable that some percentage of your customers won’t pay, or will pay considerably later than you’re willing to entertain. Your credit policy must contain guidelines for your credit department on processes for collecting on these debts.

This policy should include deadlines, in terms of the number of days after delinquency, for each enforceable collection action. This may include reminder letters, phone calls, and eventually referring the account to a collection agency. This isn’t a step to take lightly, so be sure your credit policy spells out all the ways you and your customers can avoid it.

If you’re thinking about selling your business, the primary thing you need to keep in mind is that selling is neither a quick process nor an easy one. A successful sale is often many years in the making and involves extensive work getting everything aligned and prepared.

However, this work is both necessary and worthwhile, as a business sale, properly-prepared, can command a significantly higher asking price. It’s also nothing to fear, as small business owners are used to hard work. It’s important to apply your entrepreneurial spirit to selling your business with the same intensity that you did building it.

Make Yourself Unnecessary

Before you set a price or begin looking for buyers you need to start backing yourself out of your business. This is because you’re the one asset that doesn’t convey when your business is sold.

Many small businesses are built on the owner’s talent and a small team of employees. Prospective buyers will be leery of investing in a business that seems too dependent on its owner’s involvement as they fear that the business won’t support itself without you.

To deal with this, make a long term plan for removing yourself from the day-to-day operations of the business and begin implementing it well in advance of listing your business for sale. You want to be able to demonstrate to your prospects exactly how unnecessary you’ve become.

Freeing yourself from the daily grind has a secondary purpose as well. Your time will need to be devoted to the sale of the business, not to running the business. If you choose to manage the sale yourself you’ll be spending quite a bit of time on the process. But even if you work with a broker, the time commitment for the owner is significant. Make certain your business can run without you.

Determine Your Company’s Value

Determining the proper value for your company is a critical step in the sale process. If you ask for too much you’re likely to waste precious months chasing buyers that aren’t interested, and if you ask too little you’re cheating yourself out of the value that you spent years building.

It’s best to get professional help at this stage, to be certain your asking price is set properly. There are third-party valuation companies that will do a thorough review of your company’s financials, your competitive positioning, and your future prospects to arrive at a proper dollar amount.

If you’re planning on hiring a business broker to help with the sale, they’ll handle computing your company’s value, so you won’t need a third party.

Company value is normally listed as a multiple of either revenue or cash flow, depending on the industry. In general, higher cash flow levels will command a higher multiple, so it behooves owners to do what they can in advance of a sale to improve their company’s bottom line.

Boost Your Overall Financial Picture

The more value you can add to your business, the more you’ll be able to charge for it. Spend time trying to cut costs and boost your sales to improve your revenue and cash flow. Work on training your employees to be better at their jobs. Hire extra salespeople if the math works out in your favor.

The higher you can boost your revenues, the more your valuation multiple will work for you and the higher you can push your multiple. This means every dollar you can add to your bottom line will do its share to increase your potential sale price.

Make some positive press releases of your company, so that when a potential buyer does some research of your account they find only good news. PRWeb is a great press release site.

Clean Up Your Financials

Work with an accountant to make sure you have at least three years of clean, accurate, healthy financial documents. Prospective buyers will demand proof that your company is worth what you’re asking for it. Don’t give them a reason to balk. Be sure there’s nothing fishy in your books and that all income, assets, and expenses are accounted for.

If you have too many accounts receivable, hire a professional collection agency to help you recover money from delinquent accounts. 

Find the Right Broker

Hiring a broker is usually worth the 5 to 10% commission they’ll charge for handling your sale. They’re professionals that handle business sales all the time. You’re likely very good at what you do, but you don’t sell businesses every day, so if you try and handle things on your own it’s possible for you to miss something or make a mistake.

Broker’s leverage their knowledge, experience, and their wide network of potential buyers to sell your business far more quickly than you’re likely to on your own. They’ll also pre-qualify buyers and make sure they’re a good fit for your business before you go down the rabbit hole with them.

Just be sure the broker you choose is a good fit and that they have the credentials and numbers to back up their promises.

Promote, Promote, Promote

If you opt to skip a business broker, the full sales burden will fall to you. It’s critical that you get the word out early and often. Explore all of the resources and sales channels available to small business owners and maximize your use of them.

Self-promotion is important even if you are using a broker. They will certainly make your life easier, but it’s a mistake to rely on their efforts entirely. No one know your business better than you do, so there’s no one better suited to make the pitch.

There are a number of companies that offer small business sale listings. Some of these include:

• BuyBizSell.com : The single largest online business listing service. According to their website, they’re visited by over a million business buyers a month and have facilitated more than 100,000 successful business sales.

• BuyBizSell.com  : Smaller than BuyBizSell, BizQuest is still a thriving marketplace that offers relatively inexpensive business listings with no commissions and no hidden fees.

• BusinessBroker.net : BusinessBroker is a complement to the first two services on this list. They operate with a model similar to BizQuest, with a slightly smaller audience. They’re affordable, so it can be worth listing with all three.

Along with listing your business for sale in multiple places, you’ll want to network as much as possible. It’s likely that someone you know, or someone that they know might know someone looking to break into your industry. Your future buyer may already be in your sphere of influence. You need only find them.

 

Scaling a business is no easy feat. Entrepreneurs who have successfully scaled their businesses have experienced many tough circumstances. They had to learn scalability techniques to expand their entrepreneurial horizons with minimum effort.

This blog covers numerous techniques and valuable insights to help you scale your business and experience sustainable growth.

1. Focus Focus Focus: No deviating from your goals.

Scaling is all about bringing your business to a place of continuous growth. When in the scaling process, it is pertinent to base your decisions on what you want your business to become and not where your business stands currently. To scale, you must focus on the key activities that are going to move your business forward in a strategic way. Expound on the core activities you need to focus on, and then set boundaries around these activities to prevent stagnation.

2. Have you established a standard process?

To scale, you need to establish processes and procedures that facilitate, align, standardize and streamline core functions. You need to implement standardized and properly delegated processes to simplify everyday tasks.

By doing so, you’ll be able to quickly build a solid foundation that will guarantee steady and continuous growth and thus accomplish larger business goals with ease.

3. Develop a cash flow strategy.

One of the most prevalent reasons why small businesses fail is because they lack the needed cash. Solid finances underpin healthy business growth. So you need to have an effective cash-flow strategy in place to ensure that you’ll always have enough money to cater to your business’ financial obligations. Having a stable cash flow means that you are in a position to optimally exploit all the profit-making opportunities available to your business.

4. Evaluate options for expansion.

Entrepreneurship is about taking calculated risks. Perhaps one of the best ways to scale your business is to venture into new markets. While this might be a risky proposition if carefully managed it can prove to be a very rewarding endeavor for your small business will be able to tap into a new revenue stream at a low cost with boosted profits as a result.

5. Automate processes, saves a ton of money

A business that is labor-intensive is not scalable hence automation is inevitable for entrepreneurs with future projections. Automation is great as it makes the processes in your small business much easier. In addition, automation allows you to run repeatable processes smoothly at a lower cost and more efficiently by minimizing your manual work. With automation, entrepreneurs can improve the delivery time of any task performed and further reduce the risk of human error to boost productivity.

6. Articulate your competitor’s strength.

As your business matures, you will start to understand your market and products better. To successfully scale your business, you will need to clearly articulate your company’s competitive strength and how it related to internal processes and knowledge. By doing so, you will identify the relevant growth path that will allow scaling to happen without you falling into a complexity trap.

7. Identify core competence.

It is difficult to create strategies if you are unaware of your core competencies. While some start-ups have evolved by doing certain things without articulating their core competence, this is not the ideal method to follow while you are in the process of scaling. You need to identify and emphasize your business’ core competencies and utilize them to invest in focused growth.

8. Establish your team.

It takes more than a founder to take a business from its initial stage to thriving. As you scale and grow your business, you need a strong team to take yourself out of the critical path as scalability demands an expanded skill set. As such, you should build a team with extensive and complementary skills. Consistency and quality are paramount in such a dream and will help your business excel. All team members must be properly engaged, motivated, recognized and rewarded.

Also, if need be, do not hesitate to invest in your team as their education will ultimately reduce your work and allow you to scale your business effectively.

9. Network and collaborate.

Fostering growth and scalability requires collaborations and partnerships outside the business. The growth approach needs to extend to a network of collaborations with people and organizations, for instance, service providers, sales partners, suppliers as well as customers as they may be willing to assist you by providing important market statistics.

10. Boost marketing.

Scaling marketing operations is one of the top priorities of any business. When you scale your marketing operations, your business will be able to stay lean, agile and on the verge of growth and able to improve their productivity and efficiency. You will be able to deliver marketing campaigns that will impress your customers.

11. Increase lead generation and conversion.

It’s simple, more customers equal more sales, and therefore increased opportunities to make more profits. To create more customers, you’ll need to attract interested prospects first i.e. lead generation. These prospects must then be converted into paying customers i.e. lead conversion. However, attracting and converting should be done in a cost-effective manner thereby ensuring that only a minimal cost is incurred for each customer acquired.

This consideration must, therefore, inform your preferred means of advertising and promotion. Nevertheless, one of the most effective ways to attract and convert prospects is via referrals from satisfied customers.

12. Increase transaction frequency.

Scaling your business obviously means you are making business transactions with each one of your customers as frequently as possible to increase your sales volumes and profits. In order to do so, you must have an effective sales plan in place which will assist you to generate more sales for your business. You can do so by having each customer purchase more each time you are transacting business by using effective up-selling, cross-selling and diversifying techniques without coming across as being too pushy.

Final words

To wrap up, if you think about scaling your business, you must have a clear idea of what you want to become in the future. By implementing the above-mentioned tried and tested strategies, you can be assured that your business will flourish and grow in the right direction.