Is it challenging to get your business off the ground? Is your team unable to keep abreast of the latest technological innovations? If your answer is ‘yes,’ we understand how you are coping up to remain competitive in this business world. It’s true, especially when your rivals have big budgets to explore new possibilities and make the most of emerging platforms in the B2B Industry.
Although it looks daunting, there is definitely a way out of this trouble. That’s the reason we are here with some of the most useful tips for low-budget firms. We show you the means of modernizing so that you can ensure your business runs smoothly without hassles.
1. Be Ready for Multi-Store Challenge
More and more people are transacting online. Almost every individual carries a smartphone in their pocket. This development made businesses to break into the digital world and thereby grab the attention of the customers. Now business owners offer a constant, relevant, and also excellent customer experience across various devices and formats. That’s a positive revolution.
But, at the same time, certain customers jump from screen to store. So, you need to be ready for this multi-store challenge. Try to build a bridge between your physical and digital stores.
Similar to online customers, start giving discount code to the people who visit and purchase in your physical store. Come up with the QR code and other functionalities that are capable of eliminating the boundaries between these two worlds.
Also, don’t forget to maintain a consistent visual and tone of voice while selling online and face-to-face.
2. Modernize your Endeavors Affordably
Stop worrying if you lack large advertising funds or media budgets. There are various other ways to promote your company effectively. These affordable methods will not just spread a word about your brand but also helps in the lead generation process, surprisingly.
Now let us see what these tactics are:
- Pay-per-click advertising.
- Promoting content or running ads on social media platforms.
- Hosting presentations and web seminars related to your products or services.
- Inviting influencers, local journalists, or bloggers to your business events.
- Sending out promotions along with the invoices to build the trust.
- Performing cross-promotion with companies operating in related sectors.
3. Utilize Various Team Collaboration Tool
Your marketing and sales team more likely work both inside and outside the office. A useful collaboration tool helps them communicate and coordinate productively with the team members at all times. If you look at the trends online, we can see several online collaboration apps that come and go. But only a few like Slack have caught fire.
Slack has more than ten million daily active users. With its instant messaging as well as collaboration feature, it enables the businesses to centralize all the notifications, from sales to tech support, including social media into a searchable place where every member can discuss and take action.
Apart from this tool, you can also consider streamlining inbound and outbound communication via VoIP phone network system. It is incredibly cost-effective, especially if you have to make calls to stakeholders, suppliers, or customers regularly in different time zones.
4. Perform Customer Journey Mapping
In a B2B industry, it is necessary to know all about your customer, right from their name to their interests and company info. But, sadly, most of the marketers believe they can quickly put themselves in the customer’s shoes without really bothering about an appropriate customer journey mapping.
Although the customer’s journey looks pretty simple in the beginning, it turns out to be complicated once you get into the detail. But, with the right mapping strategy, you can quickly gain insights into common pain points of the customers, and see the business from their perspective.
Other than delivering an improved customer experience (CX), journey mapping has a lot to offer.
- Helps you see how and where customers interact with your business.
- Easily learn if the customer journey is in a logical order.
- Get an outside perspective on sales process.
- Highlight all the development priorities.
- Focus on customer needs at different stages in the sales funnel.
- Show gaps between the real customer experience and the desired one.
5. Take Help of Automation Tools
If you are overwhelmed with the tasks at your desk, the right automation tool can be your savior. This personal productivity tool isn’t reserved for big businesses. They help smaller enterprises, as well. So, get yourself started with such platforms.
It helps you streamline your day-to-day tasks, as well as swiftly perform more challenging recurrent duties. You can incorporate automation in all the aspect of the business, be it capturing leads, closing sales, serving customers, checking routine office tasks, etc.
By automating specific tasks, business owners can minimize, eliminate, or even delegate unimportant activities to others. It helps them purely devote their time to the goals that really matter.
6. Switch to Powerful Cloud Services
With a fear of losing budget, the B2B companies often chose outdated procedures to store or retrieve paper documents like contracts, invoices, and receipts. Instead of wasting time on these redundant tasks, they can migrate their data to cloud-based technology that is financially and technologically feasible for small firms.
Image Source: Wikipedia
Cloud services are mostly based on monthly or annual subscription fees. So, you can utilize them without any pain of paying hefty up-front costs. These services will help you store, edit, and share the documents on the go via a mobile device. Thus, it eliminates the need to pass paper documents physically.
You must also note that cloud services are not just digital filing cabinets. It comes with built-in analytics and machine learning capabilities. So, business owners can gain access to useful data as well as actionable intelligence across a range of processes.
To Sum It Up
By plugging into new technology, you can stay ahead of the competition, and even meet the demands of the modern market. The tips mentioned above will exactly help you out in this area. By following it thoroughly, you can improve work productivity, accelerate the processes, and boost the revenue altogether.