With the New Year upon us, the one thing every business owner has in common is a resolution to grow their business during 2017.
While that is a beneficial goal, it is important to plan the steps required to achieve it.
In this article, we will recommend which free tools are available for your disposal in growing your firm.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
In order to grow your sales, there are two strategies you must employ – upsell to current customers and find new ones.
In order to keep track of who you have sold to in the past, who has contacted you, who you have contacted, etc., you need to manage your customers’ information with a CRM system.
This tool can be accessed from any device, and can be extremely useful to you and your employees.
If integrated with your other communication tools, it can alert customer service representatives as to who is calling (if you already have the person’s contacts imported), as well as let your sales representatives see which items they have ordered in the past, if they had any issues, and how they were resolved.
A CRM system will allow you to send customised mass emails to your clients, and track how many were opened and how the recipients interacted with them.
HubSpot CRM is a great free option to utilise for growing your company.
As it’s completely free, it’s not a burden to small enterprises to implement and is easy enough to use for those that aren’t advanced in their technological skills.
Organisational Tool
Your colleagues may have a multitude of great ideas for jumpstarting your business in 2017, but other than shouting them out at quarterly meetings, do they ever get remembered or implemented?
Probably not.
An organisational tool is essential for marking down these ideas, adding details and visuals and creating associated to-do lists to get them done.
Trello is a fantastic free tool that allows companies to keep track of all ideas, allowing employees to enter them into the “idea” section.
Don’t like the idea, or decide it’s not right for your business needs?
Simply delete it and move on!
If the idea is a winner, you can jump on making it happen, by assigning steps to your employees, setting due dates and monitoring progress.
If you want to attract more people to your website, you need to help them find you first.
This can be done with free or paid marketing, such as pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns or articles published on your website.
These strategies both utilise words and phrases that Google users type into Google search to find businesses such as yours.
The problem is, what are these words, and are some of them more relevant and searchable than others?
The answer is yes; and to get detailed information about keywords relevant to your niche, you should utilise Google Keyword Planner.
When you input one phrase, such as “London equity firm,” it generates tens, hundreds and even thousands of related phrases, as well as how many people search for them, what the competition is for each term and the cost for each click were you to advertise.
Doing a free search to create a list of relevant keywords, and then using them as part of your website content, articles and blogs will help you reach a new audience base to grow your business.
Thanks again
Mark Williams
Head of Training and Development
Updated on: 23 February, 2017
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