There is no easy way to fast-tracking the growth of your business. Although this may be a bit tricky, it has become a very necessary step in the face of the current challenges of Covid- 19 pandemic.

Recovering from the negative effects of the world’s economic lock downs may be done speedily with the following tips:

1. The hiring of more employees

Getting your business back on track and in speedy growth requires spending much of your time and resources. You have to do a lot of hiring of employees. These employees must be the right persons needed. You have to be assured that hiring the right people would engage you with tasks as putting out of ads, construction of job descriptions, conducting interviews, browsing through the piled resumes and checking of checking references.

Hiring your employees can be done using your social media.

2. Getting the best talents

When exceptional people are being hired, attaining to a high rate of business growth becomes easier. This is one of the secrets of big corporations and it has made them grow so rapidly in recent years.

Working with the right sets of talents in your organization will make those staff work longer extra hours, which is rarely needed to push your company forward.

3. Identify those managers that cannot cope with changes

The growing business implies that the tasks are equally being expanded too. To be on a safe side check on the performances of all your managers. You may be surprised to find out that one of the best performing managers had gone stagnant with time.

A stagnant manager who is in a strategic position is bound to drag the corporation backwards.

4. Reactions to new hire

As long as there is going to be new hires in the organization, there is a high tendency that this may affect production if not properly handled. Some of your old employees may feel unwanted or neglected when you are sourcing for new hires. Try to have discussions with members of your organization. Ensure that you say something positive about their contributions and performance in your organization first, and then you can post the advert for new recruitment’s to the public later.

5. Involvement of huge cash

No investment can boost growth without spending much. As this business continues to expand, it runs into unplanned expenditures. The reason is that a good sale of products is equal to good measures of capital investment that prompts it.

Final thoughts

The best hands to work with are those talents that believe their blissful future could be realized via the success of your corporation. Outsourcing your needs could help you to relieve your mangers and create the needed spare time for them to focus on the core functions of the organization.

Daven Michaels is a New York Times Best Selling Author and CEO of premiere global outsourcing company, 123Employee. The company employs hundreds of young bright individuals on three continents. His International event, Beyond Marketing Live! Inspires entrepreneurs to build & grow their business with revolutionary new theories and systems allowing them to design the business and personal lifestyle of their dreams.

Introduction

The year 2020 has come with its peculiar challenges. It has been notified that some customers will not be willing to spend their hard-earned money on your products if you are not going to do anything proactively to improving sustainably.  Following the recent study, it has been found out that over 50% growth of consumer packaged goods is related to sustainably marketed goods.

There are things that you have to do to grow your company through sustainable procurement. These practices are listed below as follows:

1. Your Presentation

A sustainable procurement program usually begins with a persuasive presentation from the procurement team. Stakeholders in your organization will have to be duly consulted and presented with a sustainability program. Such a presentation will properly address the reasons why the company should embrace such procurement changes.

2. Place a Workable Strategy

There are diverse sizes in procurement teams and organization. They come with no single approach to implementing sustainability initiatives. Other than trying to figure out a new workable strategy, it is very vital for your team to absorb existing sustainable practices into what you have as your procurement practices.

3. Look for Supplier That Meets Your Needs

Discovering your sustainability priorities; and what you aim at achieving, you need to make a review of all your previous suppliers and put them on a scoreboard to know which of them that suits your procurement needs and goals.

4. Work as a team

Teamwork has proven to be one of the most effective keys to move sustainable and ethical supply chain. About 75% of companies have agreed to have the assertion above as being more acceptable.

It is left for your procurement team to collaborate with any other non-governmental organization or companies in sharing what is seen as the ultimate practices for successful procurement.

5. Get to the facts

Clarity of procurement processes is a must for sustainability to be achieved. This transparency must cut across all segments of the supply chain. Invariably, you have to avail yourself to doing extra tasks.

6. Target the quick wins

Most times what brings big changes is little results we put together over time. You do not expect changes to occur instantly. You have to exercise some patience and commitment to implementing sustainability programs. It is easier to take u[p little changes one by one rather than undertaking a big procurement goal that many may seem too big to handling.

Conclusion

Some notable benefits crop up from implementing the above procurement practices. One of the benefits is the reduction of risk. Being involved in long time procurement practice will guard your organization against becoming irrelevant in the future. Outsourcing your non-core services to a remote partner will help your organization to come over these challenges in less than no time.

Daven Michaels is a New York Times Best Selling Author and CEO of premiere global outsourcing company, 123Employee.  The company employs hundreds of young bright individuals on three continents. His International event, Beyond Marketing Live! Inspires entrepreneurs to build & grow their business with revolutionary new theories and systems allowing them to design the business and personal lifestyle of their dreams.

Mobile devices seem to be the major source of web traffic for some company’s website. In other words, if your company’s website is not mobile compliant, you are going to lose a large proportion of your target audience. Studies have revealed that 60% of visitors who had had a poor mobile experience with your website never return to it.

Certainly, there is no doubt that a responsive website is very important to the building of your company in the end.

1. Cluttering your Website

Beclouding your website with extra images and videos that are not adding value to your web is a major reason why people will find your site uninteresting. Subsequently, this will lead to bounce rates and search engines degrading during indexing. Data and time means a lot to all the users. Websites that is stuffed with irrelevant videos and images is as good as being the kind that is hardly loading. They render bad user-experience for their clients who would hardly like to make a revisit next time.

2. Use of Device Size as Breakpoints

Android users have grown in numerical strength over the years. A recent study reveals that the number of users have reached 2 billion plus. This means that a large number of viewers are surfing websites through multiple screens. You should let your designers create your website for the smallest screens before enlarging it gradually.

3. Failure in Gesture Designing

Absence of gesture designing lowers the value of a website. This is one of the mistakes of designers. Advancement of technologies has encouraged the uses of gesture navigation in designing websites. Some designers even fail to leave a space of 25 pixels between objects, which would take care of misdeeds as regards to interfacing.

4. Hiding Certain Contents

Instead of instructing your designer to hide certain contents while your website is being created, you should do otherwise. Hidden contents invariably slow down the loading speed of a website. Creating a clean layout promotes faster page reloads.

5. Not Taking File Sizes into Account

In as much as enhanced website attracts more value, there seem to be a lurking danger. Do not be ignorant of the fact that when websites are over laden with the big sized files, it reduces the loading speed of the web. Subsequently, it increases the bounce ate of viewers as the website takes more than 1.5 seconds to load It is recommended that appropriate tools such as Compress JPG or Tiny PNG, should be used to optimize and reduce the images in your website.

Conclusion

Following some of the tips as written in this article, one can avoid the mistakes that is being done while creating your website. You can outsource for competent designers who have the capacities to creating a responsive, accessible and an enjoyable website for your consumers.

Daven Michaels is a New York Times Best Selling Author and CEO of premiere global outsourcing company, 123Employee. The company employs hundreds of young bright individuals on three continents. His International event, Beyond Marketing Live! Inspires entrepreneurs to build & grow their business with revolutionary new theories and systems allowing them to design the business and personal lifestyle of their dreams.

Your customer service team can make or break your chances of retaining customers for a long time. The fact is, if your customer reps are doing more than just attending to your customers, they will be distracted and as a result would never offer excellent customer service.

This is the reason many companies deem it better to outsource customer service.

Whether it is your outsourced customer service team or an in-house customer service team, adequate training is necessary to achieve excellent customer service. However, an outsourcing call center company usually takes the responsibility of training and retraining its customer reps, which is why they are experts in what they do. Besides, they do nothing else but attend to customers all day long.

Here are some proven tips on customer service training that would yield meaningful outcome;

Tip #1: Create Performance Metrics

Performance metrics are ways to measure customer service. You should determine and present the performance metrics while training a customer rep team. For instance, you may want to use repeat visits as one of the yardsticks for good customer service in your organization. Other metrics may include the following;

• Quick response time to customers
• Average check-out times
• The amount of time it takes to resolve a customer’s problem

Tip #2: Put Customer-friendly Policies in Place

Your policies should be customer-friendly. In essence, when you make policies, ensure they are policies that the staff can easily adopt to the advantage of customers in terms of treating the customers well. Such policies should be communicated and even handed out in booklet forms to those concerned. Typical examples of such policies may include the following;

• The maximum duration that a customer should stay on hold
• The right way to greet customers
• Procedures for handling an agitating customer
• Purchase and return policies
• …and so on

Ensure these policies are unambiguous and practical to implement. As mentioned earlier, it would be helpful to provide these policies and procedures in booklet forms or other print types. These will serve as a quick reminder for the customer reps before they start their job each day.

Tip #3: Train Your Reps to Keep Their Promises to Customers

Keeping promises actually starts with you. For instance, don’t be in haste to offer money-back guarantee on your product when you are not certain about such promise. Subsequently, you should train your customer reps never to break a promise to a customer. For instance, if they promise to get back to a customer on an issue before the close of the day or within a specific time, they should do just that.

Indeed, proper customer service training will increase your chances of excellent customer service.

Daven Michaels is a New York Times Best Selling Author and CEO of premiere global outsourcing company, 123Employee. The company employs hundreds of young bright individuals on three continents. His International event, Beyond Marketing Live! Inspires entrepreneurs to build & grow their business with revolutionary new theories and systems allowing them to design the business and personal lifestyle of their dreams.

Crisis affects businesses and can completely cripple a business if quick steps are not taken to remedy the situation. The good news is that a small business owner can find ways to seek financial assistance during and after a major crisis. Keep reading to learn how.

Apply for a Loan

This type of loan is called disaster relief loan. But first, find out if the government is offering such loan to small businesses. A good place to search is the chamber of commerce website or your country’s treasury website. Due to the pandemic, some countries are offering Covid-19 assistance. When you visit such websites, look out for the specific page and find out if you are eligible.

Once you confirm your eligibility, follow the on-screen prompting and kick-start the application. Usually, you would be required to fill out some details that include your business information. It will take few days to get response. But since many other businesses are applying as well, the process may be slower. But, be patient since you need the help urgently for your business. Usually, it may take two to three weeks to receive the financial assistance you applied for. But right now, it may likely take longer. You can also research private lending services through small business associations in your area.

Explore the Chamber of Commerce Website

If you are in the United States, you can also search your state’s Chamber of Commerce website. You may find financial aid for your small business on the website. Alternatively, you can explore the governor’s website – information and resources about the corona virus pandemic is usually available on the website and may include how to get financial aid as a small business. Each state may operate differently from the other in terms of the grant’s benefits.

Seek Help From Your Bank

Your bank may also be in the position to help you during the crisis. Find out if they are waiving service fees. Speak to those in charge to see if they have any special package or deal for small businesses affected by the crisis. Getting a waiver on monthly services or withdrawals can really be helpful. Read in-between lines for hidden clauses such as interest percentages or repayment – you definitely don’t want any unpleasant surprise, not this time.

Bear in mind that many banks are not working full hours due to the outbreak. So, you should call earlier and find out if you can meet one on one to discuss your business financing.

Finally, stay safe always by observing social distancing, washing your hands with clean water and soap regularly. Don’t hesitate to contact your local healthcare giver if you or people around you show symptoms of the virus infection.

Daven Michaels is a New York Times Best Selling Author and CEO of premiere global outsourcing company, 123Employee. The company employs hundreds of young bright individuals on three continents. His International event, Beyond Marketing Live! Inspires entrepreneurs to build & grow their business with revolutionary new theories and systems allowing them to design the business and personal lifestyle of their dreams.

Staying in contact with your customers is a great way to retain them. And, as you already know, customer retention is key when it comes to accomplishing more sales and making more profits. Staying in touch with your customers is as important as satisfying them. Keep reading to learn more effective ways to be in contact with your customers.

Tip #1: Communicate Regularly

Whether personal or business, regular communication is key when it comes to developing and sustaining a relationship. But, you may be wondering how to determine the right time to communicate with customers in person, by email, or on phone.

You may also want to know how often you should do that. Using a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) program, you can quickly determine the last time you interacted with a customer or client. Subsequently, you will decide whether or not it’s time to contact a customer again. When you proactively communicate with customers, it sends a message to them that you care about their patronage.

Tip #2: Add Personal Touch to Communication

Personalized communication can be helpful. It makes customers feel important. A typical example is when you reference something a customer has requested or said some time ago. The reference may or may not be business-related. You can increase customer loyalty by increasingly personalizing your business interactions with your customers.

Another great example is when you personalize birthday or special celebrations’ messages for each customer. No matter how seemingly small, a personal touch in your interaction with or service to your customers can mean a lot to them. In return, you would get increased business and revenue.

Tip #3: Pay Attention to Details

Make your customers feel great by paying attention to details. This includes keeping tab of things such as their last orders, favorite items, and exact interactions you had with the customer the last time. Weaving in such details into your next business interactions with customers can daze them and make them know you are professional to the core, and that you pay great attention to even the minutest detail. You can also show attention to details by the way you carefully package your products compared to your competitors.

Such attention to details rarely go unnoticed by customers, whether it is the way you offer service or present your product. Do you know what this gesture will earn you? Your customers would be compelled to spread the word about your excellent service or leave a good review for your business.

Tip #4: Appreciate Your Customers

Take advantage of your communication with customers to appreciate them for their patronage. “Thank you” is one of the magical phrases that can go a long way to win the hearts of people, whether in business or personal relationships.

Finally, you can stay in contact with your customers by occasionally inviting the top patrons for coffee or special events.

Daven Michaels is a New York Times Best Selling Author and CEO of premiere global outsourcing company, 123Employee. The company employs hundreds of young bright individuals on three continents. His International event, Beyond Marketing Live! Inspires entrepreneurs to build & grow their business with revolutionary new theories and systems allowing them to design the business and personal lifestyle of their dreams.

Going digital the times we’re in right now is a great way to ensure your business does not wind up completely. You should start by setting up remote work if your type of business permits it, or you can go digital. Keep reading to learn effective ways to set up remote work.

Set Up a Team to Manage Your Remote Workers

There should be someone to report to when there are issues associated with remote work. This is why you need to establish a team that will oversee the remote employees. Typical examples of issues that may arise from remote working include having problem with logging on to the system and accessing a document. If you run a small business, one or two persons are enough to manage your remote workers.

When selecting members of the team, ensure they are technical experts who can troubleshoot tech issues such as connectivity problems. It is better to appoint an IT person among your staff for the task. If there’s none, you can simply use the services of an independent IT contractor by outsourcing the IT task to such expert. The idea of having particular persons with specific skills to oversee remote work ensures consistency in the type and quality of solution proffered to problems that will arise.

Train Your Remote Workers

Commuting from home can be quite challenging, although fun and comfy. Remote workers are better prepared to work from home with the right training and support. If this is the first time your employees are working from home, then it is important to give them proper orientation on how to carry on with work while at home. Training will be required to demonstrate how the remote system works.

It may also be necessary to have all of them bring their personal computers to the office so that you can install the software they will be working with from home and demonstrate how it is used. During the training or orientation, you should also make it clear who each person should report to for a particular issue. Take advantage of the orientation program to encourage the workers to engage time and productivity trackers to stay on task. They should observe their break times to help them relax a while before resuming work.

Create Remote Work Policies

There should be rules and regulations while working from home and the employees should be aware of those policies. These include mode of communicating with the supervisors, the exact time for work review, time for break and so on. The policies may also include the stipulated work duration – example 7 hours everyday. They may be at liberty to choose what time to start and close, but it has to be up to 7 hours.

Finally, endeavor to create a virtual socializing medium for the workers.

Daven Michaels is a New York Times Best Selling Author and CEO of premiere global outsourcing company, 123Employee. The company employs hundreds of young bright individuals on three continents. His International event, Beyond Marketing Live! Inspires entrepreneurs to build & grow their business with revolutionary new theories and systems allowing them to design the business and personal lifestyle of their dreams.

As social distancing to curb and prevent corona virus continues, business owners should find effective ways to keep their businesses alive. One of such great techniques is to market a business digitally. This article contains helpful tips on smart ways to market your business during the pandemic.

Step #1: Come Up with Techniques to Adapt Delivery of Your Products

Many businesses, especially the small businesses selling non-essential items have been affected by the pandemic. Thankfully, you can take advantage of digital technology to explore different ways to get your products to your customers and by so doing keep your business alive.

Right now, it has become necessary to close brick-and-mortar- storefronts, especially those selling non-essential items. But, you can use your online storefront to take orders from customers. If you don’t have an e-commerce website, you can call customers via phone to take their orders.

For businesses that offer services, you may still be able to carry on virtually. Alternatively, you can adopt contact-free methods to offer your service conventionally. For instance, if you have a floral business, you may still deliver flowers at people’s doorsteps, as long as your workers wear sanitary gloves and facial masks during handling and when delivering an order. Just inform the customers that the flower has been delivered at their doorsteps.

Typical service businesses such as consulting and advising businesses can be conducted via video conferencing. Subsequently, you can share files with clients using cloud-based document-sharing service such as DropBox or Google Drive.

Step #2: Think of Offering a New Product

Before now, facial masks and gloves were mainly used by healthcare workers. But right now, the Covid pandemic requires virtually everyone to use those items for protection. This can present a new line of business for a company that formerly makes spirits. In essence, such business can switch to hand sanitizers production to meet the current need of most people and generate revenue while the crisis lasts.

Step #3: Find Additional Ways that Your Product Can be Used

This period calls for serious brainstorming and proactive thinking in order to generate revenue while the pandemic lasts. Take a look at your current business offerings and see if they could have additional uses. Needs are changing as a result of the outbreak.

As people are now locked down at home for a prolonged period, you can brainstorm ways that your product or service can be additionally used. For instance, if you sell spirits or similar alcohol-based liquids, they can be used with other home items to prepare quick and cheap home-made hand sanitizers.

Finally, gifts cards are also great tools to market your business during the lockdown. They help infuse quick cash into your business so that it can stay alive. Also, gift cards will help you secure customers for the future. You can engage email list to promote gift cards to your existing and prospective customers.

Daven Michaels is a New York Times Best Selling Author and CEO of premiere global outsourcing company, 123Employee. The company employs hundreds of young bright individuals on three continents. His International event, Beyond Marketing Live! Inspires entrepreneurs to build & grow their business with revolutionary new theories and systems allowing them to design the business and personal lifestyle of their dreams.

Wondering why companies are constantly engaging outsourcing as a business tool? The reasons are not far-fetched and are worth all the efforts. Outsourcing is an old business tool. It has been used in decades past to accomplish great feats in big corporations. Till date, certain outstanding benefits accrue to businesses that leverage outsourcing to carry out business functions.

For the following reasons and more, companies will continuously outsource business tasks;

Access to World-Class Talents

This reason and benefit tends to be one of the recent additions to the reasons companies are increasingly using outsourcing solution. In time past, the major focus was cost-saving. But right now, many companies go beyond their immediate location to find the best possible talents and skills for the task in question. For instance, India and Philippines tend to be the most popular offshore hubs for highly skillful programmers and customer service reps.

The best part is that companies even save much more when they hire these world-class experts from other countries compared to hiring their onshore counterparts. Thankfully, the internet and the world wide web have eliminated distance barrier in accessing the best talents from around the world. Philippine is the best call center outsourcing center for many U.S. based companies. It’s so seamless that the persons on the other end do not know they are not speaking with a U.S. based customer rep.

Affordable and Quick Way to Fill a Skill Set Gap

Another newer development in the benefits that companies seek with outsourcing is the possibility of filling a skill-set gap. Companies no longer have to wait for months trying to find a suitable person for a vacant position. In fact, over time, companies have discovered it is more sensible and highly cost-saving to use outsourcing to quickly fill a vacant position. This is especially true for business functions that are short-term oriented.

For instance, it’s faster, cheaper and more effective to hire a web developer through outsourcing platform. At the completion of the project, you can quickly cancel the contract, hence there won’t be any need to continue paying salary. If you have a need for such expertise in future, you can hire different a web designer and disband the contract again when the project is completed.

Other Benefits

The old but evergreen reason companies outsource is to save cost. When employees use their own space, equipment’s and utilities to complete a task for a company on outsourcing basis, the company saves huge costs on those facilities. One of the aspects that outsourcing helps a company to save huge cost is in the area of overhead costs.

Also, a company gains competitive advantage by using outsourcing to accomplish tasks faster.

Daven Michaels is a New York Times Best Selling Author and CEO of premiere global outsourcing company, 123Employee. The company employs hundreds of young bright individuals on three continents. His International event, Beyond Marketing Live! Inspires entrepreneurs to build & grow their business with revolutionary new theories and systems allowing them to design the business and personal lifestyle of their dreams.

If you outsource tasks to independent contractors, they would usually work remotely to get the task done. Remote working is also becoming fashionable in recent times. These days, companies allow their employees to alternate remote working with working conventionally in the office.

Indeed, remote working provides juicy benefits to companies and businesses. Those benefits include cutting back overhead costs and increased sources of talents. Keep reading to learn the best way to train remote employees.

Tip #1: Gather Them in a Conventional Office

If possible, you should bring your remote workers together in a conventional office for the training. Sometimes this may not be possible because of the locations of these workers. But, if most of them live close by, physical training is a highly effective approach.

Tip #2: Adopt Conference Calls Strategy

Setting up a conference call can also be an effective way to train remote workers, especially when the person or persons are located far away. In fact, a remote employee may be located in an offshore destination.  In this case, setting up video conferences or using phone calls can be great way to train an employee one-on-one. It’s also an effective way to make essential details of the job clearer. You should chat with the employee on a weekly basis to monitor the result of the training.

If your remote workers are carrying out marketing task for your business or involved in strategy mapping, video conference calls are more suitable training approach. It enables you to freely talk about ideas and plans with the workers.

However, you should consider time zone factor, so that you can choose a convenient time for both parties if you are in different countries. Zoom, Slack, and Skype are great video conferencing software to choose from.

Tip #3: Adopt Instant Messaging Tools

The instant messaging tools allow for quick chats to answer questions and resolve issues. Instant messaging can be a great tool when a company requires collaboration, or if the employees need to embark on frequent communication. In this case, employees can communicate and talk in real time.

So, in the course of training, remote hires can get across to you in real time via the instant messaging platform. They will also receive answers in real time. This tool is also helpful when you need to give them feedback on a project.  Again, you can choose from great services (also free) such as Google+ Hangouts, Skype, Slack and Spark. However, you need to know when this tool is most suitable and when it is not.

Finally, you should consider using emails when the remote worker lives in a different country and operates a different time zone. It may be more effective to send links, training materials, notes and attachments via emails.

Daven Michaels is a New York Times Best Selling Author and CEO of premiere global outsourcing company, 123Employee. The company employs hundreds of young bright individuals on three continents. His International event, Beyond Marketing Live! Inspires entrepreneurs to build & grow their business with revolutionary new theories and systems allowing them to design the business and personal lifestyle of their dreams.