How to Build an Effective and Solid Business Strategy for 2021!

For most businesses, 2020 has, undoubtedly, been a year they would want to write off from their history. As some things are meant to be forgotten, and things should move on, businesses must also look for the opportunities 2021 and upcoming years hold. Prospects will keep coming and going, but having a defined business strategy can help a company make the most of these opportunities.

Read more: Business Process Management Strategy for your Small Business 

If you don’t have any business development strategies or are looking for suggestions, you can consider the following recommendations.

Ten ways to form an ideal business strategy

NOTE: Not always, but sometimes implementing specific strategies may require you to take advantage of certain productivity tools, centralized IT Management applications, private IT infrastructure, etc. For any such tools and applications, you can always count on InfinCE. Using this tool, you can get desired business management software to improve business processes, achieve cost efficiencies and experience the utmost data security. What makes InfinCE the first choice among businesses is its unbeatable pricing, including a 30-day free trial.

Read more: How Successful Leaders Engage Employees Using Modern Business Communication Tools like InfinCE 

A company can incorporate the following suggestions to enhance its growth and competency and improve its business level strategy.

1. Have a realistic vision

In a business world, having a vision may seem cliché, but it is, in fact, an essential thing which a business must be precise, clear, and realistic about. As vision is a peek into the future, it must comprise aspirations related to the organization you want to develop and ascertain what success implies in various business terms like markets, volumes, customers, etc.

2. Be unique to have an edge

One of the most critical business strategies is to choose the right tools and techniques that can help you identify how your company can deliver unique value to its customers. In most divisions of the economy, businesses are struggling in the crowd of similarity. When you have a well-planned business strategy, you can stay on top of the competition through its pricing model, delivery system, service offering, and more.

3. Be clear about your targets

Poor targeting is one of the major barriers to the growth of a business. Lack of clarity in targets makes a company suffer from imprecise messaging, which in turn misaligns sales and marketing. Therefore, make sure to be clear about your targets so that your business can focus better on resources and device an integrated sale and marketing approach, where marketing enables sales productivity. With clear targets, you can execute sales and marketing plans more effectively.

4. Focus on systematic growth

Only through systematic and streamlined growth can a company invest in talent, technology, and new tools. To achieve this growth, you need a business level strategy. A robust business development strategy allows your business to grow in the required dimensions.

Once your company is precise on this aspect, it will be easier to anticipate how much you can afford in terms of capital expenditure, overhead expenses, resource management, etc.

5. Decisions must be fact-based

Most executives complain about a lack of adequate data when planning or executing a business development strategy. Having access to fact-based data or information (through public records, social media trends, geographical location, etc.) allows a business to quickly quantify the value of various segments served, thus easing the decision making for multiple operations.

6. Have a balanced short & long term planning

While some companies may prefer to have short term planning to achieve their objective, others may choose long term planning as a better way to achieve it. Instead of choosing one or the other, it is advisable to have a balanced mix of short-term and long-term planning. Having such a balance allows companies to keep the team and the strategies aligned with the objectives through long term planning.

7. Agility is Necessity

Companies should always be focused on long term scenarios; however, they should be responsive as well. For example, one of the critical components in forming a business strategy should be anticipating market trends. Companies should evaluate long-term market trends and follow procedures based on this information by holding strategy review meetings at regular intervals.

8. Bring transparency

As companies are looking to hire more millennial employees in their team, it has led to agility and enhanced transparency in operations. Such transparency in the various departments and operations has brought employees together, easing the endeavors to meet the company’s objectives significantly.

9. Invest time in pre-planning

You would want your managers to welcome the business development strategies that you frame without any hesitations. It would be better to do proper research and gather important information ahead of your strategic planning. When you have a well-thought plan beforehand, it can help you gain greater control over your choices, resulting in a positive outcome.

10. Make your strategies flexible

Every strategy you form for your business should be amendable. This characteristic comes useful when you wish to make changes to them due to unexpected changes in the business trend, customer’s preferences, or results being different from what you expected. Ensure that you always have a Plan B for the things that don’t go accordingly with your Plan A. This way, you might achieve an increased success rate in implementing your strategies and successfully meeting the organization’s objectives. 

To sum up!

To conclude, a company should incorporate a business strategy to bring together all their employees working towards the set target while keeping things transparent at all levels. A company must ensure that its business strategies are swift, well-planned, and fact-based, supported by a backup plan if things don’t go as expected.

Read more: 5 Features of InfinCE that will Transform The Way You Work 

If, at any level, your business development strategy requires the help of IT management, private IT infrastructure, cloud migration and data management, custom dashboards, and collaboration or productivity tools, reach out to InfinCE. Here, industry-trained professionals devise the best business strategy for your organization.

Why automation is key to boosting small business productivity?

Most often, we realize the potential of technologies like automation when a critical situation arises. The impact of COVID-19 has forced organizations around the world to transit to a work-from-home productivity model, and many of us are able to execute remote work successfully due to automation. In this post, we’ll explore how automation in small business improves productivity and the different areas where companies can implement automation.

Related Reading: Quickly Transit to Remote Working with InfinCE

From small tasks such as electronic document signature to intelligent data processing, automation in small business offers limitless possibilities to improve productivity in the small business environment. It is important for decision-makers to invest in the right areas. 

If you are a small business owner looking to turn your workforce more productive through automation this year, then here are 4 areas you need to look at:

1. Automating Sales Workflows

Your sales team often creates the biggest customer impact zone in your business and hence is a worthy contender for incorporating automation in its daily routine. So, what are the sales processes that can be automated within a small business? 

Some examples include assigning associates for leads, setting automated response channels for incoming leads such as emails, IVR based tele-calling or any other contact channels like social media. Once a lead is assigned to an associate for nurturing and conversion, then the next area where automation can kick in is for reminders and follow-ups. Activities involved in deal nurturing and closure can be automated to make the lives of sales folks easier and ultimately improve the productivity of the whole team.

2. Project Management

Today’s workforce demands increasing flexibility in their work and may avail benefits such as remote work. When there are multiple people working on a single customer project or task, and if there are remote resources involved, then project management becomes a challenging endeavor if everything is to be manually handled by managers using spreadsheets, IM and email conversations. This is the right area to bring in automation using state of the art project management platforms. 

Related Reading: 5 Ways A Project Management Tool Can Help Your Business Grow

By enabling automated monitoring of project schedules, individual work progress, and dependency metrics for collaborative tasks, it becomes easier for managers to have a grip on project timelines and ensure that everyone is at the same pace transparently.

3. Procurement and Logistics Processing

There are several routine tasks within procurement departments in a small business that takes up too much time and effort if done manually. A good example would be invoice processing once supplies are obtained. As your business grows, these routine jobs would incur a significantly high volume of effort and can lead to highly inefficient business outcomes due to errors in manual processing. This is where bringing automation in small businesses can be a game-changer. You not only eliminate errors but also improve the speed of processing and completing redundant tasks. 

Approval workflows, scheduling, tracking inventory and vendor notifications are some of the key areas in procurement where automation in small business can vastly change the existing operational landscape.

4. HR and Payroll

Typical human resources work schedule has components that are grossly manual effort intense like payroll processing, profile and resume screening for recruitment, appraisal and performance tracking, rewards and feedback collection, and much more. Automation in any or all these areas will help the HR personnel to be more pro-active in managing employee relations while technology takes care of the manual effort in enabling the same. Ensuring that your employees are engaged is a fundamental goal that needs to be achieved for overall business success and making sure your HR team is empowered to do that via automation is hence a key focus area.

Related Reading: Tips For SMBs To Boost Growth With Increased Employee Engagement

Automation in small business is one of the key pillars for propelling companies into the next level for the coming years. As more disruptive business and market conditions continue to show its face every year, it is important for small businesses to remain competitive and allot enough core business skilled employees to handle newer challenges. By utilizing enterprise platforms like InfinCE, you can enable seamless automation across your key business units and leverage human manpower for more decisive operations. Get in touch with us to know how you can leverage the automation capabilities of InfinCE to create the next level of success for your business.