Set Up Your Back Office For Business Success
Ever wonder how the big guys get big? Of course there are many things that factor into the equation, but one of the greatest contributing factors is their level of organization.Being organized makes you more productive and effective in your business. It allows you to use information in ways you may not have thought of before. But you can’t use the information if you can’t find it on your desk, in your car, or on your computer.You must get organized in order to grow your business, bring on interns, partner with a Virtual Assistant, and hire staff. How can anyone complete a task you assign if they can’t find the information or if you can’t find the information? Being organized is not about being neat: it’s about being successful.One element that is true for any successful business of any size is being organized in the back office. Big businesses get big by running like a well oiled machine, and if you want your company to grow you need to oil it. If you’re not organized – and I mean more than just having your filing cabinets neat and tidy – you are missing out on a huge opportunity and unknowingly slowing your business growth.Let’s take a look at some questions on this topic…Sue from San Antonio asks:I hear a lot about organizing my back office. I have filing cabinets, my desk is clean and I work with a bookkeeper. What am I missing?This is a great question that many business owners need to ask themselves. There are many ways to organize the information your business produces. No one way is right for everyone so you need to find the solutions that fit your business’ needs. That being said, let’s look at additional ways to get organized.Sue mentioned her filing cabinets, and it is very important to have hard copies of certain paperwork. It’s also great to have a system to get that paperwork filed in a way that you can find what you are looking for… fast!But if you are only using a filing cabinet you are missing out on great opportunities available in this virtual age to organize your business and yourself. My question for Sue is what type of CRM (client relationship management) system are you utilizing? How are you maximizing your organization of information? We will talk more about this but first I want to get to this question…From Lea in Chicago:Kate, I am so unorganized. I just don’t know where to start. I have never been an organized person; I am more of a creative type. Things are really getting out of control – please help.Lea, I can completely appreciate where you’re coming from! I am a thought person also, and I can understand WHY it is important to organize information. I truly did not get the HOW to organize it.The first thing I did was hire some help in this area. First was an organization consultant who came to my home office to get things physically organized, then I hired the most hyper, anal organized VA I could find. The great thing about her is she is open in sharing info in a way that my disorganized mind could comprehend – it made sense and now I am organizing every bit of info I can!Lea, to get to the nuts and bolts of what I did I started with Calendars. I love my online calendar. It allows me to have numerous calendars all in one central location and I get email or pop up reminders at specific intervals of my choice. This allows me to stay on top of my schedule, my appointments, and my family obligations all in one place. I can even share it with my VA, husband or business partner – whomever I wish. We can even have group calendars which allow all the team members to enter their schedules so we know what is going on in different departments. It’s amazing how powerful this ability is – and it’s free!Another critical tool in any organizational box is the DATABASE. I am not a techie and I don’t want to be. I also don’t have patience for difficult to use tools so I was thrilled to discover with the help of my hyper organized VA a web based database service. Here is why I think this tool is crucial:You need to collect information about your clients, customers, prospects, past customers, where customers come from (web, ad, referral), how long has someone been a customer, how many times have they purchased, what do they purchase, what item or service is your top seller, worst seller, etc. We have and collect a lot of information but it does not help us maximize our efforts in growing our business unless that information is easy to access and easy to manipulate. A good database allows you both.I actually use a database service that makes it easy to implement the information I am organizing via the database to be part of my CRM. It allows me to keep a file on each client, update as needed and move that information into the appropriate database if need be.Other things I love about the service I use is I can email my contacts, print mailing labels, filter and print any information I need (names, phone numbers, and time zones say). Plus, it allows me to customize my contact forms for my website, landing pages, squeeze pages, etc., and all the services are unlimited for only $10 a month.Did I mention it will generate the HTML code for you to cut and paste onto you site – that’s right! It’s amazing software at an incredible price and it really is that easy to use.The other way to play like the big boys is in your phone service. It’s no longer incredibly expensive to have an 800 #, and you can choose an 800 # service provider that suits your business needs. If you need an 800 # to service customer care calls, FAQs or take orders, an inbound service might be a good fit for you and many services start at $30 a month.If an 800 # with prompts and messages will serve your business better good services start at $10 a month.All services have set up fees and vanity number fees, but most are reasonable. Some tips when setting up these services…If you are recording the voice mail greeting(s), write out your message prior to recording. Make sure you are in a quite place and on a good quality phone. Be sure to listen to your message since this is the first impression many potential customers will have of you.If you hire an inbound call service be sure to include every question possible; it’s better for them to have too much info to choose from than too little. Take the time to think through how you want an inbound call to go and write out the call.Since we’re talking about the phone, let’s not forget the power of Follow up calls and customer service calls. Again, you need to have this information organized so you know who you have called so you don’t double call some clients and miss other clients completely. It’s also important to include Time Zones with phone number info – if you are on the east coast you don’t want to call a potential client at 7AM. Having this information organized is crucial to the success of growing your business.Email campaigns are another great opportunity to grow your business and stay in touch with your customers. However, if you’re so disorganized you have e-mail addresses stored in other e-mail messages, in files, on scraps of paper or sticky notes, on business cards, on the back of someone else’s business card, etc., you’re e-mail campaigns will never be successful. How can you effectively get the information into one place? There are several options but you want the info at the very least into an email campaign service – many start out free for under 50 contacts. They are easy to use, you can track who opens the email, how many times they open it, what links they clicked on, how many times did they click on a link, etc.. In addition, you can create sub-lists, create different lists, create different campaigns with different business logos, etc. If you’re like me and have more than one business going at a time, having access to multiple lists within your main database of e-mail addresses is a good thing.As your business grows it becomes all too clear why having all this information organized is critical to your business success. I can assure you it is better to get it organized when it is only 40 people instead of 4,000 people.What if you’ve been in business for a number of years and have 4,000 contacts – what do you do then? You’ve got a couple options:1.Moving forward implement a database service to create contact lists that allow you to filter information to make it more usable.2.Little by little go back and enter your past contacts into said database to make all your years of effort more useful moving forward.3.Send out a contact form you created in the database program in a email campaign to all your contacts, asking them to update their info and make fields required. Most people will do as you ask them to.Presto! Instant database with most of your current customer info in a format that will help you understand what your customer wants, what motivates them to purchase, how often they purchase and what mode of communication they prefer – it all depends on the questions you ask.Being organized makes you more productive and effective in your business. It allows you to use information in ways you may not have thought of before. Remember, can’t use the information if you can’t find the information!
