As your business grows, it’s important to standardize your processes to reduce errors and save resources. Otherwise, you can end up with too many steps and people involved where they shouldn’t be.
With the right processes, you can ensure the same level of quality and efficiency as you scale. But which ones should you focus on? Small businesses generally have five types of business processes covering internal and customer-facing aspects of a business.
Types of Business Processes Small Businesses’ Should Prioritize
1. Sales
The sales process refers to the series of steps a business follows to turn a prospect into a customer. This is where you’ll get the most direct engagement with your target customers. That said, your sales team members shouldn’t each be doing things their own way. This won’t only complicate your internal operations, but your customer relationships will also be affected.
You should have a standardized sales process informed by careful research, authentic communication, and a strategic approach to closing a sale. With a standardized process, your team can convert leads more efficiently. This strategy should include how quickly and frequently they should follow up, specific ways to pitch your products, and how to resolve objections.
While the process may be similar for most sales teams, standardizing each step tailored to your team will make your workflow more efficient. Doing so will also help you detect which parts of the sales process results in low returns through performance metrics.
2. Customer Service
When people pay for your product or service, they expect you to provide the right solutions at the right time. Everyone representing your business should follow a unified process for dealing with customer complaints and answering questions. Be sure to address all steps of customer service.
- Contact: Every customer service process begins with a customer approaching you for a solution. Make sure your business is accessible by keeping your lines open.
- Information Gathering: While it may be a seemingly simple step, actively listening to a customer’s pain points gives you better insight into the problem and strengthens the customer relationship.
- Strategy Formation: With all the necessary information, you can formulate the appropriate solution.
- Resolution: This step includes the actual process of solving the problem while also ensuring the customer experience is positive.
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3. Accounting and Finance
Standardized business processes become all the more crucial when dealing with many numbers and complex data. Your finances should be the last thing you want to do on the fly. Consider tax deadlines, invoices, cash flow statements, and other transactions. Plus, having organized databases will help you make more accurate decisions when allocating resources.
Some ways you can improve your financial processes are:
- Unifying all finance processes in one software system
- Integrating team members into the processes
- Streamlining interdepartmental collaboration
- Setting regular schedules and deadlines for invoices and payments
4. Human Resource Management
Despite having a small company size, it’s worth investing in your human resource management. After all, there’s a lot more to HR than hiring new people. As you scale your business, your work demands will inevitably grow with it. It typically involves everything, from recruiting to providing employee benefits and security.
- Recruitment: As the first step of the HRM process, you must create strategies to attract eligible candidates. You can do it through websites, articles, newspapers, word of mouth, and other modes.
- Selection: For this step, you must set an eligibility criterion that includes the skills, education, attitude, and experiences a candidate must possess to fill the position.
- Training and Development: While the chosen candidate has the necessary skills for the role, fostering a space for learning new skills and sharpening existing ones is essential.
- Worker Protection: As their employer, it’s your responsibility to ensure that your employees are safe in the workplace and compliant with legal requirements.
Modern Outsourcing with Magic
Small businesses typically lack the resources to carry out the necessary business processes. Magic can offer a cost-effective solution to your current business needs. By outsourcing services to Magic, you can ensure that each of your business processes is running smoothly.
Below are some of the tasks our VAs can do to achieve that:
- Manage your CRM database
- Assist in processing refunds for seamless customer service
- Manage your team’s calendar and organize virtual meetings
- Compile and analyze customer data
- Perform basic bookkeeping
- Do positive scripting for your customer service team
You won’t have to worry about losing more of your time as we’ll take care of the hiring and recruiting for you. Book a call to get started.
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