Many people operating their businesses assume that growth only comes from external expansion. As such, emphasis is placed on growing market share, getting more customers, and boosting revenue. However, there isn’t any company out there that couldn’t benefit from some kind of internal development. Knowing how to gain complete visibility into your business is a must in order to accomplish this.
5 Ways You Can Get More Visibility Into Your Business
There are certainly many ways to get more visibility into your business, but these five are a great place to start:
- Discover How Valuable Accounts Are: Strategic thinking and whitespace analysis let you dig deep into revenue reports and find new opportunities already lurking in your various company teams and departments.
- Maintain Total Visibility From the Lead All the Way to the Cash: You need to implement insights and visibility into every part of the customer lifecycle. That will cover top lead sources, personal rep performance, orders, quotes, and revenue.
- Focus on the Best Lead Sources: Make sure you track all of your incoming leads. Identify the best sources so you can make moves that optimize the pipeline around them for maximum revenue.
- Track Territory Performance: You can track the health of any part of your business easily and with precision. That can be done by department or even by region. Data-driven choices help you align things for effective implementation.
- Know Your Ideal Consumer: Utilize your company data to complete the profile of an ideal customer so your team can address that market segment through leads, contact, and special accounts.
Automate Your Professional Services
If visibility into your business is important to you, then professional services automation is certainly something to consider for multiple reasons:
- Forecasting: Get an idea of upcoming billings and revenue to identify likely expenses and opportunities you should be flexible about.
- Resource Management: This lets you connect projects and people across multiple teams throughout your organization for optimal scheduling and deployment.
- Project Financials: Access relevant financials every time you need them, from billing and budgets to revenue and rate realization.
- Project Management: Keep your budgets in their lane, inform all stakeholders of everything that they need to know, and maintain projects on track for premium collaboration.
- Time/Expenses: When service teams can submit their time and expenses using any device, data is input faster, with more accuracy, and more often.
- Sales Engagement: Perfect the handoff between sales and service with software that lets different teams work seamlessly throughout the pipeline.
Working On Your Business
Forbes points out that while everyone in your business works on it, it might be that only you can work on it. There are tips to make this work better in the long run:
- Always know whose job you are doing at the moment.
- Balance your time managing, working, and marketing.
- Be accountable to somebody else.
- Block time out specifically for strategic analysis and thinking.
- Consider your business your best client so you never forget to focus on it once a week or more.
- Delegating things to employees empowers them and frees up your time.
- Ease into things and find the optimal tactical-strategic balance over time.
- Make sure every system is effective first so others can take over for you.
- Schedule your strategic updates on a calendar to keep momentum.
- Step out of the office so you can get fresh perspectives on things.
A lot of your time might be spent working for or in your business keeping the daily operations moving smoothly. However, you also need to spend time working on your business. Much of that might happen outside of the business in terms of looking for new clients to profit from, fresh talent to recruit, and innovations to put into play. However, you also need to set aside time to look inside your business, and getting total visibility into everything brings both problems and opportunities to light.