Chances are that since 2020, your work has had to continually pivot to adjust to whatever challenge was coming next. But now, we can all collectively aim for more than staying afloat or prepared: in 2022, it’s time to reassess those issues that prevent productivity in the workplace – whether that’s a company you work for or your own small business – and end up costing more time and money than you’d care to think about.
With that in mind, here are four ways to pick up the slack, using streamlined tech and smart tools that free up time and space to focus on true innovation.
#1 Make Marketing Easy
When it comes to marketing your small business, you don’t want to be stuck in the weeds. Teams should be focusing on the bigger picture and bold, exciting moves to reach customers. Unfortunately, a significant part of the job can involve menial (but important) email programming and advertising.
Enter marketing automation: tools like Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud allow you to streamline reaching a customer or client. By gathering and presenting data on them — say, a user looking through your website — automation can then be used to establish enough content for a prolonged campaign specific to them, over personalised emails or online ads, something any one team could never achieve.
With all this data, in-built analytics and a system to track customer relationships across platforms and purchases, it can help you work out what the best ways to connect with people are: you can even see the cost per opportunity and the ROI of your marketing efforts, which previously would have been guestimations at best.
#2 Keep Collaboration Simple
Too often, workplaces are a bit of a mess of communication — a mix of emails, office meetings, dodgy Zooms and Slack messages.
Turns out, you’re probably underusing that last tool. While more and more workplaces embrace Slack as their go-to for day-to-day internal conversations and quick messages, the platform can do a lot more.
External partners or clients can also be added to select Slack channels with relative ease, using Slack Connect, removing the need for cumbersome and impersonal email chains. Instead, clients feel connected and listened to, as it’s easy to share files, notes and messages in-app, as well as take video calls. Suddenly, everything’s so much quicker: after all, we all know how easy it is to let an email sit for longer than it should.
#3 Process This
“This is just how it’s always been done” isn’t cutting it anymore. Salesforce’s AppExchange has a whole bunch of downloadable apps that automate any kind of industry-specific issue or process, like manually entering repetitive text fields, or creating a customer-service bot that’s just right. There’s no need to approach a custom designer or build your own complicated system.
#4 Embrace AI
Artificial Intelligence isn’t as intimidating as we make it seem: Salesforce’s Service Cloud lets you make chatbots for your sales site without worrying about coding. Instead of going through the deep and dark world of UX, create a bot in no time, and use the analytics to assess where any gaps may be in servicing customers.
Easy.
If you want to get more insight into small business trends, the Small and Medium Business Trends Report is your best place to start.