| Want to know how to put more of your revenue in your pocket
AND free up time to do the important things for your business?
All business owners can save time and money if they properly
leverage the Web through Web services. What I am referring to
is replacing recurring tasks that take employee time to accomplish
with web-based services that do it automatically. |
|
|
|
|
| If
you are a small business owner, you probably do many day-to-day
tasks that take up a lot of your valuable time. Your time is
better spent doing the things you’re in business for than regularly
completing every little business administration chore. A common
complaint I hear among small business owners is that they spend
too much of their time on “business” issues like accounting
or mailings instead of the “fun stuff” that their expertise
is in. |
|
|
|
|
| Now
you can have it both ways, thanks to the Web and the strength
of Web services. The idea is that if you shift your time or
employee time away from tasks that can be accomplished via the
Web, the newly saved time can be spent in more productive and
lucrative ways. |
|
|
|
|
| I
can give numerous examples of Web services for any industry,
but for the sake of brevity, I will offer a few that will hopefully
stimulate your own creativity. |
|
|
|
|
| 1)
Pricing |
|
|
|
|
|
| Do
you have prices on your Web site that need to get updated regularly?
If you have many products, and a price list that changes sometimes,
it may save employee time by putting all the prices in a database
(if they aren’t already) and making your Web site dynamically
database driven to pull the pricing out of the database in real-time
so the pricing on your site is always current. |
|
|
|
|
| This
saves time in a number of ways. First, if a particular price
is listed in a number of areas on your site, than you have to
pay someone to make the update in each place every time the
price is changed, or spend your time doing this. Maybe your
pricing stays the same most of the time, but what about when
you run specials and discounts? |
|
|
|
|
| Another
way this helps is that your entire company can now refer to
the Web to get the most updated pricing. Let’s say you run a
special and decrease the price of a product. Do you contact
all your sales people and tell them about the discount? Do you
print out a copy of the updated price list and send it to everyone
who deals with customers? By making this a Web service, you
would simply change one entry in your database and refer everyone
to the Web to get the current price. Any company information
that regularly changes and you spend time disseminating ought
to be automated using the Web. |
|
|
|
|
| 2)
Sales & Marketing Web Services |
|
| Let’s
say a typical sale, whether it’s done by you or your salespeople,
takes fifteen minutes to close (when speaking to an interested
or ‘hot’ lead). Let’s also say that half of the fifteen minutes
is spent explaining what your product or service is or how it
can help improve their lives. You find that you repeat the same
basic selling points over and over again. What if you could
create a Flash presentation that does this for you? The presentation
could be loaded on your Web site and linked on your home page.
You could refer people to this presentation and cut your sales
pitch in half. |
| You
don’t even necessarily need to be so sophisticated. Simple html,
images, and good writing could do this job as well. Software
companies can really benefit from this tactic. Screen shots
of their software, with descriptions of how their product benefits
the customer, put together in an attractive presentation can
act like a sales person who never sleeps or takes a break. |
|
|
|
|
| 3)
Required Customer Information |
|
| Do
you or your employees spend time asking each new client their
particular specifications for a job? Is there a set of questions
you ask every customer in order to fulfill their request and
complete the project? Consider creating an html form that asks
these questions, have the answers emailed directly to your inbox,
and place the form on your Web site. A catering company may
have a standard set of questions they ask a bride and groom
that could be automated and put on the caterer’s Web site. This
could save the caterers valuable time, freeing them up to party
plan and cook, which is probably why they got in the business
in the first place. |
|
|
|
|
| 4)
Partnering |
|
|
| Do
you have business partners? Do you waste a lot of time sending
out mail to each partner when you have something to communicate?
Do you want to entice other businesses to partner with you but
don’t have a good incentive? Creating a simple password protected
area of your Web site that only current partners can access
may be the answer. |
|
| |
|
|
