Innovative Ideas for Business Growth

As a business owner, one of its major roles is to constantly find ways to innovate. Whether you are running a flat organization or with managers, you or someone should always have the drive to stimulate business growth.

I have some list of ideas which is being done by our organization:

• Sales
• • Sales Automation – implementing a CRM system drives growth in a company because you\’ll be able to access metrics real-time and focus on metrics that matter most.
  • Hire a sales trainer – Sales teams differ from another sales team because of products they sell and environment. It is important to have a regular sales trainer to constantly teach sales techniques to bring in more sales.
  • Recruit a specific profile – A young, tech-savvy profile best suit companies who sell IT products while companies who sell mechanical seals should hire competent mechanical engineers to sell better.
• Marketing
• • Establish your Why, How and What? – rethink of why your company exists, establish how you serve your purpose and then what products you sell. You can now define your one-liner tagline once you have answered the three items in that order.
  • Blog – Establish a blog, talk about your industry, products and contribute content to your community.
  • Build a community – Serve a particular group in your market space. In our case, we want to serve Filipino programmers and aspiring entrepreneurs.
• Finance
• • Project cash flow Cash is king. It\’s always good to sleep at night if you know that your company will survive in the next coming years.
  • Raise funds from investors – present your growth idea, and justify the need for cash by presenting the forecast.
  • Apply for loans and establish a debt payment plan . – this should align based on the combination of projection and investment funding.
  • Establish control and automate the process – practice the standard way of having a sales forecast, annual budget, budget review and budget control using a good finance software tool.
• HR
• • Try LinkedIn – Paid job boards are slowly dying at least in our country. With LinkedIn, you\’ll be able to find people with unique skills and talents. It\’s always a good practice to hire employed people because if they join your organization, their motivation is not solely to survive.
  • Employee engagement, surveys – Do not underestimate the value of consistent feedback system from employees. Knowing their satisfaction at work and solving their individual issues are a good way to make them stay and happy at work.
  • Consistent KPI reviews – We do weekly regular KPI updates. We make sure those KPI are accounted for a more objective performance review and appraisal.
• Operations
• • Try Agile – iterative shipment and progress principle is one of the most important lessons I learned in operations. This doesn\’t only apply to software development but other industries as well.
  • Training – train people not only in hard and technical skills but also in soft skills. Try to have a weekly soft skills training in your organization.
• Product development
• • Establish a process of involving employees to generate ideas. – this is a good one and my most favorite thing. At Hilsoft, we have what we call Hilsoft Labs and the ultimate objective is to continuously generate ideas, develop quickly and test the market.