e-opening our business doors is a wonderful, positive, step forward towards a better future.
Your workforce may be returning from remote work or coming back from furlough. Their future is also looking brighter, plus, returning to work may alleviate the stay at home stress experienced by some of your employees. This is the perfect time to introduce new tools to help increase your bottom line. This methodology is called ”Job Crafting*” and it is an incredibly valuable way to take proactive steps to increase positive energy and vibe in your jobs and at your workplace. (Please hit the link below to understand this concept more fully if you want to learn the science behind this methodology).
Given the fact that the last 2 months of lockdown has pretty much blown part most company’s 2020 annual business plan, your old goals will most likely need updating. In addition, you may feel they are unreachable. However, as Confucius once said, “When it is obvious that the goals cannot be reached, don’t adjust the goals, adjust the action steps.” Your action steps should stay focused on connecting with your customers as well as making it easier for your teams to stay connected.
Your action steps should not only focus on connecting your teams and customers, but these action steps should also focus on analyzing your marketing and sales campaigns, staying on top of industry news, and developing new workflows to better manage your businesses processes. This is also a great time to introduce new tools to help get the phones ringing, and customers emailing you! Below are five free tools to help your team to jump back in the game, and get those sales going up!
Five free tools to get the phones ringing and the emails dinging:
1. Google Alerts
Change is inevitable, but staying ahead of change is the key to success. Business news from your industry is easy to come by with a simple alert. Log on your Google account, and search for “alert.” You can set up alerts for keywords about your business. Google will send you an alert to your email when your alert is activated.
Alerts help you to become an industry “insider” with all the latest news delivered directly to your email. As you arm yourself up with this news, share it, communicate about this news on blogs, call your customers with breaking news alerts etc and your customers will engage back with you in a way that should help generate some further business outcomes.
https://www.google.com/alerts
2. Google Analytics
Your website is a valuable tool, and to get the most out of it you need to know how your customers use it. Google Analytics shows you where your customers come from, and what they do while they are on your site. Plus, it can improve the performance of your website, and possibly increase conversions.
Insights on web traffic include multiple types of reporting, including why you may experience a high bounce rate. It can also show you areas of popularity or areas that are unclear. Additionally, it also has a feature that shows you what types of information that your customers are searching for.
It is easy to install on your website and very easy to customize your reporting. Honestly, if you are not using it yet, you should be. It’s a no brainer.
https://analytics.google.com/analytics/web/provision/#/provision
3. Phone tracking
Print and digital ads are all part of your marketing campaigns and should have a strong call to action (CTA). If your CTA includes a phone number, using a phone tracking system can show you which marketing campaigns are worth investing in more. High-quality leads may come from specific campaigns, and you can invest in those winning strategies to generate even more business going forward.
Archonic offers a free basic tracking tool that includes basic call analytics, data retention, and international or local phone numbers. There is no hardware to install, it is just a simple sign up on their website. In addition, you can upgrade to record calls, generate email logs of calls, and even integrate the data in your Google Analytics or AdWords account.
https://www.archonic.com/
4. Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Good CRM is not just improving customer service, but an entire business strategy. By measuring how effective your communication is, you can pinpoint the best way to connect with your customers. Although there are many CRM tools out there, I prefer Zoho. You can interact with customers across multiple channels, telephone, email, live chat, social meetings while tracking every single interaction.
The Zoho CRM has a user-friendly interface, and you can customize modules, automation, and even add social media features. It integrates smoothly with Facebook, and Twitter as well. Developing a specific workflow will help your team manage leads and become their most productive and successful!
https://www.zoho.com/crm/
5. Operations / Communication
Great communication makes great teamwork. Your day-to-day operations depend on it. Slack is a professional messaging service that creates private or public channels. Every message is searchable and indexable, in addition to choosing which messages to prioritize. It puts all your communication in one place! Did I mention it also does video and voice calls?
Teams can organize conversations by topic, or team, or however they would like into customized channels. Within the channels your team creates, they can file share and those files can be kept in one place. Slack has an app directory of over 2000 applications and it integrates with other tools mentioned above such as Google Analytics, Zoho CRM, and PhoneWagon.
https://slack.com/
Bringing it all together,
Facilitating positive emotion in your workplace can be as easy as helping your employees craft the workplace they love with great new technologies. With these five free tools mentioned above, you can manage workflow, increase communication, connect with your customers and your teams, analyzing your marketing strategies plus stay on top of industry news. These great five free digital tools will positively encourage your team, and help them focus where they need it the most all the while, helping your team to love the place where they work while driving sales higher!
Until Next Time,
Your Staffing Partner, Darrin Rohr- President, CEO and Chief Servant
Darrin Rohr
Current owner of HH Staffing and Former Chief HR Officer for several successful Multinational Fortune 500 Companies. Brings fresh perspective from decades of experiences creating Great Workplace Cultures by building high performance teams while leading and managing people from all different backgrounds. HH Staffing is headquartered in Sarasota, Florida and is uniquely positioned to serve both local and national clients.
*https://positivepsychology.com/job-crafting/
