Achieve More Work-Life Balance in Your Business for 2017

2017 has arrived, which means many people around the world will have started their New Year’s resolutions. You might already have some of your own, but what about your business?

It’s good to go into the New Year with a clear set of goals for the 12 months ahead, which is why we’ve decided to share some B2B New Year’s Resolutions you can implement this January.

First off, we’re looking at work-life balance. Running a business isn’t easy, which means there’s always a risk of losing perspective and maybe even burning out. Investing in an all-in-one solution for your business is a great way to operate more efficiently and make sure you have enough time for work and play. Keep reading to learn how an all-in-one solution can restore your work-life balance.

1. Say Goodbye to Spreadsheets

If your business depends on manually updating spreadsheets then you’re wasting valuable time you could dedicate to new business and expanding into other markets. Managing your inventory and orders is so much easier when you’ve got software doing some of the heavy lifting.

By centralising your inventory management, you can get a real-time view of all your sales channels and warehouses, synchronise pricing and promotions, automate new purchase orders and prevent stock-outs when it matters most.

It’s not just inventory management either, what about orders? If you’re selling in different channels (which we strongly recommend), then being able to manage all of your orders from a single screen is invaluable. That includes the follow-up customer service and any related marketing you might have planned. Life gets even better when you realise you can do all of that from your smartphone.

2. Streamline Your Sales and Marketing

Why use four different pieces of marketing software when all you need is one?

Being able to integrate your favourite marketing solutions into a central hub makes it easier to execute your email marketing, social and SEO campaigns across different channels. When someone shows an interest, all you have to do is pass them along to your sales team using a built-in CRM.

Good sales and marketing is about making incremental changes that deliver more leads, more conversions, and ultimately, more sales. Managing everything from a single CRM allows you to make these changes and then get instant feedback about how your campaigns are performing.

The alternative is trying to connect a range of different software, transfer data from one to another and build your own reports from scratch using Excel or yet another standalone solution. That makes the task of working out clickthroughs, conversions, sales and ROI much more time consuming.

3. Build a More Robust Online Presence

Most of the activities we’ve mentioned already happen on the back end of your business. So, while you’re trying to do all of that, you also need to make sure customers can find your business online.

That means having a website, making sure it’s optimised for mobile, integrating with different payment providers and staying in touch with your customers on social media. Add those tasks to the day-to-day running of your business and it’s easy to see how things can spiral out of control.

Using an all-in-one ecommerce solution makes it easier to customise your website, offer mobile-responsive content, sell in different marketplaces and talk to your customers on social media.

4. Always Be One Step Ahead With Big Data

• Why make an educated guess when you could look at historical sales data?
• Why end the year with excess stock when you can plan ahead?
• Why target everyone when you can target only potential customers?

Trying to guess how demand for your products or services will change over time is nearly impossible when you’re relying on gut instinct alone. But when you’ve got big data on your side, you can see which products where most popular and when, or which lines need to be discontinued. You can use past sales data to determine how big your next stock order for the holiday season will be, or what items you need to discount in order to clear out your warehouse for the New Year.

You could even go as far as changing your business model based on the data you’ve collected over a number of months and years. Regardless of why you’re using it, the thing to remember is that big data can help take some of the guesswork out of running a business. That means less indecision, less stress, and more time to spend on other aspects of your life that you’ve been ignoring.

Is 2017 the Year for More Work-Life Balance?

A better work-life balance is something we can all strive for, but that’s often easier said than done when you’re involved with running a business. Why work twice as much when you can be twice as efficient with a reliable all-in-one front and back office solution for your organisation?

To learn more about how SAP Anywhere can help you create a better work-life balance for your business, make sure to check out our website or speak to one of the sales team for a free demo.