What should small businesses be doing during this slow period? (part 1)

If you are a non-essential service your business may be experiencing a slow period while we try to contain the Coronavirus. Here are things you need to be catching up on during this time. 

1. Create processes and SOPs:
   Whether you are a product or service based business you have processes for almost everything you do. Write them down. Optimize and streamline these processes and have them available in hardcopy and electronically for all your staff members to have access to. If you have a certain sales method for pitching your products or services to potential customers, write it down and make it a standard practice. This way if any valuable members of your staff leave, you can train the new staff members on previously successful techniques very easily. It takes all the guessing out of the equation. This also makes your business more valuable. Having operations and management procedures are critical to establishing an effective workflow, ease of transfer of knowledge and reproducibility. This makes a business worth more! So start your SOPs now while you have a moment to breath.
   
2. Accounting and bookkeeping:
   Catch up! You all know what I mean because we are all in the same boat.  :O) Get your receipts together and snap photos of them. Stop those manual processes and automate everything you can. Quickbooks is an extremely user friendly tool you can use that is connected to your own accountant if you choose to do so. Your accountant will then have access to everything they need during the year to take care of taxes and make things easier for both of you. There are other platforms as well. Here is a great article that talks about the best platforms for accounting and bookkeeping in 2020 and questions to ask yourself in order to choose the best one for your business.
3. Clean up your CRM:
   If you don’t have one then choose a platform that suits your business the best and start organizing your sales funnel. Hubspot offers a free CRM that is perfect for small businesses. That's the one I use and I love it. There are other great options as well that are a small cost per month. Go through your sales funnel and move leads along where necessary or drop them in the appropriate stages as you go through your list. Work on your warmest leads and go backwards from there. Touch base with them, email market to them, pick up the phone, write them snail mail letters. Use your time to be genuine and listen to these potential customers. Rekindle relationships that have died down. You can do this by going through your CRM and noticing at what stages they are in the funnel.
   
   
   

If you have questions, comments or suggestions please comment below!