How to online business to banking Right Strategic plan

 How to online business to banking

Scale-Up Your Business to the Next Level

Now that your online business is structured correctly, and you have the right people in place to handle the essential functions, the time has come for you to begin scaling your business. Having a well-structured operation in place will provide you with the luxury of using your own skills to grow the business in whatever area where you're an expert.

This is where most people try to start their online business. The general thought is that if you are an expert in a given area, that will be enough for you to start and run a successful business. However, talent in one area is simply not enough.

You, unlike so many other small business owners, have a distinct advantage. Unlike other online business owners, who quickly find themselves in over their heads and scrambling to try and master a dozen different tasks at once,

 you have a reliable system in place that has freed you up from having to deal with every little task personally. Instead, you can concentrate your efforts on utilizing your specific talents to grow your business.

Scaling your business might seem overwhelming at first when you're already swamped with work and home life. While it can be challenging to find the time to focus on scaling your business correctly,

 the following information can help you tackle the process without breaking a sweat. A good part of scaling a business merely involves getting your ducks in a row before you start ramping up business.

Create the Right Strategic Plan

Your strategic plan is the road map that directs your companys focus to the fewer and better things that will allow you to dominate your market niche and create explosive growth. It prompts you to look at the big picture. 

It also helps you to prioritize and allocate your companys resources to their best advantage. Finally, it helps align your team on the big picture, so they can better manage their responsibilities and contribute more to the needs of the company.

When it comes to creating your strategic plan, you have to ask yourself the 

following three questions:

Why is your company in business? This first question cuts to the heart of why youre in business in the first place.

What is your singular goal? You need to think about the one goal that you are mobilizing all your company resources to accomplish over the next three to five years.

Whats in it for you and your team?

Creating a strategic plan isnt a one-time activity, but one that will continually evolve as you learn, refine, and re-create your business. Every quarter, you need to revisit your plan and map out the next 90 days. Youll want to determine your top three strategic priorities for the coming quarter and write up a simple one-page plan of action that specifies exactly what you must do that quarter to grow and develop your 

business.

The reason why this process works so well is that it forces you to take a fresh look at your business every three months while also allowing your team to dive deep into the execution of actually accomplishing meaningful progress on the areas of the most importance in your business.

Done well, these 90-day sprints will reward your business with the most significant benefits of regular opportunities to change and adapt to the market demands.

Measure Effectiveness with Accounting

Sound systems have a way of increasing efficiency throughout your business, allowing you and your employees to accomplish objectives and give your customers what they want every single time. Your business accounting should be the master system of your business that can measure the effectiveness of all your business processes. 

Your accounting system is the brain of your business, processing all of the data related to the activities of your business and providing you with strategic information that will allow you to drive growth and profitability.

In many small businesses, accounting is seen merely as the system that is used to pay the bills, reconcile the bank, invoice customers, and prepare tax returns. What many small business owners dont realize is that it is the perfect system for gathering business intelligence.

Your accounting information will reveal the strengths and weakness of your business. It can tell you what went wrong in the past and what can be done to improve in the future. 

The accounting systems you use in your business can reduce large quantities of complex data into understandable and straightforward information that contains the seeds of solutions for all the problems your company may be facing. 

It is also the basis for making critical business decisions.

To develop the perfect business requires discipline and a systematic course of action. You must understand where you are at, where you are going,

 and how you are going to get there. To do this, you must use strategic information and systems to achieve financial control. When managed correctly and grown correctly, 

your business can become profitable and reward stakeholders while creating economic and personal freedom for you.

Every business has one or two "key numbers" that drive its economic engine.

 If you want to be able to scale your business, you have to have knowledge of and control over these numbers. When this happens, everything else will fall into place.

 If you haven't already identified these numbers, you need to do so now. Paying attention to these critical numbers will make all the difference in your ability to scale and grow into a successful business.

Focus on Sales and Marketing

Every company has to generate leads. 

If you dont have any leads, then you wont make any sales. If you cant make any sales, then you wont have a business. Its that simple. If you want to sustainably scale your business, you have to evolve from growth based on your personal production to growth based on the stable base of system, teams, and controls youve established.

Sales are everything you do as a business to make your offers as useful as possible and to close selling opportunities. Your offers can be delivered in a variety of ways, from call centers taking phone calls to trained sales reps, to sales letters to an interactive website and everything in between. It is your sales and marketing efforts that will find your clients, generate sales, and increase revenue.

Too many small business owners focus solely on sales and marketing because they feel they have to as opposed to wanting to. They feel intimidated by the idea of selling, but to be successful, they must focus a majority of their energy on generating profitable sales. If you don't, your business will never thrive, let alone survive.

When you first start your venture as a small business owner, you focus your time and energy making sure that sales happen, which usually means meeting with clients and closing the deals yourself. As you begin to look at scaling your business, you have to focus your attention on creating repeatable and scalable selling systems that don't depend on your involvement to function. 

This might involve building advertising systems that will generate leads, hiring and training new sales reps to close deals, or eventually hiring a sales and marketing manager to take over.

To build a sales and marketing department that can function without you, the following systems need to be included in your growth strategy.

Lead generation systems that can consistently generate the lead volume that is needed to make sales.

Lead conversion systems to consistently convert leads into paying clients.

Tracking and reporting systems to measure the effectiveness of your marketing and sales efforts. This will allow you to optimize your selling system over time.

Tacking your results is an essential part of scaling your business. You can do this by creating simple spreadsheets that tell you what is and is not working. After you've gathered the numerical data, you can determine the best lead generators, the best lead converters, and the best current client resellers and invest in scaling up those efforts.

The first step to removing obstacles to scaling your sales and marketing efforts is to pinpoint your companys most costly lead-generation weaknesses. The following checklist can help you evaluate your company's lead-generation challenges.

You don't have enough leads to sell to, or your lead generation is erratic, and you don't have a consistent lead stream you can't count on.

You dont have a system to organize and maintain your leads.

• You dont have a structured lead scoring system.
• You dont systematically track your lead-generating efforts.
• You dont have a system to generate leads.
• Your current lead-generation processes arent scalable.
• Your current cost per lead is too high.
• Your lead quality is too weak.
• You have a ton of lead-generation ideas, but you just arent able to effectively implement them.

Your marketing is too reliant on you.

Check the box for any of the challenges that are currently hurting your business. If you check more than three boxes, go back through the list and circle the one pain point that hurts your business the most. This is where you will need to focus initially.

Five Steps to Build a Baseline Lead-Generation System

Its not enough for you to just learn new tactics to generate leads and close sales.

You need to build the systems that help you to accomplish these tasks.

The problem with having informal systems in your business is that they leave your business vulnerable. If you get sick or busy, there is no one else who knows how to do the fundamental processes that you have stored in your head. Informal systems that are locked in the minds of you and your key employees aren't scalable. Here are five steps to take to build out your baseline lead-generation system so you can scale your business.

Step One: Determine the Marketing Tactics to Focus on First

Look at all the lead-generation tactics that you've used and picked your single most important one. This will be the tactic that you will systemize first. If you're not sure which one is the most important, ask yourself if you could only do one thing to generate new leads, what would it be?

Step Two: Draft the Process Layer of How to Implement the Tactic

Using sticky notes, write down the steps that you will need to follow to implement this marketing tactic. Each sticky note should contain a single step. This is an effective way to document your process because it frees up your mind to lay out the steps and edit them as you go. Once you have the process of executing the marketing tactic, write it up into a simple step-by-step recipe.

Step Three: Create a Round Scorecard to Track the Tactic

The key to this step is to gather relevant, objective data that will tell you how well your marketing efforts are going. You need to be able to compare tactics to make smart, strategic decisions about where to invest your time and money.

Step Four: Package the Process

You need to determine the best way to package the process that will ensure your team and business follow the steps consistently to get the results you want. You need to ask yourself, what the best format is to package the critical stages of the system so that it is followed consistently.

Step Five: Implement, Track, and Refine

When you pay close attention and track the results from your lead-generating efforts, youll start to spot opportunities to improve your system. You and your team will continuously find ways to tweak and improve your baseline lead-generation system so that you can continue to produce more and better-quality leads.

Implementing Marketing Controls

When it comes to your marketing efforts, there are four essential controls that you need to have in place to make sure that the right steps are being taken, at the right time, to get the correct results. To make sure your marketing systems continue to operate smoothly to produce quality leads for your 

marketing Calendar

The first step to ensuring that the sales and marketing systems you've put in place operate smoothly is to develop a marketing calendar. Take the time to lay out your essential lead-generation campaigns for the next 90 days on a standard calendar.

 Next, add the deadlines for any key steps that are required for you to run that campaign successfully.

A marketing calendar is an excellent visual control to make sure that you remain on track with the precampaign steps required to make your lead-generation efforts successful.

Standardized Marketing Collateral

Whether you develop a template email that is sent to everyone who registers on your website, a glossy white sales brochure your sales reps use, or a white paper that prospects can download from your site, 

having standardized marketing collateral is an effective control to make sure your prospects are getting your best sales message.

Your marketing collateral will not only help your prospects learn about your products or services, but they can be used to train new employees on the product knowledge they will need to have to be a productive member of your team. Start small and build out your marketing collateral in bite-sized chunks.

Develop a Marketing Scoreboard

Create a simple scoreboard that gives you the high-level of results of your marketing efforts. Start by using the following three numbers.

Your Cost per Lead  measure the total cost of a particular marketing campaign and divide it by the total number of leads that were generated during a specific period. Knowing your cost per lead helps you compare which lead tactics are the most cost-effective.

Your Cost per Sale  measure the total cost of a particular marketing tactic and divide it by the total number of sales you made from that tactic.

The Return on Investment  a powerful way to equalize various marketing tactics so you can see which one has the most significant return on investment. Calculate it by dividing the total sales you made with that tactic by the total amount you spent on the tactic.

Implement a Customer Relationship Management System (CRM) 

Your CRM is the system you use to organize your customer and prospect data and how you manage those relationships over time. When used correctly your CRM can help your business ensure that leads are appropriately captured and followed up with on a timely and effective basis.

Hire the Right People

To grow your business, youre going to need talented members of your team to both spark and support growth. Whether you are adding new members to your sales team to increase sales or engineers to design new products, your company's most significant source of leverage is its ability to attract, hire, integrate, and empower talented employees.

One of the only ways for your company to create and sustain rapid growth is for you to systematically make your business a place where great talent wants to work. Here are some simple ways in which you can do that.

Deliberately define and profile your ideal employee. Take the time to establish a profile of your businesss perfect employee. While the specific qualifications will vary between positions, you can think of several common traits, beliefs, and drives that you want your employees to encompass. Think about how you can build simple filters in your hiring process to weed out any candidates that dont fit into your profile.

Be selective about whom you invite on your team. Great talent tends to thrive when working with other talented individuals. Keep your standards high as you hire and consider upgrading weak team members as you have the opportunity and cash flow to do so.

See the whole person and manage individually. While your company has to have standard HR policies in place, you can still use your common sense in applying those standards. The goal isnt to treat all your employees the same, but to produce amazing results by getting your team to perform at its best.

Remove poor performers quickly. If you have poor performers on your team, it is essential that you provide them with proper guidance, coaching, and training. However, if after a time it becomes clear that they cant perform at the level of those around them, then you have to remove them swiftly and decisively.

Now that you've found the right talent you can begin to enlist them in developing ideas to scale and improve your company. Every six months, ask each of your team members to go through the company, department by department and write there three best ideas for scaling and improving your business.

Once they've completed, the tasks spend some time going over the results. Choice the top suggestions and hold a team meeting to go over the results and allow them to help you pick out several of the best ideas to implement in the company immediately.

Repeat this process over time and watch how your company benefits and improves with the ideas, as well as how your team responds and grows when they see you take their input and ideas seriously.

Conclusion: The Final Words

When it comes to running a successful company, it is important to remember that your business, as well as the markets you serve, are not static, but are in a constant state of flux. This means that over time you'll need to refine and redesign your systems and controls. The more you grow, the more that growth will require you to evolve your systems.

Rapid growth will continue to make increasing demands on your outdated systems. The systems that worked for a $500,000-a-year business will no longer be sufficient to cope with a $5 million company. This is why you need to approach your systems and controls as a work in progress as you continue to scale your business.

As you grow your business, your policies and controls must grow with you if you want to run a successful business.