Help Your Small Business Thrive By Increasing Sales Efficiency

Every small business struggles with its course ― in the pandemic, for example, most of them closed or suffered multiple losses because it took a while for the technology to be implemented efficiently. But now that we learned from the past year’s attempts, it’s time to introduce new systems that will make businesses stay on their feet while providing the best services to customers.

According to Statista, e-commerce retailers were the most successful in the past years, with an increasing sales expectancy for 2025, so sales are better when technology is included.

Increasing sales might be top of the list among the most important financial elements. Sales play a key role in building your brand’s trustworthiness because they lead conversions and encourage customer retention, as we’ll discuss further on. So, here’s why sales are crucial in a small business and how you can increase their efficiency.

Image source: https://unsplash.com/photos/Q59HmzK38eQ 

What improvements can you make in your small business?

Whatever the industry your business fits into, it’s essential first to make an audit of the processes, methods and approaches you’re currently using and see where you can make improvements. The key is to let aside the idea of perfection because your goal is to seek development, not to be without flaws.

A great company will look for improvements in:

• Inventory needs (tracking product information, auditing inventory, analysing supplier performance and tracking sales)
• Brand loyalty (improving customer experience by offering incentives for loyalty, tracking customer’s purchase behaviour and offering gift cards)
• Business performance (monitoring feedback, managing employee involvements and setting goals)
• Customer feedback (reaching out to customers and using their feedback to improve your approach)
• Payment experience (improving payment terminals and the check-out experience)

When talking about the purchase process, as a business, you need to make it as simple and fast as possible because most clients are losing their interest when they don’t understand how the payment is made and what they need to do for that particular purchase. Therefore, you might want to use the tool to help you improve in all these sectors.

What’s the best digital solution for increasing sales?

This highly depends on what your business lacks. Yes, increasing sales is the final goal. Still, if you don’t fully control your target audience or want to simplify the customer experience, it would be best to look for software that focuses on that specific task.

Let’s say you want to know your target audience better. This will help you increase sales by understanding purchasing patterns and preferences so that you can make the right decisions about your products and marketing approaches. So, you can open a merchant account to benefit from a secure payment gateway for your online and mobile payments. Such an account will help you introduce a POS (Point of Sale) system to facilitate your business operations. Besides, it tracks and organises the store’s information, from where you’ll get the data required to increase sale efficiency. In other words, the POS’s software allows you to create reports automatically to have a better view of your business’s improvement.

With myPOS, you’ll be able to accept card payments, boost your check-out system and create invoices to send to your clients. But what are the advantages of such a tool? Here are five categories that can be developed by using a POS (but not limited to):

1. Better inventory management. You can easily track your store’s inventory with a POS. It allows you to scan items without manually tracking them, which means fewer errors in your inventory.
2. Quick payments. Having one point of sale makes payments faster for the customers to complete. Therefore, your customers will have their waiting time reduced, and your employees will be more efficient in completing transactions.
3. Better purchasing and supplier order management. A POS allows you to keep track of all your orders placed, therefore, properly managing your purchases from your suppliers. Viewing all your invoices in your POS system gives you control over the purchasing process.
4. Better customer experience. By providing a fast and easy way to purchase, your customers will most likely return; therefore, you can acquire more loyal customers.
5. Better security. As a business, your data is the most important, so you need to ensure protection and security. A POS reduces the intrusion of malicious users into your system by providing two-factor authentication. Plus, most of them use cloud-based sales points, therefore backing up your data.

What are other ways to increase sales?

If having a POS can greatly benefit your business, you can do more to strengthen your business’s sales efficiency by using smart resources in other departments so that you’ll be able to remove redundancies. Among these strategies, three of them are the most efficient: tracking your sales process, retaining sales reps and building a strong team.

The sales process has more phases that you need to watch. For example, the second phase regarding educating your audience is where leads are qualified and transferred to the sales team. Basically, you need to provide your clients with accurate and easy-to-understand information regarding your products and services, but the sales process doesn’t stop here.

Regarding the sales representatives, it’s challenging to find fully competent ones, but when you do, make sure you’re not losing them. A highly skilled rep is the one that improves your relationship as a business with your existing customers. The skills you’re looking for in a candidate are confidence, resilience, active listening and an entrepreneurial spirit.

Lastly, building a solid team is all you need in terms of human resources. Find the people that fit in your company’s culture and learn to value them. Employees’ morale and ability to work efficiently will increase if you’re able to see what they’re best at and encourage them to strive for the best version of themselves.

Final thoughts 

Small businesses have more creative opportunities and independence, but that comes at the cost of fewer financial rewards. Although the sales might be stagnant or decreasing, you can always do something that costs little to nothing to increase sales efficiency and improve your business.