Five growth trends small businesses can’t afford to miss in 2020
It’s not long ago that we entered the new decade that is 2020. The beginning of the new decade brings a lot of changes to the professional as well as the personal front. On the professional grounds, how businesses function and customers’ expectations and requirements have changed drastically.
I won’t say that ten years ago, small businesses had disorganised processes but a majority of them were manual; prone to errors and consumed most of the employees’ time. Now, times have changed, and businesses have started introducing automation in every process. The processes are now more technology oriented and are designed by keeping customers at the center. The element of individualisation and personalisation also have started becoming the epicenter of the current business strategies.
Growth trends in 2020
#GrowthTrend1 – Hand over mundane tasks to third party agencies
Automation has seeped into every small business process but there remain some activities that require your attention. These activities can be writing emails, segmenting customers or providing support. Basically, these are the tasks that require human expertise and creativity. You can hire an agency or freelancers who can complete these tasks for you. Note the time taken by a team to complete a task and see whether technology can be deployed to automate these activities, or you have to outsource it.
#GrowthTrend2 – Tie value with every conversion
The sales world has slowly shifted from selling based on product requirement to selling based on the value offered by product/service and the relationship created with the company. Pertaining to this shift, the second growth trend I want to highlight here is innovating every process starting from tailoring a product/service, preparing the sales pitch or approaching prospects. You need to be unique and keep finding ways to attract prospects.
#GrowthTrend3 – Build a customer success team
The customers have started valuing the experience they get before and after investing in a service/product. Therefore, it has become crucial for you to build a customer success team whose main responsibility is to build relationships with the new as well as the existing customers. You will need to recruit dynamic personalities who can initiate conversations with the customers and subsequently find an upselling opportunity. The customer success team will regularly remain in touch with your customers by sending them marketing collateral, new schemes, product release notes and any other formal documents. They are indeed a single point of contact between your brand and your customer and fulfill all the promises you made during the sales process.
#GrowthTrend4 – Deliver omnichannel customer experience
Omnichannel experience initially ruled the B2C landscape but the B2B buyers are also slowly hopping on this bandwagon. The B2B buyers are now keen on searching the required item online and then post RFQs on the portal and then complete price negotiation over the phone. B2B buyers want to have the same experience across the different channels. Therefore, you need to ensure that you are consistent in communicating messages and delivering experiences.
#GrowthTrend5 – Understand millennial buyers
It is not an exaggeration to say that generation Z are a majority of the buyers. These are the people who have been using the internet since their childhood and are well versed in the concept of e-commerce shopping. To entice them you need to keep producing different types of content such as blogs, videos or images and educate them about your product/service. Just ensure that you have a similar message across all the forms of content that you release online.
The End Note
We have covered a few trends and there will be many more as we move forward. The bottom line here is that the B2B landscape is going to change dynamically every year and small businesses must be prepared for all the growth trends.
Carly works as the Xperience Manager at Quiddity, an amazing workflow and customer relationship management tool for small businesses. Carly is passionate about ensuring that all users get the very best out of Quiddity.
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