If you own a retail business and you aren’t satisfied with just being part of the bunch, then you’re probably looking for some tips to go about out-selling the competition and really carving your mark in the industry. Most retailers are facing pretty strong competition these days, so the idea of outselling them all can be rather intimidating.
Before you let the fear and doubts set in, here’s a look at some tips you can start to use right away that will help you to out-sell even the stiffest of competition.
Install the Right Systems
In order for you to be truly successful in your retail business, your store needs to operate smoothly and be well-organized. Investing in a ePOS system that meets your specific needs as a retailer can certainly create that flow your business needs. For those unfamiliar with a ePOS system, it is a point-of-sale system that is meant to make selling easy from your perspective and buying easy from the customer’s perspective.
Where it used to be that a ePOS system referred to a cash register in a physical store, today it can also refer to a system that resides in the cloud for online retailers. It allows customers to go about transactions quickly and smoothly, which will make them want to return either to the store in person or your online store.
Vend is a popular example of a ePOS system that makes it possible for businesses to sell in both a physical storefront and online. The system lets you manage your inventory, your customer profiles, add items, create receipts, and of course, fill your orders. Vend provides customers with a positive experience, which means they are more likely to return to shop with you in the future.
Give Serious Thought to Your Location
If you operate a physical store front you will want to think long and hard about the location you choose. Spending time checking the demographics can really pay off, as you want to be located somewhere that gets the right traffic, traffic that will be drawn to the products you sell.
At the same time, you should check out the competition in the area. It may not be wise to set up shop where you are basically surrounded by competitors. You’ll want to try to be subjective as you look around for the perfect location and try to see how it would look through your customers’ eyes.
Find a Niche and Appeal to It
Another way you can out-sell your competition is to become an expert in one area. Find a niche and really focus on that area. Become an expert in your community when it comes to that niche so that customers will believe you are the one with the most knowledge.
The goal of outselling all your competition is certainly a lofty one, but when you take the right steps and you stay focused, it’s more than possible to reach the top. All it really takes is thorough research and planning, then as soon as you know what you need to do, you can put all your resources into making it happen. Remember that just because one tactic is working for your competition, doesn’t necessarily mean it will work for you. Thus, you need to focus on formulating a plan that suits your business and target market and stick to it.
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When it comes to landing the career of your dreams, you can get quite giddy. And who could blame you? Your entire future is out there, just waiting to be harnessed. So it’s time to work exact exactly how you’re going to do that. Whether you want to ensure you get started out on the correct path from the start, or you’re currently unhappy with what you’re doing and you want to make sure that you’re able to find the right career with a suitable change, you want to get it right. And to do that, you need to combine a few different areas.
Firstly, you have your education. Whether that’s currently where you are now, or something that you’re considering to going back into. But you also have your work experience to consider, and this can often play heavily into making your career work for you too. Then, you’ve got your enthusiasm, because your determination and drive often makes a huge difference in how well you can progress in your career. And finally, there’s your evolution, because landing that career of your dreams does often involve a range of progressive steps. So let’s take a look at how you’re going to combine all four to land the career of your dreams.
If you are just starting out with your career, and you’re still in college (or even about to start), you’re really going to want to drill down on the right major. Choosing a major can be tough is if you’re unsure of what you want to do. Sometimes, even choosing the right courses individually can be a hard task. But if you do have a rough idea of what career path you want to head down, you need to be able to make your major work for you.
Going On To Graduate Level
Then, you may want to think about what graduate education can do for your career prospects. If you are looking to change career fields, this can also be relevant to you too. You may wonder how long it takes to get a masters degree, but if you’re serious about the right career, the one or two years of extra education will benefit you immensely. It may even be a prerequisite for the career you want.
Further Training
Then, depending on what career it is that you’re chasing, you may also be interested in further training. Some industries require licensure or certification, which you may need to train for. Or, if you’re interested in something like journalism or marketing, you may want to look into vocational qualifications that can help you to stand out.
Following on from education, you also need to have the experience. It’s hard to say which of the two weighs up as more important, as in most career fields the two go hand in hand. So you may want to think about getting some work experience whenever you can. Gaining job experience can be done in a range of ways, but doing this while you study, or alongside another job, will often stand you in good stead.
Internships
One of the key areas of getting experience will always lie within interning. Sometimes, you may not feel as if an internship is right for you. But, a lot of the time, you will find that internships can open a lot of doors for you. Finding an internship can be competitive, but the right one will often provide you with key experience and allow you to build valuable connections too.
Starting Out
Some people often assume that as soon as you’ve landed your first job, your days of getting experience are over. But really, they’re just beginning. You often have to learn a lot when you first begin your career. In fact, you do learn throughout your career. But at the start, you need to take in everything. You need to prove yourself and ensure that you can absorb knowledge from those around you, and start to make waves in the industry that you’ve gone into.
Going Above And Beyond
You’re also going to find that you need to go above and beyond to get to where you need to be. Regardless of the industry, you’re in, or the job role that you go into, if you’re a mediocre employee, you may not go far. But when you have big career dreams, you need to chase them with all that you have. And that will often mean that you need to go above and beyond what is asked of you, in order to stand out.
Your enthusiasm is often what pushes you forwards in your career. Without it, you may struggle to get to where you want to be. One of the ways that you can often show your enthusiasm for the job, and ensure that you’re able to contribute as much as you can, is to combine your hobbies. Although they’re often there for enjoyment, you’ll find that sometimes your hobbies can make you better at your job.
Starting A Side Hustle
At the same time, you may find that having a ‘side hustle’ is invaluable. When you’re trying to commit your all to your job, you may not think you have time to operate anything alongside it, but you should find that it can help you to stand out and even progress in your field. Whether you start a blog or sell a product, it could be the edge you need to keep you moving in your career.
Going The Extra Mile
At the same time, you should also be thinking about how you can go the extra mile. Your enthusiasm helps with this. Yes, it is in some ways similar to going above and beyond what it asked of you, but sometimes it can be something that you come up with on your own – like giving ideas, that can help.
Taking On Extra
Finally, you may also find that offering to take on extra work can benefit your career in a range of different ways. Not only will this look good to your bosses, and go under the idea of ‘going the extra mile,’ but you will also find that you may be able to learn new things and get yourself experience in areas that you wish to progress into in the future.
The last ‘E’ in the list concerns your career progression. Because if you’re ever going to get that dream role, you need to be able to harness your own growth. To do that, you will need goals. Because it’s hard to advance without knowing where you need to be. Setting career goals may be tough to start with, but as soon as they’re in place, you will have a guide that can get you to where you need to be.
Following The Stepping Stones
Then, you need to be able to follow the steps that you’ve set out for yourself as a part of your goal setting. You may find that this is going to take you time, it could even be ten years or more, sometimes even twenty. But you need to be able to know what promotions you need, and what roles you’re to go through in order to reach the final step.
Using The E’s To Get To The End
And finally, you need to understand how you’re going to use all of the three other ‘E’s to get to this stage. By ensuring that education, experience, and enthusiasm can work together in harmony, you should find that you’re able to not only chase after your dream career path, but pass through it with ease.
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Working hard, taking risks, and failing nonetheless is a part of life – and it’s certainly a part of business life. The failure tastes especially sour when you’ve fired up an entire bottle of midnight oil and invested all of your energy and resources into the launch of this product, just to see it crash-land as soon as it’s unleashed.
Although most successful businesses today have experienced a few spectacular disasters through their life, all of them managed to pick themselves up and keep pushing forward. Their failure made them robust and innovative; learn from their mistakes and bounce back after the miserable product launch as well, stronger than ever.
Analyze the situation
When you’ve put your mind into recovering and not losing hope quite yet, the first thing you should do is to gather as much data as possible. You can learn so much from the way your product or service was received – and sometimes, you might even find that it was never a problem with your product in the first place.
It may have been the marketing strategy, how you presented it to the market, and whether or not you managed to communicate its purpose properly. A business can launch an exceptional product that should have been well-received, only to realize that the target group never really understood its benefits.
Talk to your customers
Reach out to a few of your customers and find out what they disliked about the product. This is the first step to recovery and a potential recipe for re-launching it with greater success than ever. Send out a survey in a newsletter and offer some form of reimbursement for taking the time to answer your questions – such as a discount or similar, and gather as much data from this as possible.
By looking at their answers, you may find that there was, in fact, something wrong with the product that should be fixed. Maybe you find that you never reached the people who could have loved the product, and you should find room for improvement with the product launch instead. Finally, it could have been challenges around the market you targeted that kept your product from soaring.
Improve the product
With the amount of data you have and the feedback you’ve received from your market, it’s time to get back to the drawing table. Sometimes, you need to make major changes to the product or service, and many business owners before you have scrapped the idea altogether when they understood the costs. You can easily apply for some of the best small business loans to improve your product and make the money back, though, so don’t let this stop you.
Implement the changes and present the new and improved product to the ones you’ve surveyed earlier. Explain that you have considered their opinions and tried to improve it before asking them to try it out and give some final feedback.
Maybe you still need to improve it – or maybe you’ve learned from your mistakes and created something brilliantly useful.
A failed product launch doesn’t have to mean disaster, especially not when so many successful companies have failed miserably just to grow stronger within a short year. The key to success is, of course, to analyze your mistakes and learn from them the best you can, giving the market exactly what they need in the end.
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Running a successful and efficient company is all about time management and reducing errors. A business that spends as much of the day being as productive as possible will always be set for success. The same can be said for a company that doesn’t make a lot of errors, therefore doesn’t waste time correcting these errors.
Sadly, there is one thing that can cost your business and hold you back; human error. Yes, while employees are essential for your business, they are guilty of making errors from time to time. One simple mistake could cause disruption in your company that leads to half a day being wasted as you all try and fix it.
As a consequence, it should be a top priority for businesses to reduce human error. Is this even possible? Of course, it is, and here are two easy ideas you can use:
Use Software For Certain Tasks
To completely eradicate the risk of human error in some tasks, you can use software. This is particularly useful regarding various human resources tasks such as paying employees and managing staff absences. These are tasks that often have the most mistakes occurring. As it says on the HRIS Payroll Software website, the right software can free up time and minimize errors. By relying on a computer to do certain tasks, you haven’t got to worry about employees making mistakes.
Software isn’t going to work for every single task in the office, but it will be a great solution to plenty of HR or accountancy tasks. Essentially, anything that can be automated or done by a piece of software doesn’t need to be done by a human.
Hire Better Employees
A simple way to reduce human errors is to ensure you hire the best people for every job. Companies that rush through the hiring process usually end up with employees that make a lot of mistakes. You must ensure you hire the best person and that they prove their worth. Someone with a good track record and lots of experience in the same role is ideal for your business. They know what they’re doing right from the start and will make far fewer mistakes than someone who might be in their first ever job.
The best thing you can do is take your time when hiring someone. Review their resume, check their employment history, talk to their previous employers, bring them in for an interview, etc. I’d even go as far as to say you should give them a trial run before actually hiring them full-time too. This shows if they’re good enough for your business and will highlight their mistake-making ability.
There may only be two ideas here, but they’ll go a long way to helping with any human error problems you have. As it was mentioned at the beginning of the piece, human error causes disruptions and wastes time. By reducing the likelihood of employee errors, you can stop holding your business back and drive forward in the right direction.
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It may have escaped your notice, but UK businesses are gradually changing how they deal with the paper trail. Offices around the nation are looking at ways to reduce the need for paper mills to order pulp (which makes paper) that comes from the cutting of small trees and the remnants of harvesting larger ones. This way, forestry across the UK stays where it is, which looks more appealing and helps clean the air across the country too.
Here are a few ways that your business can reconsider how it manages its paper use and what options there might be.
Intentionally Going Thinner and Lighter
Just like with our waistlines, aiming for a lighter, thinner version is a good choice when it comes to paper usage in the office. It needs the cooperation of the office manager who handles paper orders from the photocopier right down to the little notepads to pull it off. Cutting down the environmental impact from your business’ paper use is as easy as cutting down the paper stock thickness to use less volume.
It’s also worth noting that paper which comes with a special coating over it, or has been treated to be reflective, also uses different types of thicker paper to achieve this result. The greater use of this kind of paper product is impactful too.
Lower Storage Costs for Paper Files
With the use of thinner paper stock, paper files that are necessary for businesses to keep on-hand are thinner. With each page being a lower GSM stock (as recommended above), files get thinner overall. Fewer metal storage cabinets are needed, and you need less space to store them and access them too. A filing clerk is no longer needed either when there’s fewer files to manage.
Think Before Printing Out
Pausing to consider whether a printout really needs to be produced is a great way to reduce paper usage. The mindless printing of multiple copies of a seldom accessed paper version is not helpful to reduce paper usage or the costs of it. Where copies are needed, consider printing on both sides and train staff on how to set up their software and printer to achieve this result. Alternatively, the company could look at tablets for teams to use and access digital versions of reports for reference purposes.
Paper copies fade over time and are a poor way to keep records in the wake of the complete digitisation of software. Set standards for employees where staff are rewarded for reducing paper usage, which cuts the environmental impact and office costs.
Fewer Photocopies
Taking fewer photocopies is another way to reduce costs both in paper usage and maintenance expenses for the photocopier machine. Distracting staff by having to monitor repair staff when they have to attend to fix a copier machine is a time suck. The greater the use of the photocopier, the more often it’s likely to run into trouble too.
There are always more ways to cut down on paper usage to save money. You can a look at the GoCanvas.com website to learn more about how much paper usage is costing your company and how you can set up your business to operate more efficiently and less expensively.
Going digital saves businesses money in many areas. They are no longer reliant on a paper trail for most activities and the company operates more smoothly as a result. It’s also easier to look up key information online when necessary because putting hands on the paper file is no longer needed.
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If you own a retail business and you aren’t satisfied with just being part of the bunch, then you’re probably looking for some tips to go about out-selling the competition and really carving your mark in the industry. Most retailers are facing pretty strong competition these days, so the idea of outselling them all can be rather intimidating.
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