Running a business is extremely difficult. With the lasting impacts of the pandemic and a lot of uncertainty, it’s now even harder for businesses to succeed than before. As a result, most business owners are looking for ways to slash expenses and save money. They feel like they may end up needing every penny, and they may be right. Thankfully, there are cost-cutting strategies every business can utilize. Below are five.
Go Paperless
Most offices go through a lot of paper. According to statistics, the average office worker wastes about two pounds of paper daily. This is not only wasteful from an environmental standpoint, but paper costs money, and that’s a lot of money down the drain. Also, think of how much money your office spends each year on ink and toner. Printers and fax machines are expensive too. They require maintenance and will eventually have to be replaced. However, everything you can do with printed documents can now be done with digital files and email. Digital files and email are essentially free to produce and distribute. Going paperless can eliminate a lot of waste and expense over a year.
Use a Sales Dialer
Something else that isn’t quite efficient is the traditional sales strategy of cold calling. Your sales representatives may end up spending a lot of time going directly to voicemail. Only an extremely minuscule number of those voice mail messages will result in a customer calling back. In other cases, your sales reps may waste time on other dead-ends like calling a fax machine number on accident. One thing that can make your sales force more efficient at converting leads is a sales dialer. The best salesforce dialer software is great for automating the process of finding an actual person to talk to on the phone so less of your sales budget is wasted on fruitless efforts that don’t generate leads.
Allow More Employees to Telecommute
If there’s one thing that the pandemic has shown employers it’s that more employees can telecommute than they had first assumed. Telecommuting has certain great benefits. For one, it can allow you to work with talent you wouldn’t have access to otherwise. It also helps to slash costs a great deal for both the employer and the employee. Over-staffing an office is expensive and inefficient. Not having employees in the office saves money and can increase efficiency under many different circumstances. For those employees, they will save money on the cost of commuting. In many cases, it’s a win-win scenario. While not every position can telecommute, some can quite easily.
Switch to Digital Advertising
Traditional advertising strategies can be extremely expensive. Platforms like television, radio, and print are all very costly to run ads on. What is not nearly as expensive is digital advertising. In certain cases, you only pay when a consumer takes action by clicking on the ad. This is not the case with traditional advertising. If you run an ad on late-night TV, you pay money for that ad whether any consumer takes action in response to it or not. In other cases, digital advertising can be completely free to distribute as is the case with email and social media. Using digital ads in your marketing campaigns can be a game-changer in regards to what you spend on your marketing budget.
Switch to Open Source Software
Every office needs productivity software to do its work. However, what you may not know is that you don’t have to pay for subscriptions to Microsoft or other companies to give your employees access to word processors, slideshow software, and spreadsheet applications. Each kind of office productivity software has its open-source alternative on the net that you can download and use for free. LibreOffice is one such example, and there are many others you can try as well.
Running a business is hard, and it’s especially hard in today’s rough climate. If you want to help ensure the survival of your business, look for different ways to slash costs and increase efficiency. The strategies listed above are only a starting point. Overall, examine every dollar you spend on your business and see if there is a way to remove overhead so that each dollar goes further.
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