MAKE BUSINESS "GREAT AGAIN” - Using Technology For Effective Leadership And Management

2017 has started on an interesting note and coming months will have an impact on global business, both due to political and economic reasons. Businesses can expect some turbulent times ahead and for successful navigation during such times, traditional business practices will require significant transformation.

Using Technology for Business in 2017

Technology is bound to play a crucial role for effective leadership and management. Fine tuning of routine tasks by using automated tools can greatly boost the chances of success. 

5 Best Practices for Your Business in 2017

1. 12 Month Plan

A key ingredient of successful execution is proper planning. Setting up a 12 month plan at the beginning of an year is the best thing a business can do. Use of collaboration tools like Evernote, Google Drive etc. can ensure that the entire team can contribute towards creation and execution of the 12 month plan.

2. Capture Relevant Data for Analysis

Capturing data relevant to your 2017 goals can amplify your efforts. For example, if you are into professional services, reviewing all the projects executed in 2016 and rating them based on your experience in dealing with each client, client’s feedback and time spent on each project can provide interesting insights.

This can be done simply using an excel sheet and rating each project as a 0 or a 1, like a project where you spent more time than expected due to reasons under your control could be rated as a 0, and a project where a client gave positive feedback or a testimonial after completion can be rated as a 1.

Once all projects are rated, you can compare all 0s with 1s and then think about better ways of executing projects in 2017 to convert the 0s to 1s.

3. Develop Feedback Mechanism

Brainstorming new ideas and executing them promptly is a routine practice. However, reviewing the execution results and improvising future processes based on the same is something most of us don’t do. For example, we attend multiple business events (conferences, seminars etc.) to meet various stakeholders and immediately after the event, we connect with them via email and other channels to explore synergies. 

Hence, reviewing results of all events attended in 2016 to determine the most useful ones can be a good way to plan for 2017 events. Strategy for conferences that resulted in successful conversions can be fine tuned further to achieve better results in near future.

4. Referral Rewards

Businesses rely heavily on referrals from existing clients, peers and friends. Review all the referrals you received in 2016 and analyse the overall experience. More client conversions can be achieved if there’s a well defined process to reward the referral sources. Such rewards can be monetary or non-monetary. For monetary rewards, a small percentage of revenue generated from the referral can be shared and for non-monetary rewards, reciprocal referrals can be provided.

5. Define CTA

Having a well defined call-to-action (CTA) for all your plans is extremely important. Most plans fail because there is no definite call to action attached to the plans. For example, if you plan to attend a conference, decide what will you do after meeting the desired attendees. Have a specific call to action, like if you intend to work with a particular company whose CTO is attending the conference, prepare your pitch for the meeting, spend time writing the follow-up email, and make notes before the follow-up call. The desired CTA can be fine tuned further by determining your potential client’s interest by studying his blogs, news mentions, public updates across social media, etc.

These small measures can collectively improve productivity and as a result can add additional value to your business in 2017.

Hope you found this useful. I would be sharing more such experiences in coming weeks. Thank you.

Journey of my blog from LinkedIn to 30+ news portals

Rahul Dev is a Patent Attorney & International Business Lawyer practicing Technology, Intellectual Property & Corporate Laws. He is reachable at info (at) techcorplegal (dot) com & @rdpatentlawyer on Twitter

Flagship Speaking Engagements

Patent Forum (Munich, Germany) | News Channels | Ministry of Corporate Affairs | ASSOCHAM | FICCI | Brand Licensing India | BioEnergy International

Featured Publications

Economic Times | BioSpectrum | International Bar Association | LawAsia | SwissInfo | Global Legal Post | HT Live Mint | Outlook Money