With new and varied IPOs demonstrating every week just how much potential all businesses have to grow, business leaders would be wise to address what strategies and tools they have in place to scale their business.
While scaling is an objective for nearly all businesses, it is not without its challenges to say the least. Scaling involves many moving parts which can be tricky to wrangle when lofty business goals are set across wide-spanning organisations.
Not only do businesses need the basics in place, such as funding and a smart financial strategy, they also need to be agile and adaptive – and this doesn’t even begin address the issues of recruiting and training a talented and engaged workforce. Balancing all of these business requirements is a fundamental challenge and unfortunately there is no single, easy fix.
However, engaged business leaders can make their lives easier through smart investment in technologies and software. We have seen the success of such ‘tech first’ strategies in high-profile companies such as Airbnb, Lyft and Netflix, where a focus on development empowered by tech innovation has acted as a core driver for growth in simplifying this arduous process. With this in mind, here are six tools designed to form a multi-prongedapproach to scaling.
Nail your investor pitch
- Prezi – Engaging presentation software
Prezi is a tool that provides users with a more flexible and engaging approach to presentations. The software enables presenters to adapt to the natural flow of a conversation by jumping seamlessly from one topic to another with the help of its zoomable canvas and dynamic layout.
Engagement has never been so important and the key to keeping an audience interested in a presentation is by providing a highly visual and impactful experience. It has in fact been confirmed by Harvard researchers that not only are Prezi’s presentations more engaging and more persuasive than Microsoft’s PowerPoint (and oral presentations), but they are also more organised. All of this means that you can really nail relationship building with potential investors, all while making your business stand out from the crowd at a crucial point of growth.
Collaborate and keep sight of goals
- Asana – Work management tool
Asana is a work management tool that helps teams organise and manage all of their work, from small projects to strategic initiatives. With Asana, each person knows what they should be doing, when and how that work fits into company goals.
Through its visual project plans, Asana administers significant visibility to areas of risk, pinpointing potential hazards and pitfalls, allowing your company and its managers to always be thinking one step ahead – a concept indispensable to any successful business. This clarity, transparency and focus allows teams to collaborate with less friction and produce great results.
Whether you’re looking to add a little more organisation to your working day or seeking out a solution to better manage the work of your team or business, Asana will keep you on track and focused on what needs to happen next.
Make sales success inevitable
- Pipedrive – CRM built to replicate successful sales patterns
Many businesses fail or succeed based on sales performance, and without this function, most companies wouldn’t exist let alone be able to grow. The first CRM platform to be developed from the salesperson’s perspective, Pipedrive operates to give salespeople a singular, streamlined view of their sales pipeline. Featuring a powerful AI-powered sales assistant, flexible user interface and robust performance dashboards, Pipedrive’s platform has been designed to make sales success inevitable.
Pipedrive helps organisations accelerate growth, adopting automation to free up sales professionals to focus on building relationships, offering greater visibility and helping to drive actions that can supercharge business trajectory. Whether you’re an early stage start-up or mid-level company planning global expansion, the platform can help sales teams get more qualified leads into the pipeline, and then support the salesperson to replicate their most successful sales patterns – closing more deals, faster.
Construct a ‘smarter’ workplace
- TEOS Manage from Sony Professional – Workplace management software
Scaling a business usually means hiring more staff, and with this, the need to re-work your current office space to accommodate more people or open additional workspaces. This can provide the perfect opportunity to consider how the space could most intelligently be used.
The complete suite of TEOS workplace management solutions helps organisations create a working environment where employees can work smarter, more productively and more efficiently. Anyone who has ever worked in a corporate environment can understand how frustrating and time-consuming even basic tasks, such as booking a room or sharing content to a screen, can be. TEOS has been designed to overcome these challenges. From tablets outside meetings rooms that show when and for how long the rooms are occupied for, to integrated room-booking applications and solutions that seamlessly and instantaneously allow users to share content to and from any connected device; TEOS helps organisations create an environment in which working in simplified, collaboration is enhanced and productivity is boosted.
Tap into the power of data
- Unravel Data – Application performance platform
Part of any business is unlocking the rich data sets within to make more calculated and strategic business decisions, whether on a small or large scale. Unravel provides full-scale management of the data pipeline across all platforms and big data solutions, in the cloud or on-premise, offering complete visibility over applications and their performance usage. This, coupled with AI-powered guidance to help optimise them in order to drive cost, time, and resource efficiencies, means that businesses can become big data leaders in every industry.
Outsource skills, grow at pace
- Fiverr – Freelance digital services platform
Businesses that want to explore or expand into new areas often feel held back because they don’t have the headspace to hire someone to do the job – but online freelancer marketplace Fiverr aims to change all that.
As a digital services platform, Fiverr’s central purpose is to connect buyers and sellers of creative skills like copywriting, coding and graphic design. Essentially, it’s designed to give easy access to the kind of tools that have previously been prohibitively expensive or difficult to find.
Notable for its vast array of professional services, the platform provides the necessary steppingstones to help you to build your brand, reach more customers or engage your audience. And because all of the searching through ads is handled within the platform – it provides a handy review system to let users know how well the freelancers have performed for previous clients.
In short, Fiverr allows you to outsource any creative professional service quickly, easily and reliably – leaving you more time to do what you do best.
