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21st Century Business – Hand Your Tasks Over to Web By Jason OConnor © 2003 http://www.oakwebworks.com
Want to know how to put more of your revenue in your pocket AND free up time to do important things for your business? All business owners can save time and money if they properly leverage Web through Web services. What I am referring to is replacing recurring tasks that take employee time to accomplish with web-based services that do it automatically.
If you are a small business owner, you probably do many day-to-day tasks that take up a lot of your valuable time. Your time is better spent doing things you’re in business for than regularly completing every little business administration chore. A common complaint I hear among small business owners is that they spend too much of their time on “business” issues like accounting or mailings instead of “fun stuff” that their expertise is in.
Now you can have it both ways, thanks to Web and strength of Web services. The idea is that if you shift your time or employee time away from tasks that can be accomplished via Web, newly saved time can be spent in more productive and lucrative ways.
I can give numerous examples of Web services for any industry, but for sake of brevity, I will offer a few that will hopefully stimulate your own creativity.
1) Pricing
Do you have prices on your Web site that need to get updated regularly? If you have many products, and a price list that changes sometimes, it may save employee time by putting all prices in a database (if they aren’t already) and making your Web site dynamically database driven to pull pricing out of database in real-time so pricing on your site is always current.
This saves time in a number of ways. First, if a particular price is listed in a number of areas on your site, than you have to pay someone to make update in each place every time price is changed, or spend your time doing this. Maybe your pricing stays same most of time, but what about when you run specials and discounts?
Another way this helps is that your entire company can now refer to Web to get most updated pricing. Let’s say you run a special and decrease price of a product. Do you contact all your sales people and tell them about discount? Do you print out a copy of updated price list and send it to everyone who deals with customers? By making this a Web service, you would simply change one entry in your database and refer everyone to Web to get current price. Any company information that regularly changes and you spend time disseminating ought to be automated using Web.
2) Sales & Marketing
Let’s say a typical sale, whether it’s done by you or your salespeople, takes fifteen minutes to close (when speaking to an interested or ‘hot’ lead). Let’s also say that half of fifteen minutes is spent explaining what your product or service is or how it can help improve their lives. You find that you repeat same basic selling points over and over again. What if you could create a Flash presentation that does this for you? The presentation could be loaded on your Web site and linked on your home page. You could refer people to this presentation and cut your sales pitch in half.
