Since you have clicked on the link and have managed to read further than the title, you are probably a startup entrepreneur or an aspiring one at best. If you are the former, read and see if you are overlooking any of the factors, thereby limiting the growth of your venture. For the latter, carefully internalise the things that you can’t afford to overlook when you start a venture of your own.
Not working on these trivial factors is like driving a car with its handbrakes pulled. You’ll burn out way before you reach the victory line.
Strong customer redressal system
Amazon is impeccable in it. If you visit its social media profile pages, you’ll seldom see any negative review or complaint of any of its customers gone unnoticed.
“Customers aren’t always right, and they certainly aren’t equal but customers are always paying the bills” says Joseph Michelli.
REI, an adventure shoe selling brand even replaces their customer’s 3 year old shoes.Now you are not supposed to go all out like REI, but do provide your customers with a strong and efficient network to get their products exchanged or replaced if the nature of your product/service allows you to. Do not take your customer redressal system in a lax way. One negative review can infect a whole group of your potential customers.
Product improvements
Regardless of the nature of industry, the market for any product keeps changing. The customers’ preferences keep evolving.
In such a dynamic environment, your product should update itself before losing its existence in the dark valleys of abyss.
PayTM India is an electric ecommerce and online payment company. After the recent demonetisation, the company saw a tremendous growth. Many users connected to it, but what’s more important is that most customers stayed with it because of its incredibly smooth user experience. In the earlier days, people didn’t find sending and receiving money from paytm as easy as they do now with its simple 2 step process.
Talent retention
“Not only are there financial repercussions, a high turnover rate can also lower the knowledge base in your company and decrease performance and morale” says Steve Olenski‘s article on forbes.
There is no point hiring talented people when you can’t make them stick with you even for a couple months.
As an entrepreneur, retaining the pool of talent is essential for the life of your startup. However, the entrepreneur gets placid after recruitment. The employee leaves the organisation after sometime. There goes all your efforts and money invested in procuring him. The work suffers too.
Fortunately, offering more money is not the only motivator that makes people stick.
There are plenty of articles already on the web about employee motivation factors. However one very potent factor is providing a very liberal work environment to the talent. If they have more space to spread their wings, your work will soar higher.
Delegation
Doing everything by yourself is very entertaining. It’s very enriching too. Such benefits are very nicely written in a previous blogpost of Durofy.
But the learning curve that you have to go through requires uncompromised time and effort. Or your monotonous work will demand lion’s share of your time. Most entrepreneurs do not consider these two things and end up with a ton of load on their chests. Sadly, these are the ones who fail.
Say for instance, handling your social media. It’s a 24/7 job because your audience never sleeps.
Also, it requires your intact attention because no negative comment should go unnoticed.
Many entrepreneurs are taking the services of a social media virtual assistance to get relevant content created for their brand, enhance audience engagement and much more.
But before you rush off to get the services of one such virtual assistant, you should address certain critical issues pertaining to it, described comprehensively in the post Your One-Stop Guide to working with Social Media Virtual Assistant.
One has to focus their time and effort towards client acquisition or developing the managers of your team, or as such activities that give maximum return on their investment.
Robust pre-launch presence
Instead of putting in truckloads of money in a grand launch show, utilise those fund on getting clients. It’s essential to have some blood flowing in the system first. Have a decent base of customers, so that the venture at least gets some cushioning when the need be.
Another thing is to have a strong presence in your target audience through blogging/vlogging and engagement through social media. Have really good and useful content served in front of your customer so that they remember and connect with your brand. Just one thing to remember, blogging is a way to offer value to your audience. Do not turn it into a platform for direct-response sales letters.
A startup may take its time to succeed and become a profit-generating powerhouse. And there are plenty of reasons for a startup to not make it big But startup owners should refrain themselves from making the silly mistakes of missing out on things we discussed above that have the potential to jeopardise all of its chances. Let us know if you’d like to add anything else to this list. We’d love to hear how these tweaks benefited you.
Guest post by Anupam Rajey.
Anupam Rajey is a seasoned marketer and sales expert. He is the CEO of Acelerar Tech, a leading KPO that offers virtual assistant for social media, Internet research, email & chat support, and more.
