Business growth is partly a function of how you acquire customers and clients and mostly about how you get repeated business from them. Smartly organising your business and professional contacts will go a long way in helping you do that.

Among the many tech solutions for local businesses, second phone numbers for work are one of the most effective and functional tools for business organisation and management.

What happens when you don't organise your business?

A lot of people don’t realise that there’s a significant cost to disorganisation. Whether you’re starting your business or looking to scale, if you don’t organise your business and professional contacts, you’ll end up paying the price in several ways.

Lost contacts: You may lose important clients or customers in the clutter of your online or offline documents. It would be awkward to reach out and get their details once again.

Difficulty in retrieval: Even if you don’t lose the contact details of important clients, if you don’t organise it, it will be difficult to find it at a moment’s notice. Just when you need to call them, you’ll have to waste time searching for the number.

Customer dissatisfaction: Customer service greatly depends on how you customise their experiences. What will help you do that is collecting and organising customer information. When you don’t have the necessary details, service becomes generic and dissatisfying.

Delayed communication: If your contacts are disorganised, there will be an inevitable delay in your communication. You’ll end up calling them hours or even days after you had to, which could lead to missed sales and revenue.

Tips to organise your business

Focus on core areas

As a business owner, it will be tempting to be on top of all parts of your business. To make it more effective, you should choose the key things that need your direct control. But limit those focus areas to two or three a day.

This will improve your focus on those areas that can increase sales and revenue. Also, this will show you where you don’t have to constantly supervise.

Schedule everything

You should actively organise your affairs by scheduling them in your calendar. Remember, being busy isn’t always a virtue. It’s a sign of a hurried, unprofessional and disorganised life.

Whether it’s a meeting with a client, marketing team or a vendor, add it into your schedule. This will later tell you where you’re spending most of your time and also whether it’s a good use of your time.

Manage your workspace

Organisation is the enemy of clutter. To get your business organised, keep your workspace and your work processes free of clutter. There should be a system for everything, from cold-calling clients to sending invoices to customers.

Streamline customer service

The quality of your customer service will decide how fast you grow and how many customers come to you for repeat business. In other words, better customer service often leads to higher revenue.

An effective way to improve your customer service is by monitoring and managing your online reputation. The more engaged and proactive you are at that, the easier it will be for you to improve your customer ratings.

Automate whatever's possible

Automation isn’t an added bonus just for bigger businesses. Even smaller business owners can automate most processes in your business. You could use the appropriate software to send out welcome emails, order details, thank you emails and personal wishes automatically.

This will not only save you time and energy but improve customer satisfaction and make your business more agile.

Use second phone lines for work

The hallmark of a successful business is how easy and professional its systems are. One of the proven ways to do that is by having a second phone number exclusively for business purposes.

It will help you organise your personal and professional contacts separately, which will make it easier to search for and communicate with your clients, customers and business associates. The other reason why every local business should opt for a second number is that it will enable you to separate your work and personal lives.

You’ll be able to devote yourself to work during business hours by responding to calls and messages via your second line and automating responses at the end of your working hours. Enabling clients and customers to get relevant responses through auto-reply texts is one of the main reasons why entrepreneurs prefer to have dedicated second lines for business.

Make your time count

As an independent business owner, contractor, entrepreneur or freelancer, the one resource that you’ve really got to focus on is time. Your growth rate, client acquisition and profitability will greatly depend on how well you manage your time. Organizing your business and contacts through a second phone line for work will give you more time to focus on satisfying your customers and growing your business.