How not to become a slave to your own Business?

Maybe you and I both agree on one thing: There is nothing better than owning your own business, being the boss, having economic benefits for yourself, and contributing to the community. developement of society. But many of you complain that you spend too much time on your business: you don't have time to travel, go out, see friends, and on holidays and weekdays you don't dare go anywhere for fear of not being able to control yourself. Control the store,...

Just started on a small scale but if you're lucky everything goes smoothly, larger scale, more customers, more branches,... will you still have enough strength to manage?

When we start a start-up, we have to work very hard, invest a lot of time and effort to work, but it should only be for a certain period of time, not the whole life. The purpose of doing business, making money, is also to serve ourselves and our families. Lots of money for what? When you can't go to your favorite place, can't spend time with your family, can't be present on important occasions for friends, relatives, etc. I've been like that too, selling more products is fun. , but I have to work more, have more control, and have less time for myself! Luckily, when I realized this, I read the book: 4 hour work week by Timothy Ferriss. Reading this book helped me realize a lot of things, if you are facing a similar situation you should also read it.

BE YOUR BOSS, DON'T BE A SLAVE TO YOUR BUSINESS!

Automate your business

How do you do this?

To master your business without being dependent on them, you need to find ways to achieve the following:

• Doesn't take much time for Management
• Don't tie yourself to one place.
• Can be controlled and handled promptly.
• When the scale grows, it does not take more management time.

To achieve the above, we know we must look for tools to automate current sales processes. How to reduce manual work to the lowest possible level. At the same time, reports can be easily viewed anywhere.

In each business industry there will be different ways of automation and you have to work hard to find suitable applications and ways of operating.

If you're lucky, your industry already has pioneers doing it, so you can find out how they're doing it. You won't be able to automate your entire process at first. Well, it's hard to do, so break your processes down and automate each part of it.

With the service industry

For example, if you make a website about legal consulting, you have many steps in your process and Live chat is part of them.

This step is quite important because after users enter your website and want to find out information but it is too difficult to contact and ask questions, they will exit and look at your competitor's website (note that when automating, apply 80/20 rule to see which parts are important and automate them first).

Therefore, having Live Chat is very necessary. If done manually, it will also cost you a lot of money because you have to hire staff to be on Live Chat.

Sometimes it's too crowded, the chat staff can't keep up, the chat is slow -> Customers always leave, and they also have a bad reputation because they have slow support, complain about money...

Sometimes it's as empty as Ba Danh pagoda, the support staff sit around chatting, watching livestream sales. Summer is coming, you're in the middle of hunting for jean shorts when your customer chats -> it's okay, after hunting, chat again, why rush?

True story…

You just lose money to support your employees, lose money on advertising, and receive aversion from customers.

To solve this, you can learn and use Chatbot to solve it. Because many Customers will have basic questions over and over again, you can automate answering these questions.

There are many Chatbot tools that will solve this. In particular, recently there have been thousands of advertisements selling the Facebook Chatbot process to you. But I note the following things for you:

• If your client, like this legal consultant, has traffic sources mainly from Google and then transferred to the website, it is best not to use Facebook Chatbot. Because it's inconvenient, customers have to log in to Facebook. One more thing, FB will read your chat and recognize the needs of customers looking for marriage law advice. Customers' newsfeeds are filled with ads from competitors.
• Most customers often repeat repetitive questions such as: how much does it cost? When are fees charged? You should synthesize these questions, the issues customers care about and build yourself a reasonable chatbot scenario.
• Set up chatbots for different pages or categories. For example, when a customer reads an article in the marriage law consulting category -> it shows that they want to leave each other. Please use a separate script for this section. For example: You want to divorce but don't know how much money to divide? Don't be like Thao! Let Binh Minh Law advise you! How long have you two been married?… (I'm just using an example, you can be creative)
• The language of the script needs to be friendly and fun to create friendliness for customers. Let customers know that they are still having fun while chatting with a bot.
• There should be a section to switch to live chat with the Consultant if the Chatbot's script cannot resolve the Customer's request.

That's a small example for the Service industry that I want you to consider how to think and do. Find and apply processes that are suitable for your service!

You can refer to Chatbot tools such as Landbot.io, Tidio,... They all have free packages but limit the number of chats, people can use and upgrade when their needs increase.

With sales shops

For sales shops, there is more space to perform because e-commerce has been developing for a long time and there are many businesses developing ecosystems here.

I have also used many foreign applications, but when doing Dropshipping, foreign applications almost do not support connecting with Vietnamese units such as shipping, payment, etc. And the main thing is that the fees are very high. high, while the effectiveness of use is still unknown.

You can automate parts such as placing orders, shipping, putting products on exchanges, etc. If before you had to use many services and have to connect data together manually, now These can all be done automatically. In the Vietnamese market, there is Sapo.

Before, I reviewed Sapo's Omnichannel platform for everyone. Recently, Sapo launched a mobile sales management application and advertised it quite loudly, so I tried it out.

Sapo App offers an unlimited free trial. The limitation is that you will only be able to create one warehouse and limited to 500 product codes. All other features are unlimited.

When trying out any application, I usually prioritize apps that have an unlimited free trial policy but limit some features or scale to save costs when the scale is small and to save money. Test whether the features are suitable or not. Because business often has many problems that cannot be predicted in 7 days, 15 days or 30 days.

When the business is better and has investment costs, there is no reason for you not to invest in upgrading, right?

To register, download the Sapo application on your phone. You can see the instructions here.

Evaluating the Sapo mobile sales management app

After trying out the Sapo sales management app, I have some reviews for you to refer to. I will only mention points that I find interesting and convenient. As for the obvious must-have features of a sales management app such as Orders, Customers, etc., I will not mention them anymore.

Adding products is relatively fast, convenient, and requires little effort

This is the product import interface of Sapo App. You can immediately take a photo of the product with the Camera on your phone or upload a photo of the product.

At the same time, the camera is also used as a barcode scanning tool. I personally tested this tool and found it to be relatively sensitive.

But there is a slightly inconvenient problem: Barcode cannot be added or edited to products that have already been created, but can only be used when creating new products.

Product attributes such as color and size are also created quite simply on the application. You just need to enter attributes such as color, size, etc., the system will automatically combine the attributes to create separate products according to the attribute.

Connect with Shipping Units

The application is directly connected to many large shipping units so you can automatically push orders to these systems.

If you connect to these shipping units, order statuses will be automatically updated, helping you reduce a lot of effort to just a few touches. And there are no errors like when entering orders manually.

In addition, the application also allows you to add your own Shippers to shipping partners for convenient tracking and statistics.

Report with visual graphs

I don't know how everyone is. But I'm not sensitive to these numbers, so I always want the results to be displayed in graph form so that it's easy to follow and compare each day's revenue, how the difference is, to find the cause and fix it, to know the product. Which products are accounting for more revenue than other products to come up with reasonable strategies.

That is my assessment of Sapo. What about your opinion? Please comment below to let everyone know. Everyone can see more about Sapo App here.