As a business enters a period of consistent growth, it becomes increasingly important that it invests in appropriate technologies for maintaining healthy expansion. A tool which may be ideal for a stable business confident in its position in its market can become worthless in the hands of a business which may need to discard it and replace it with something else months or years down the line.
What makes a technology ideal for growth?
There are two ways to look at technology when selecting what to invest in during a growth period. One, you need something that you won’t need to replace with another solution if growth continues. Two, you want something which can help maintain the growth indefinitely rather than something that offers a short-term boost to a new plateau. In other words, you’re looking for scalable technologies, tools which can help you a lot today and still help form the backbone of your company ten years down the line.
Workforce management
For most companies, growth means more employees doing more work. That in turn means workforce oversight becomes increasingly complex, which means the task of keeping your workforce efficient becomes increasingly inefficient in and of itself. This is where a workforce management solution comes into play, helping you to avoid understaffing or overstaffing, helping you keep track of all the intricacies without hiring an army of HR workers.
A good workforce management solution will help with tracking attendance and time, scheduling, talent development and management, performance monitoring, payroll and benefits admin, and myriad other difficulties of HR.
Marketing automation
As your company grows, marketing becomes necessarily more expansive and expensive; whether you’re growing by selling more to the same customers or picking up an abundance of new customers, marketing is going to play a critical role in maintaining healthy growth. To make the most of your growth without losing quality of marketing or sacrificing too much of your gains to feeding the engine, you need marketing automation.
With the right tools in hand, you can give your existing marketing team everything they need to deliver more potent marketing to more people without greatly expanding your team or marketing budget. The clever use of CRM suites and other automation tools can make sure your team delivers the right message to the right person at the right time. Efficient market segmentation, follow ups, personalization of materials, lead scoring, all of this can be done automatically.
Cloud-based solutions
Moving as much of your toolset into the cloud as possible will make it far easier to maintain a coherent system as your company grows, without spending a huge portion of your budget on outfitting workers with the necessary software. SaaS and cloud data storage can also keep your workforce consistent in the face of differences in equipment, delivering the same experience to your PC workers, mobile workers, Mac workers, etc. These tools are also immensely useful in keeping collaboration from becoming a snarled mess as your company grows.
Parting thoughts
You shouldn’t view this list as a limitation on what you can invest in—rather, your growth means you have the opportunity to invest in these highly effective, highly efficient tools. And by their nature and the nature of growth, they’ll only become more potent as time passes. A company which fails to invest in such tools, by contrast, will hit a wall in its growth far, far sooner. Take the time to determine the best tools for your growth now and the best tools for your growth tomorrow, and build healthy scalability into the fabric of your business.
