3 ways to increase your take-home income (and how Office Power can help)
Working in partnership with office supplies businesses throughout the years – as well as running our own – has given us some great insights into business best practices; what really works and what doesn’t generate any return. In this blog we wanted to share the 3 key areas that us and our partners focus on to ensure that our businesses are more profitable. Do you focus on these too or are there other areas which you find more important?
Margin management
Profit margin is probably the most common area that you look at to ensure you maximise your profit. We do it too and here is how; first things first – cost prices. We continuously negotiate with our suppliers on our partners’ behalf to ensure that our cost prices are as competitive as possible. This allows us to pass savings on to our partners, helping them maintain a healthy margin. Secondly our dealer partners look at their pricing strategies and the Office Power platform gives them all the tools they need to optimise their pricing. For example, they can create segmented pricing for different customer target groups, lock-in contract prices and automate price changes to go up or down depending on the cost price changes using Dynamic Pricing, always protecting their margin.
Optimising your customer
Of course, selling more and making more money as a result is an obvious statement, but what’s important is that you sell smarter. Over-servicing loss-making customers and inefficient sales strategy can really harm your bottom line. This is what our dealer partners and businesses focus on the most. With the help of Office Power CRM tools, our dealers can see which customer segments have the potential to generate the most sales. They then look at these segments even more closely by filtering them in multiple ways – lapsed, not buying in certain categories, sales have declined, quotes have expired and a multitude of others in order to slice and dice the customer data. This helps to really focus the sales process on the most profitable customers. It also enables our dealers to focus on trading the customer rather than trading the order. Winning an order is one thing, but building a deep understanding of that customer buying profile and communicating to the customer about the right things at the right time is key.
Adopting lean principles
In simple terms, being a lean business means creating greater value for the customer while using fewer resources. We’re not suggesting any drastic measures. The important thing is to eliminate waste and increase your operational efficiency. This may mean anything from re-thinking your sales strategy to re-structuring certain departments to make them more efficient. In some cases (not all) our dealer partners outsource some of their operational business functions to us, such as customer service for example. This helps them turn some of those fixed overheads into variable, resulting in a more profitable business.
