Total Quality Business Management

The current global economic situation set the rhythm of business closure, mergers and acquisitions. The competition is fiercer than ever combines with the fact that 70% of small businesses will fail in their first five years of operation.

While most companies still struggle and grow in this economic climate. The company has created a complete strategy for the business success, and marketing is always the important part of business growth. Marketing is everything for every company, by an appropriate planning, execution and monitoring tailored to the company’s aims, growth come without breaking a sweat.

There are many ways to grow a business, most of which can be very complicated and expensive for small businesses. In short, there are three ways to grow a business.

• Generate more clients or customers
• Increase the number of purchases of customer / client
• Increase the value of each customer / client

(1) The way of generating prospect are many : press, media, word-of-mouth, social media, email marketing, etc. The effectiveness of each depends on how many marketing pillars the company use. To aim of generating more prospects must be converting them to the actual customers cause what is the point of letting people know about your business without capturing their needs to purchase? Of course, it feels like inviting everyone to dinner without entertainment. Simply by integrating a company’s USP into all marketing activities, will help increase the conversion rate of prospects to customers.

(2) By increasing the number of each customer purchases is the sales strategy most companies have found success in, particularly in the food industry and retail industry. In retail, this is called “link selling”, whereby, a customer decides to buy one item, but other products are introduced to the customers that go in hand with the initial purchase. The food industry is expert in this, gone are the days where you go to McDonalds for a burger, but now, it is recommended to buy a meal that consist of fries and a drink instead.

(3) The third way, which I think is more important is to increase in the value of each customer. The business owners need to see their customer as a lifetime customers. Analyzing the products or services that being offered your customers is a way to measure the value of every customer.

If you find it a challenge to decide on an online backup services provider for your business requirements, you are not alone. Many businesses are pretty much in the same situation with so many offsite backup vendors who offer such a service.

The short list of services providers that can provide the minimum standard of service should only consist of those who can meet the minimum criteria as explained below.

1. Established

Many vendors have come and gone. On this basis, I would recommend considering vendors with a track record of at least 5 years. This will ensure you have an established vendor to support your business needs in the long term.

2. Large business customer base

A large customer base by itself is further proof of the provider sustaining in the long term. Businesses by nature have more stringent requirements than say home / end users. So, having many business customers (with testimonials) usually mean that the offsite backup vendor has consistently provided the minimum satisfactory service standard at the very least.

3. Secured Premise

While impressed with what the online backup services provider can offer, do remember to check out the service provider’s premise before subscribing to their service. There should be physical security mechanism to allow only authorised people to have access to the service provider’s premise. Also, this premise should have protective measures against earthquake, fire and other natural disasters.

Established services providers often use world class data centres for their premises.

4. Scalable

As your business grows, your data storage needs will also increase. Do consider those vendors who have data plans that can cater for your present requirements and can be expanded in future when required.

5. Affordable plans

When it comes to pricing, there are some who offer “too good to be true” free storage for life. Well, all I can say is if it sounds too good to be true, then it probably is. And I don’t think you will want to rely on one that provides poor service or one that may not be there when you desperately need to recover your business data!

It’s far more important that you that you get the best service as long as the prices are affordable. The way to go about this is to determine the backup plan that meets your present requirements and from there set a budgeted price range.

Once you have gone through the five criteria above, you will have a short list of offsite backup vendors for you to carry out Stage 2 of the methodology and determine the online backup services provider of choice.