Commerce in the UK has been massively suppressed since the UK government started introducing social distancing measures and social restrictions in March. Almost every business has felt the effect of the crisis financially, and many companies are now, in effect, closed and hibernating – hoping to survive on their resources and the government’s financial assistance long enough to be able to reopen and recover in a few months.

In order to grow your enterprise from its current position, you need to bring in business from new customers. This might seem obvious on paper but finding ways to attract prospects and turn them into loyal (i.e. repeat) customers requires understanding them and how best to influence their decisions. As such, here are some of the factors you should be looking at in order to keep attracting customers.

To expand, and even to survive, every SME has to become comfortable with selling their services. According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS) 89% of UK businesses that started in 2017 survived into 2018, yet of those businesses that started in 2013 only about 42% were still operational. For your business to survive long-term you must be aware of how best to market yourself as well as be flexible enough to engage in newer methods for marketing and sales as they become available.

If your business has a couple of really big clients who keep on coming back, that's a good thing. Most companies have securing high value, repeat customers at the core of their business development strategy. However, over dependence on a core of returning customers – at the expense of new business sales – can be a risky approach. Here’s why.

You need to keep track of your relationships with your customers, but are you doing that in the most cost-effective and resource-efficient way? Many businesses rely on basic spreadsheets, and some still rely on piles of physical business cards. Keeping everything accessible and easy to manage with these outdated approaches can be a nightmare. Fortunately, if you need to build an intuitive and accessible database, there's a great alternative FREE option: HubSpot CRM.

Since LinkedIn introduced its native video feature in 2017, it's become increasingly attractive for small and medium-sized businesses. Your business could be missing out if it's not one of them, so let's go straight into looking at 5 reasons for business owners to use it to generate more leads and sales.

As the new year gathers pace, many businesses are looking to step up their sales performance. Attracting new customers is the first step on the road – and it can be tempting to fall back on that old standby, cold calling. But hold your horses. There are plenty of alternatives that don't involve calling people out of the blue.

A lot of articles talk about a website in terms of lead generation and marketing – i.e. getting people interested before the hard work of making a sale begins. But what if you’re one of those businesses for whom the majority of sales are still made face-to-face, at events, or through referrals? Do you really need to sink money into a website in this case? Yes. Your website is your most important sales asset, bar none. And that applies even if you make none of your sales online.

In this article, we explain why, and how you can optimise your website to make more offline sales.