Productive Strategies Can Increase Revenue Growth

Every company is looking for ways to enhance it. Our firm’s definition of marketing includes all activities that influence revenue growth. The two subjects we review below may appear to be outside of conventional marketing thought, but not if you accept our definition that marketing is every skill, policy, program or activity that affects revenue.

What is one of the most direct risks to revenue?   Internal fraud.  The U.S. government reports that fraud performed by your own employees is one of the greatest causes of business failure. What caught my ear when I recently heard a talk on this issue is that there is a very effective tool against such fraud that very few small companies take advantage of. Because of the importance of this tool, all large publicly traded firms are required by law, Sarbanes-Oxley, to use this tool.

The tool is to offer your employees a phone number that they can call in complete confidence to report fraud if they observe it in your company-in effect, a “tip line.” To answer this need, we created a product for our clients using our call center’s inbound 800, voice mail, and page/notification technology. If you are interested in outsourcing the “tip line” to insure privacy, please contact us. The program we designed provides an 800 number, a local number, a voice mail account, and an automatic notification system to alert the appropriate party at your company that a voice mail has been left. We also include an email blast to your employees to advise them periodically of this resource and to assure the confidentiality of their call.

A second threat to revenue growth results from data loss.  Again, a government study reports that 93% of all businesses that suffer a major data loss will go out of business within five years. This is the ultimate disruption of revenue growth. What is worse is that most companies don’t realize that their current back up system is inadequate.

80% of the time the loss results from human error. The most common errors include:

• The information believed to be on the backup is not there

• The tapes do not function 50% of the time

• Corrupted data has been saved over good data, thus no backup exists

• The backup is not stored far enough away to assure its survival

One of our clients now offers a backup service that works automatically, during the night. The data is encrypted and can only be restored by you. The data is stored in
redundant locations within the United States. We were on the service for about six weeks when one of our important hard drives crashed. The computer was in Nevada at the time, and we needed it within three days to be in Michigan for a presentation I was giving. In those three days, a new hard drive arrived from the computer maker, and all data was restored. Without this vital service it would have taken too many hours and too many dollars to restore what was on this specific hard drive.

For more information on the back up service visit our client’s site:  www.level2storage.com/PS

During an annual physical exam my doctor asked me if I wore seat belts. I confessed that I usually did, but was not a 100% user. He then informed me that nothing he could medically suggest would have the same impact as my wearing seat belts. I’ve been wearing them ever since. The same thought applies to the discussion above: It will do you no good to invest in sales training or lead generation or a new marketing plan if fraud or data loss sink or slow your ship.

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