4 business skills you can develop right now

Table of Contents

It’s great fun being a business owner but it’s hard to find time to develop you and your business. These business skills are easy to implement and we have even included activities you can do.

Project management

Running a business involves managing projects. It can be anything from managing website changes to running a marketing campaign. You need to know how to manage your resources (Your time, money and staff etc).

You can see why it’s a key business skill.

Business Skills Activity: SMART Goals

This is a simple activity that is not just handy for you, but your whole team. Setting SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Timely) goals helps to set everyone to make sure everyone knows what they are aiming for.

SMART object for your business could be something like this “Increase Website Sales 20% by December 2020:

  • Specific: To increase the number of sales that come to our site by 20%
  • Measurable: Increase our annual sales from 10,000 to 12,000
  • Achievable: Due to our marketing efforts we will be able to achieve this if we continue to prioritise this objective over others
  • Relevant: The more traffic we have, the more money we make and the larger our reach
  • Timely: We have set the goal’s target by December 2020

Understanding your customers

You might think you know who your customers are but do you know how to reach more people like them? There 2 things you need to know about your target market:

  1. Demographics – Age, gender, location
  2. Psychographics – A buyer’s habits, hobbies, spending habits and values

An example could be:

Demographic Profile:

  • Female
  • Business owner
  • Aged 30-45
  • Married, with children
  • Wanting to learn more about business development, marketing, sales
  • Household income £100K+

Psychographic Profile:

  • Concerned with running her business
  • Enjoys going online in the evenings, a big fan of Instagram
  • Tends to favour quality over quantity
  • Finds fulfilment in her career and family
  • Values time with a small group of friends
Business Skills Activity: Profile Your Customers

This is an easy task that helps you target your existing and new customers online(as well as offline). This task is easy to do when you take it one step at a time. Ask yourself and look at your existing customers to answer these questions:

  1. How old are they? (this can be an age range)
  2. What gender are they?
  3. What’s their occupation?
  4. What ethnicity are they?
  5. Where are they from? (this can be a radius e.g. within 20km of Newcastle, UK)
  6. What’s their highest qualification achieved?
  7. What are their personality characteristics?
  8. What lifestyle do they live?
  9. What are their attitudes towards [an industry]?
  10. Do they have any core principles & beliefs?
  11. What activities and interests do they have and like to do?

Sales and marketing business skills

Having successful sales and marketing is essential in growing your business. Understanding your customer is a great start but they are a few key things you should also look to learn:

Social Media Management

As a small business owner, you don’t have hours to spend improving your social media accounts, however, there are a number of ways to improve your social media accounts by doing very little.

These adjustments to your social platforms can boost business growth and get you more customers, with very little time spent on it.

You can read the article here.

Simple Sales Techniques

We all have our own sales pattern but it wouldn’t hurt to increase your sales conversion rate would it? These are simple techniques that you can use that really do work. Read the article here.

You can go one step further, we are releasing a course about boosting your sales.

The most essential of all business skills: Time Management

What is the one thing that we all have in common; no matter who we are, no matter where we are in the world, what we do, or how much money we have? We all have the same number of hours each day, the same number of days in each week, and the same number of weeks in each year. How we manage our time, is where we differ!

Some people manage their time much more efficiently than others and are therefore more productive. No matter if I’m talking to business owners or students in education, time management always seems to be a big issue. So here are some of my top time management tips.

If you want to go one step further we have just released a time management course that’s available here.