A beauty guru on TikTok exclaiming about a new holy grail concealer. A model posting an Instagram story about their favorite vegan burger place. A celebrity is pictured with a cute hoodie from a startup fashion label.
These days, plenty of brands work hard to get their products to celebrities and influencers—people with a high follower count and engagement on social media. This is because one post from them featuring your brand’s product can make previously sluggish sales skyrocket.
Of course, this scenario is a dream come true, especially for small business owners. That is until the demand exceeds the supply, you run out of finished products before you could fulfill all orders, and you can’t get raw materials quickly.
This phenomenon is called a sales surge and, while it looks like a positive matter, it could lead to your business’s downfall. Some of the negative effects of a sales surge include:
- Unhappy customers due to unfulfilled orders
- Employees quitting due to too much workload trying to catch up on orders
- Sub-par product quality
- Bankruptcy
Keep in mind that a sales surge doesn’t just happen in the scenarios presented above. Seasonal shopping, emergencies, and other events can bring it about too. As such, you need to prepare your business by learning the ways to manage a sales surge.
1. Streamline Your Processes
One way to manage client surge is to find ways to streamline your processes so you can save as much time as possible. This might mean automating your repetitive operations, such as admin tasks.
For example, client communication is one of the easiest areas to automate. You can use mailing programs like MailChimp to automatically send emails to customers based on certain online behaviors or interactions with your website.
This is a great way to appease clients while saving time, which you can use to work on fulfilling their orders.
2. Provide Employee Support
As a business owner, you will likely see a sales surge as a growth opportunity. However, as mentioned earlier, the staff may see it as an overwhelming strain on their time and energy.
In the rush to meet demand, employees might need to work overtime for extended periods. And while this may be possible for a few weeks, it’s not sustainable long term, pushing your employees to quit.
To prevent employees from quitting, you can ask employees for ideas on how to reduce the strain on them while improving the process. Compensating employees or incentivizing extra work can also do wonders to keep them happy and motivated.
Hire Support to Help Service Your Clients
Did you know that CEOs who delegate generate 33% more revenue than CEOs who don’t know how? This is why another step to take when you have too many customers is to hire help.
Whether you hire a virtual assistant or more full-time employees who work in-office with you, it’s important to delegate tasks to handle the client surge and continue to grow your business.
Delegation helps you focus on more revenue-generating tasks while your virtual assistant holds down the client-facing side of your business. This means, in the big scheme of your business, it’s worth the additional expense to hire help.
While a sales surge is not all positive, you can’t deny that having more customers can be a good problem to have. As long as you know how to manage them properly, you can grow your company successfully.
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