By Jim Sansi

It seems wherever you look nowadays successful businesses are using some form of testing to improve their business. From brand name soft drink makers to political campaigns the key to improving the profitability of any business is to simply to try out new things and new ways of running the business until you have a valid result then acting upon those results as a way to guide future actions.

But where do you start testing? Well first and foremost you should be constantly testing your sales and marketing materials. If you have an online sales page or print advertisements go and test different layouts, colors, fonts and wording of the ad itself. Sales and marketing material is the lifeblood of a business and the good news is that even very small changes can have a big impact on conversion or response rates which will directly puts more money in your pocket... But if you're not testing you will be missing out on these potential gains.

If sales and marketing are the direct customer facing side of things then operations handles the fulfillment and services that will influence a customer's satisfaction of your business. This is also a critically important area of any business to test and improve upon because it is absolutely important to retain customer's long term.

So go out and test and track the results from your order to delivery, support systems and product fulfillment processes. You should especially test them even if they are handled by third party companies to ensure they are running in top shape and can make delivery on time.

Beyond sales and operations I highly recommend that you implement testing and process improvement in every area of your business. Establishing testing and continuous improvement cycles throughout is a major accomplishment that will ensure the long term viability and profitability of your business.

You can discover even more awesome tools, techniques and articles for achieving outstanding results in any business at The Kaizen Business blog.

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