Sustainable business tips

We promote a lot of companies that have an environmental or social benefit in addition to doing a good job. And as somebody who manages many different sales campaigns, you would be surprised how little the reasons for buying is a company’s sustainability credentials or their ethical credentials

10% of customers say yes because of your ethical credentials

We measure everything and this is based on all the campaigns we’ve done over the last 5 years. I estimate that approximately 10% of people that said yes actually said yes for our client’s sustainable credentials.

That’s a bummer, right? Why can’t people pick a company solely because they do good in the world?

I bet you’re saying “I thought this was a blog about sustainable business tips and you’re telling me that nobody cares?”

To which, I say “Hold on, shh, I’ll tell you”

An uncomfortable truth about your customers, they’re in it for themselves

An unfortunate fact about the way that people buy is that people are much more likely to buy from you because of well-established business reasons instead of your sustainability credentials.

• Do you save that money?
• Do you make them money?
• Do you make their life easier?
• Do you save them time?
• Do you give them peace of mind?
• Can you be trusted to give a superior service?

I think I speak for everybody when I say I would love to be able to make much more sustainable choices all the time. But unfortunately, there is a practicality element to the purchases that I make. They need to solve the problems that I need them to solve. A big sustainable business tip is this, don’t forget that customers are buying your product to solve problems

Whatever the reasons for buying, your customers are still helping you make a difference

That’s not to say that this is necessarily a bad thing, this is simply a fact of life. If you go back to all of your customers, 10% said yes because you’re sustainable, the other 90% said yes because you’re doing a great job. Regardless of the customer’s reasons for saying yes, our clients are still providing a great service which has a clear environmental benefit at the same time.

So why worry if somebody is not saying yes because you have a sustainable business? Why worry if they’re actually picking you because you give a good price, or give a high-quality service? Who cares! The positive environmental impact is still the same.

An environmentally sustainable business needs to be commercially sustainable first

I think there is an assumption that to be as a sustainable business you have to sacrifice commercial viability. That is not true though. In fact, the most successful businesses that are sustainable and ethical or ones that have a commercially viable business and then attach an ethical aspect on to that commercial process:

• Innocent drinks have a well-established business that give 10% of profits to charity
• Domestos fights diseases like Cholera by using profits from bleach sales to build toilets in less developed countries
• Pre a Manger has a commercially viable and very profitable Cafe business and they simply give away the uneaten food at the end of the day to those that are in need. It’s food they can no longer sell, so why not?

All of these businesses are good, financially sound businesses that have attached an ethical benefit on to their commercial machine.

Small sustainable business tips

If you’re looking for a commercial reason to make your business more sustainable, based on my experience you will find about 10% more customers because of it. It doesn’t have to be particularly time-consuming or costly either. There are lots of ways that you can do this yourself:

• Promise to donate a certain amount of your profits to charity
• Invest heavily in your own employee’s development
• Provide some additional benefits to your wider community
• Or in our case, we plant a tree for every telemarketing lead that we generate

I’ll be honest, planting trees is a very straightforward thing for us to achieve. It sounds like a difficult thing but it really isn’t. We do this in two ways;

1. We plant trees ourselves
2. We use charities who plant trees on company’s behalf

Take some sustainable business tips from local small businesses

If you are concerned that small businesses find it harder to do such a thing compared with larger businesses than I will give you some local examples of companies that do this incredibly well;

• Yogafurie is a sustainable hot yoga studio which by simply changing their electricity and gas supplier, run their entire hot yoga studio on 100% renewable energy
• Ommec Direct Are a direct mail company that donate time to providing cups of tea and food for the homeless in Bristol
• Collect Eco is a waste removal company that helps companies clear out their own buildings when they are doing a refurbishment. The difference is that they arrange for as much of the collected furniture as possible to be donated to charities and good causes

I hope you found these sustainable business tips useful

I hope these examples show you how possibilities for your business to also have a positive environmental or social impact. It really can just be one simple change like the above or something that is close to your heart

A common misconception is that people assume that social and surprises cannot be profit-making enterprises. It has to work commercially for you otherwise you aren’t going to be able to make the positive impact that you want

Fortunately, I hope these examples have shown you ways that you can make a small difference to how your business operates which will have a huge positive impact for the world

Sustainable business growth with results focused pricing

If you would like to talk further about growing your sustainable business, we have 2 ways which we can help

24/7 Pay-Per-Lead Webchat – We help you to maximise your ROI from your online marketing by converting your traffic into qualified leads on an entirely Pay-Per-Lead basis

Results-focused telemarketing – We can manage your whole sales process and grow your business with results focused pricing