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Ready to Scale? Get the Talent Necessary to Unlock Growth

Posted: 03 Feb 2020 01:00 PM PST

If you look at any successful company, you'll find periods of rapid growth. But for every successful company, thousands of others fail because they're unable to sustain the high growth rate needed to thrive. 

But what separates the successful from the unsuccessful? It hinges on building the right team. 

Sink or swim 

Talent makes a huge difference in whether your company sinks or swims. For most businesses, revenue is the biggest – and sometimes only – concern. 

When you hit an accelerated growth period, though, you'll need an agile workforce with a wide range of skills. If your team is not properly structured to handle the changes, your business can stagnate. You must make efforts to find people who can put the right organizational structures, processes, and technologies in place. This will help you keep pace with sales while adding strategic insight regarding where your business should go. 

Businesses that scale successfully often involve their top executives in all hiring decisions. They recognize the importance of having the right team. And to find the right team, they focus on bringing people who have the right skill sets and competencies together to thrive in a high-growth environment. By taking the right steps, you can overcome the challenges inherent in scaling and instead achieve success. 

Ramp up for explosive growth 

Even with the right team, scaling your business is easier said than done. It requires each facet of your operation to remain upright during the fits and spurts of accelerated growth. A tall order, no doubt, but it's within your grasp if you follow these five strategies. 

1. Always be recruiting.

Successful companies are constantly recruiting. When demand spikes, you don't want to scramble to find people to handle the work. Instead, build a bench of candidates who are ready to go when you need them. And if you find someone great in the process, but the timing isn't exactly right to put them in place, make adjustments. You could create a new role, find an open position, or bring that person on as a consultant – just don't let them slip through your fingers. 

The important thing is to identify the great people in your talent pool. To attract these people, develop and communicate a cohesive employment brand. Branding can make all the difference as your business grows and you look for talent. 

Your company's reputation is built through every piece of collateral you put out, including job descriptions, employment announcements, career pages and more. That's why it's important to work with your marketing team to create content that accurately represents why your company is a great place to work – and every touchpoint should be a sales pitch for your organization. Ultimately, you want to capture your company's story and tell it consistently across every channel your candidates view. 

When promoting your employment brand, you can amplify your efforts by getting your entire team involved. Think of your employees as ambassadors, promoting the company brand and getting the word out. If they do that, you're sure to become a magnet for talent and grow your candidate pool. 

2. Hire for the right competencies.

Problem-solving skills, teamwork and initiative are the qualities most companies seek in talent, according to a recent survey. In a high-growth environment, initiative is especially important; employees will have to create solutions or put processes in place independently, often with limited resources. And when you're in a high-growth environment, you want resourceful employees who are able to do more with less, roll up their sleeves, and get the job done – no matter the amount of time, money, or manpower you have. 

Problem-solving skills are equally imperative, because you need people who can develop creative solutions to reach your goals. During a high-growth period, you'll probably have a spike in demand. You'll need a team that can solve problems and reach solutions quickly to meet that demand. Additionally, hire people who are passionate about the work your company does. Employees will have to work long hours in a high-growth environment, but those long hours don't feel like work if you have a team that cares about what it's doing. 

Though it's an overused term, agility is another important trait that determines success or failure for a high-growth company. Without a team that can quickly pivot and navigate challenges and opportunities, you'll be hard-pressed to stay relevant in the ever-changing marketplace and sustain long-term success. 

Companies fail when they hire for experience instead of competencies. From leaders to managers to employees, be thoughtful about your hires. You want team members who can work together, motivate one another to take responsibility and make decisions quickly. Above all, hire people who will bring new strengths to the company and complement your existing skill sets. 

3. Find real leaders.

Building a company from scratch requires a visionary management team. Find leaders who have the future in mind and possess foresight, expertise and a knack for distilling complex matters into simple terms. Hire managers who demonstrate the above competencies, can do more with less, and are committed to the success of the company and its employees. 

Though this may sound obvious, make sure each person on your management team is a good listener. This can do wonders for productivity and morale. For example, a Salesforce study found that employees who feel heard are nearly five times more likely to be empowered to do their best work. Good ideas can come from anywhere, and your managers need to make sure people feel comfortable speaking up. 

4. Commit to your team.

In high-growth companies, employees often do more work with fewer resources and support. To make sure your team members still feel supported, find creative ways to invest in their growth and career development. For example, you can send them to conferences or provide coaches and mentors. It might take extra effort on your part, but a Randstad study found that 58% of workers say their employers don't offer enough growth opportunities; another 57% say they'll need to change jobs to advance their careers. 

If you're scaling your business, you're scaling people. Ensure your team grows with the company by offering training, benefits, and more. Your commitment to the team isn't just the right thing to do – it can solidify your competitive advantage from the start. After all, you need a good team to sustain high growth. 

5. Communicate your plans.

Communication is the best way to prepare for the challenges of scaling. It can make or break the best of companies, even ones with solid teams and strong goals. Poor communication accounts for more than $37 billion in business expenses, and communication barriers cost organizations about $62 million a year in lost productivity. In a business that's scaling, productivity is everything. 

To avoid these losses, communicate your change management plan to the whole team. Without the proper strategies and internal communication channels in place to get buy-in from stakeholders, the changes will have a ripple effect on the productivity of your company. People will be confused and reluctant to adapt to the modifications needed to sustain high growth. Role clarity plays a big part in this; make sure each team member knows how he or she is contributing to the short- and long-term success of the company.

Conclusion

Whether you're just starting your business or it's 20 years old, unlocking high growth comes down to one thing: getting the right talent. Your team will set you apart from the competition, and it will be the difference between sinking or swimming. By assembling the right team, you'll have no problem handling the challenges of high growth and making a splash in the business world.

This article was written by Sarah McCullough and Jill Greenblat.

4 Tips for Growing Your Personal Brand Website

Posted: 03 Feb 2020 12:00 PM PST

  • Personal brands are used to turn a person and their career into a profitable business. 
  • The most common people that use personal brands include business owners, freelance developers, artists and writers. 
  • Understanding your target audience can help improve engagement. 
  • Networking with other experts in your industry is a great way to grow your brand. 
  • Blogs and social media marketing are great ways to share your content and build your business identity.

Are you a business owner, freelancer or developer? If so, there's a good chance you have a personal brand website. If you don't know, brand websites are essentially pages that feature one person, and that individual markets their career as a brand. 

There are plenty of benefits to using a personal brand to grow your career. For starters, your website will act as a resume. If someone wants to know what you've accomplished in the past, you can send them your site that features a comprehensive list of your testimonials and byline work. 

Despite the advantages of having a personal brand, most people struggle when it comes to getting other people to engage with their website or business. We are going to take a look at four ways you can help your website flourish while increasing engagement. 

Understand your target audience 

Business owners know that you have to understand your target audience when you run an online store, but the same rules apply to personal brands. When you want to grow your website, you have to think about the goal of your brand page. 

Do you want potential clients to find your website and email you with a job offer? Is your goal to connect with other experts in an attempt to start a new project? Think about who you want to attract to your website and create content and marketing material that resonates with your audience. 

For instance, if you are a freelance writer, you know that your clients don't have time, or lack the skills to write. In that case, you would want to create marketing material where you show how you take dull and lifeless content and turn it into something amazing. 

When you know the kind of people you want to reach, it makes growing your business long term much more manageable. If you want to know more about your target audience, you can refer to your onsite analytics, as well as email and social media statistics. 

Connect with experts in your industry

Believe it or not, there are plenty of experts in your industry ready to engage with your brand. Two new professionals join the professional social media platform, LinkedIn, every second. Due to a large number of people that use this website and many others, you can easily find people that have the same interests and experiences. 

The ability to connect with other experts in your industry can help you build connections and start exciting new projects. Better yet, when the average person or business owner sees that you're engaging with a famous expert, there's a good chance that their expertise will rub off on you. The idea here is simple, "If (famous person) trusts them, they must know what they are talking about." As a result of this philosophy, consumers are much more likely to visit your website and see what you're about if they notice that you're talking to people that they know.  

This is different from influencer marketing, which we will discuss later, because this is not a paid promotion. Instead, this is a meeting of minds between two people with similar interests. The fact that the conversation is playing out publicly for people to see is great for educating and engaging with people interested in what's being said.

If you live near a big city or like to travel, you may want to consider going to business conventions in your industry. You can meet with people that have similar interests, grow your network and pass out cards that have the URL to your website. If you're ultrasavvy, you can even collect emails for your brand newsletter while you're at the convention. 

Create a personal blog 

Surprisingly, personal blogs are an afterthought to some people that make brand websites. It's not hard to see why. There's the idea that since the website is already full of testimonials and previous work, there's no reason to create a blog for your website. 

As it turns out, the opposite is true. Blogs are a great way to show off your personality and flex your creative muscles. The great part about running your blog is that you can write about whatever you want. 

This freedom may help you shine in a unique way that's bound to attract the attention of a potential client or peer. If you want your website to grow, focus on creating content for your blog that resonates with your target audience and your career. 

Let's revisit the fictional freelance writer we mentioned earlier. This writer could write a blog post explaining the benefits of hiring a freelance writer or pitfalls to avoid if you want to hire a copywriter. At the end of the blog post, the writer can plug in a call to action that encourages the reader to submit a quote for a piece of written content. 

An added bonus of creating a blog is you can target keywords for your industry in your posts, which can improve your SEO and, therefore, organic traffic. When you consider that 75% of Google searches don't make it off the first page, high-quality SEO is vital to your growth. 

Market yourself on various platforms 

Business owners and freelancers are going beyond their website and email marketing when they want to promote their brand. Now, many of these people are creating profiles on various social platforms like YouTube to increase the number of people that see their website. 

The truth is, diversifying your content ensures that everyone that can potentially benefit from your service could get the opportunity to see your website. For instance, if someone watches YouTube but doesn't have a Facebook account, one of your videos could lead them to your site. 

Influencers are extremely common when it comes to spreading personal brands. The owners of these websites find influencers that operate in their niche on Instagram, Twitter and YouTube and pay for promotion or something for free in exchange for a shoutout. The key here is finding something with a small, highly-engaged audience that's similar to who you're targeting.

Conclusion 

It's hard to deny the success of personal brand pages. More often than not, people look online when they need to find someone with a specialized skill set, like developing software, writing, or owning multiple businesses. 

A brand website that's designed to represent you and your core values can help you spread awareness and get more people interested in the products or services you offer. As your business grows, you'll continue to add and update your testimonials and content. You can expect to see changes in your target audience and the content you create over time. Your brand website should change and grow with you, which makes it a physical representation of your career and accomplishment. 

If you continue to update your website, engage with your audience, and create a blog loaded with valuable content, you'll have no problem growing your brand identity.

How Negative Reviews Can Be a Positive for Your SEO

Posted: 03 Feb 2020 11:25 AM PST

Managing your brand's SEO (search engine optimization) often feels like trying to catch cats in the dark. You know what success looks like, but getting there is chaotic and difficult. Everyone has their own strategies, but no one can give you a game plan with a 100% success rate.

Of all the moving parts involved in SEO, reviews are one piece we don't spend a lot of time talking about, since you have no direct control over what people say about your business. Despite our lack of control over reviews, they are a factor in SEO. It's worth taking a look at the relationship between negative reviews and SEO.

The role of reviews in SEO

SEO is based on a diverse collection of information from a wide variety of sources. While secrecy from search engines makes it impossible to pinpoint exactly what determines their rankings, we do know the basic parts of the equation. We know that reviews do affect SEO, and we've been learning over the years that their impact is growing steadily.

According to a 2018 survey by Darren Shaw, online reviews make up around 15% of the factors that go into local rankings on Google. Keep in mind that this applies to local search only, not broad search. However, local search may be a big part of your SEO strategy, and much of what we know about local SEO factors and techniques has some useful application in broad search as well.

Whether positive, negative or somewhere in the middle, reviews can boost your SEO by adding to the mix of your engagement and brand interest.

Positive effects of negative reviews on SEO

Negative reviews of your business aren't always a force of evil against your SEO efforts. There are a few distinct ways that bad reviews may actually benefit you at the end of the day. Here are some of the things reviews do for you that can positively impact your SEO: 

1. Boosting your total number of reviews

The more reviews you have, the better it tends to be for your business. Negative reviews add to the total number of reviews listed for your business. Google tends to place businesses with a larger number of reviews closer to the top of the list, assuming the average rating is high enough.

If your negative reviews outweigh your positive or neutral reviews, of course, this can start to be a problem. However, a few negative reviews mixed into your others won't be the end for you.

2. Giving you more authenticity in consumers' eyes

People don't trust companies that only have five-star reviews. In the eyes of many, this is too good to be true. It's better to have a mix of reviews because this makes you appear more authentic and genuine to people, and it shows you aren't using shady practices like buying good reviews and finding ways to hide bad reviews. This can drive more clicks and interest in your company, which improves your ranking.

3. Boosting your engagement numbers

It's better to have people interacting with your business with negative comments than to have no engagement at all. Reviews give customers a way to engage with your brand and give you an avenue to respond. Engagement plays a role in SEO, so the more engagement you have, the better it will be for you in the future.

By engaging with negative reviews, you also have a chance to show potential consumers how you handle a bad experience. Do you try to make things right for the consumer? Do you promise to take steps to rectify the situation? People who are interested in your product or service will see your reply, and that can reassure them that you take care of your customers.

4. Connecting related keywords to your brand

Reviews, even negative ones, tend to contain keywords that are relevant to your business. Keywords in reviews are great for your overall SEO, as they point to what your company is doing and support your own SEO efforts by prompting industry-specific keywords. As long as the reviews are on Google Verified Review Partner sites and software, the keywords within those reviews will help you.

5. Giving you personal insights

No one will tell you what they think of your brand more honestly than customers writing reviews online. Customer surveys and anonymous critiques won't necessarily provide the same level of honest feedback. Reviews give you a glimpse at some of the problems and honest frustrations people have had when interacting with your business.

Imagine if a business like McDonald's were to go and read through all the reviews people post about them. Although some of the reviews would be bitter and angry without much wiggle room for resolution, others could present legitimate problems that the company should know about. This is a valuable source of information for you to learn about what people like and don't like without a filter affecting their responses.

Should you remove or respond to negative reviews?

The only negative reviews you should remove, if possible, are spam reviews or fake negative reviews. You can try to have these removed or disputed, if you can identify them. However, responding to reviews is never a bad idea. You can gain a lot from the engagement with your customers on third-party review sites. It's not a requirement, but it can be beneficial to respond to all types of reviews from your customers. [Read related article: Why Responding to All Your Online Reviews Is Critical]

Google My Business is a different story. Google has confirmed that responding to reviews left on your Google My Business account will help your page. Responding to reviews, both negative and positive, is a sign of the credibility of your business and your engagement with your customers. If your goal is to outrank other businesses in your specific section, you should respond to every review of your business, whether negative, positive or neutral. Never remove reviews.

Another indirect benefit of responding to negative reviews is the chance to get the person to change or modify their review in response to you. If you give an apology and offer to rectify the situation, that person may change their review to something more positive, remove their negative comment, or leave a separate positive comment.

Reviews undoubtedly affect SEO. If you're not already paying attention to reviews and working to manage them, take this as your wake-up call and start today. No matter where you're at with review management or monitoring, don't be afraid of a few bad words. Negative reviews in SEO aren't the end of the world, and they could even be beneficial to you if you play your cards right. [Looking for help managing your online reviews? Check out our review of Podium, our best pick among online reputation management services for review management.]

The presence of negative reviews can help your business or product appear more authentic and credible. It also gives you a chance to share your brand's voice by responding to criticisms, showing that you care about your customers and are dedicated to improving your products or services. By allowing negative reviews to remain tied to your business and taking steps to address them, you can turn them into an overall positive for your business.

 

What Marketers Really Need to Know About Artificial Intelligence

Posted: 03 Feb 2020 10:00 AM PST

Few topics ignite the imagination more than artificial intelligence, or AI. According to a Gallup poll, some 70% of Americans say AI will cut more jobs than it creates. Others fear much worse. To Elon Musk, it's a technology with the capacity to enslave us, which is why he is doing all he can to stop it. He's not alone. Bill Gates once said, "First the machines will do a lot of jobs for us and not be super intelligent. That should be positive if we manage it well. A few decades after that though the intelligence is strong enough to be a concern." Recently the New York Times reported that AI is actively being used to create wide-scale disinformation campaigns on Facebook.

To others, AI is a technology poised to free us from the ruthless burden of toil. President Obama called it essential to improving economic productivity and raising wages. Meanwhile, in a brief titled, Economic Impacts of Artificial Intelligence, the European Parliament writes that AI will "focus on productivity, efficiency, automation and costs, enabling consumers and businesses to capitalise on the digital economy."

Is AI coming for you in 2020?

AI already exists all around us. Every day you interact with very sophisticated AI, and even help train the AI models, though you may not be aware of your role in its proliferation. When you tell Siri to call your mom, or ask Alexa to tell you the weather, you're engaging with a sophisticated form of AI called natural language processing. When you confirm whether or not these AI techs served up the right results, you're helping to train the model.

It's AI when your iPhone automatically sorts your photos or a website that suggests the perfect product you didn't even realize you want. Websites today anticipate and serve up content, products or services most likely to intrigue us because they're powered by algorithms designed to get to know us.

If you work for a software company, chances are high that AI is an important part of your product. And your job hasn't been eliminated, has it? Your supervisor is a human being, not a machine, right? Now that you realize you use AI every day, perhaps you don't find it scary after all.

What is AI?

AI is a field of computer science that teaches machines and robots to act "intelligently," meaning they can make highly informed decisions all on their own. The concept is old, kicking around academic circles since the 1950s. In fact, a British logician and computer pioneer first described AI back in 1935.

Machine-learning is often used interchangeably with AI, but in reality it's a subset of AI. It's also extremely common so it's pretty important to have an idea of what it means. Machine learning is an approach to AI where the computer learns from data (often with the help of a human). 

There are two kinds of machine learning: supervised and unsupervised. Supervised machine learning is when a human trains a machine by providing it with the right answer. For instance, let's say you want to train a machine to identify dogs in images. With supervised machine learning, a data scientist would need to provide the machine with thousands of images, many of dogs, and many that aren't of dogs along with the right answers (i.e. this is a dog; this isn't a dog). The machine will begin to identify attributes that make up a dog (has fur, isn't blue, has two ears, etc.). 

This differs from unsupervised machine learning, which doesn't rely on humans to identify the right answer at all. In fact, quite the opposite is true. With unsupervised machine learning, data scientists feed a machine a ton of data and rely on the machine to surface insights. This is how iPhoto makes decisions as to how to sort your photos. It looks for commonalities in images, and then files baby photos together, photos with your friends together, and so on.

Unsupervised machine learning has a wide array of applications in the field of marketing. For instance, marketers use it to predict who their next customers will be. One way to accomplish that is to look at an existing group of users and examine all of the places they've been and behaviors they've engaged in. Let's say that you're a store that specializes in home furnishings and you want to know when a customer is in the market for a couch long before your competitors do. There are some real advantages to that insight, namely in terms of higher conversions and lower acquisition costs. Wouldn't it be ideal if you could advertise to those customers before they Googled "sectional couch"? Why pay for those expensive keywords if you can target the customer proactively?

In this scenario, data scientists would look at all of the online and offline behaviors of sectional couch customers to see if patterns emerge that indicate intent. Maybe people who will ultimately buy a couch first paint their rooms -- looking at interior paints online is an important clue. Machines are really good at crunching through complex and disparate datasets to identify important connections and commonalities. For instance -- and this is true -- people who Google school districts are likely to shop around for a new Internet service a few months later. Why? It's likely they're planning to move, and moving is a good time (and possibly necessary) to change carriers.

Thanks to the software industry, marketers can purchase a lot of AI functionality out-of-the-box. For instance, product recommendations and website personalization are very common tools you've probably interacted with as you shopped online. They anticipate what you're likely to want or need, and present it to you automatically. Of course, these AI tools aren't cheap, but that's another story.

AI Depends on Humans

A big misconception about AI is that it will replace humans and eventually eliminate us, but nothing could be farther from the truth. AI simply wouldn't work without humans. People play very important roles. First and foremost, they must frame and translate the question at hand. Let's say you're a marketer and you want to understand how to get more women aged 25 to 45 to buy your products. To arrive at that answer, you will need to identify the behaviors that indicate need, and then target women who share those behaviors but who aren't yet your customers. Put another way, youwill need to translate your marketing challenge from a qualitative problem into a quantitative one that an algorithm can answer.

Once you makes that determination, the next step is to figure out if the right data is available to answer that question. Remember earlier when we talked about supervised machine learning and how the model needs a set of right and wrong answers to identify a dog? A person training AI will need to curate data in order to ensure it will correctly answer the data.

More importantly, you must train and test the algorithm, and tweak it on an ongoing basis. It's actually not uncommon for an algorithm to go in the wrong direction if a human doesn't watch over it. Amazon made a splash when it announced it would use AI to help it cull through resumes and decide which candidates to invite for an interview. About a year ago, however, the company had to ditch its recruitment AI because it favored only males. This is why humans need to watch over AI to ensure it's delivering answers that make sense. A human recruiter would have spotted this bias in half a day.

How to Reduce Costs with Group Purchasing Organizations

Posted: 03 Feb 2020 06:00 AM PST

Group purchasing organizations (GPOs) empower separate companies to leverage their combined purchasing power to get better prices on supplies and services. Both general and industry-specific GPOs help businesses dramatically reduce their expenses while retaining access to the same products they normally use or sell. Joining a GPO leads to savings that businesses can invest in other areas, such as staffing, to maximize growth without cutting corners.

GPOs make their money by collecting membership and administrative fees from buyers, sellers, or both. Regardless of who pays, the presence of a GPO helps both sides. Buyers get access to better prices, while sellers get guarantees of volume. A good GPO, or the presence of multiple GPOs, can lift an entire market. Think of it like CostCo or Sam's Club — when a new store moves into the neighborhood, everyone saves. 

While some business owners mistakenly believe GPOs only serve companies in specific and closed niches, like heavy manufacturing, GPOs help all sorts of people. Some cater to general business buyers as horizontal market GPOs, while others serve specific industries and businesses as vertical market GPOs. Vertical market options also employ knowledgeable industry experts who not only help members get better deals but also educate members about their options and best purchasing practices.

Consider how GPOs help companies in these industries reduce costs and improve service:

1. Educational institutions get smarter deals

Schools use plenty of supplies. Teachers and administrators require student-specific items that traditional business supply stores may not carry in necessary quantities. Smart displays, electronic quizzing tools, and desks for everyone from kindergarteners to seniors don't appear in most showrooms. Working with an education-focused GPO, schools and school districts can turn student and faculty numbers into a powerful case for a sweet deal.

Schools face budgets stricter than even the leanest startups. Nearly all teachers have to spend some their own money on classroom supplies. According to research from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), teachers in high-poverty districts spend about $523 per year in unreimbursed expenses, while teachers in low-poverty areas spend $434. 

Educational institutions don't just order supplies, though. Schools also order food in large quantities, which means education-focused GPOs necessarily help schools find better deals on healthy ingredients. In a good GPO, members can coordinate with one another and with GPO employees to customize their menus as their districts' needs change.

2. Electronics and technology companies optimize operations

In the digital era, all companies are tech companies. Some spend more on technology than others, though, and GPOs can help those tech-savvy businesses save thousands or even millions on software, equipment, and subscriptions. Some electronics GPOs can even help companies save money on non-technical spending, such as company travel and shipping costs.

Because so many companies require electronics, some GPOs in this niche have evolved to serve more general audiences. That expansion has created a low barrier to entry, allowing even the smallest businesses with just a few employees to get in on the savings.

GPOs in electronics also play a major role in counterfeit prevention. Businesses that rely heavily on tech cannot afford to be duped by fake parts. At best, a fake part will not work correctly. At worst, a bad part could contain malware to capture and distribute sensitive company data to outside parties. Instead of risking the gray market for leftover pieces and savings, tech businesses should consider their GPO options to save money without putting their security at risk.

3. Healthcare institutions combine patient care with financial savvy

GPOs may be most famous for their role in helping healthcare entities get the supplies and equipment they need. Doctor's offices, hospitals, nursing homes, emergency rooms, and specialist clinics all depend on specific, hard-to-find items that rarely go on sale in consumer catalogs. Machines that cost millions of dollars may not look like candidates for group purchasing discounts, but when healthcare entities band together to leverage their buying power, suppliers quickly slash prices to avoid losing big contracts.

According to one study, GPOs in healthcare save members an average of 10-18% on products and services. With healthcare's famously high supply prices, that can quickly add up to millions of dollars a year in savings. Whatever fees a healthcare GPO may charge, members can make that money back after a single big order.

Like horizontal market GPOs, healthcare GPOs typically offer a wide range of services and savings to members. A healthcare GPO may be able to help with shipping costs for sensitive biological materials in addition to stethoscopes and scanners. Available options depend on the specific healthcare GPO, its member demographics, and its choices of partners, so prospective members should think carefully about their unique needs before committing to one option.

4. Nonprofit organizations save the world on tight budgets

Nonprofit organizations work hard to solicit donations, but with so much to do and so little time, many don't apply that same energy to saving money they already have. Enter the nonprofit GPO. Under a common umbrella, nonprofits can work together to save money, even if they focus on different missions.

Like schools, nonprofits deal with tight budgets. Nonprofit workers frequently go the extra mile to work extra shifts or make donations themselves. When nonprofits overpay for the supplies they need, they must either reduce the scope of their mission or cut overhead, which can include positions and hours. 

Nonprofit vertical GPOs help members access better prices to standard supplies and services at deeply discounted rates. By specializing in nonprofit work, these GPOs can also help nonprofit companies take full advantage of their tax privileges and identify opportunities to improve without spending more for the privilege. GPOs can also guide nonprofits to shop for unconventional needs, like rare types of insurance, which could prove vital during hard times.

5. Manufacturers solve big woes with big discounts

Healthcare organizations and manufacturing companies have something in common: they spend tons of money on expensive equipment. Healthcare GPOs may not know much about the manufacturing sector, though, which is why industrial and manufacturing GPOs arose to help these companies avoid overspending on equipment and tools that already carry hefty price tags.

Manufacturers must comply with a variety of laws regarding operations, sourcing, ethics, and environmental impact. A GPO staffed with manufacturing experts can help business owners and company leaders avoid common pitfalls and stay on the right side of the rulebook. When manufacturers can rest easy knowing all their products and equipment come from ethical sources, they can devote all their energies (and budget) toward scaling their operations.

Data matters in manufacturing as much as it matters in software, and good GPOs understand that. By keeping an eye on market trends and helping manufacturers find and acquire smarter tech, GPOs bring clarity to a complex and evolving industry. Manufacturers also need long-term, reliable partners, and GPOs provide an excellent forum to solicit advice, consider testimonials, and find the perfect match.

Businesses in these major industries benefit greatly from the influence of GPOs, but these are far from the only niches where GPOs thrive. In markets small and large, companies with common goals and similar needs band together to get better deals from suppliers, share knowledge, and make success more achievable for everyone.
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