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Discounting Is Dangerous

Offering a discount in the heat of negotiations may seem like a good idea at the time but thoughtless discounting is an easy way to lose money fast.Before you succumb to the temptation to win new business by offering a discount take a moment to consider these ten problems associated with discounting.1.    Discounting eats away profit margins!2.   Negotiating a discount focuses the customer’s attention on your price. If your only competitive advantage is price you are i...

Cash Management Creates Choices

Managing cash is one of the most important tasks for any business owner and even if it’s not as glamorous as sales and marketing it is the job that makes sure the bills keep getting paid on time.  The cash position of a business at any time is easy to determine if you know just three figures – the cash in the bank, the cash that’s going to be received by the business, and the cash that has to be paid out. It sounds simple, and it is, yet it’s  amazing how many business own...

Measuring Customer Service

The focus of every business today, from corner shops to IT multinationals, is on providing customer service. The driving theory says that keeping customers happy is the key to customer retention; and customer retention is the key to profitability.And these days if a business doesn’t please its customers it won’t be long before they go somewhere else – there are plenty of places to go.To remain competitive every business needs to examine just how it’s handling the fundamentals of customer...

Strategies to Reduce Costs

The business depends on its cash flow to pay its bills. Cash flow can fluctuate greatly in smaller enterprises and there are often times when payments have to be made selectively. This is a strategy to serve as a general guide for paying bills at any time; it is especially useful for times when extra consideration has to be given to which bills are paid and which are delayed. Prioritise every bill that comes in when it comes in. Maintain a register of all bills that shows their priority ranking,...

Don’t Hire Problems

One of management’s key responsibilities is selecting the right people to perform the functions needed by the business to operate productively. Hiring the wrong person can affect your business for years. Businesses have even been found legally liable for damages to property and injury to customers as a result of employee incompetence because they failed to uncover the candidate’s depth of ignorance at the time of hiring.Whether you’re about to hire your first team member or you’ve alread...

Develop The Art Of Being Small

Being small in business isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In fact, small businesses have a lot of advantages over their larger competitors. Small business collectively is the world’s biggest business. Small businesses have perfected the arts of travelling light, living frugally and being able to quickly change direction. Recognising the specialised nature of small business can help you appreciate and use some of the advantages you enjoy. The CEO is multifunctional The decision making powers of ...

Acquiring And Managing Leads

The process of gaining new customers can be summed up in two steps - ‘getting leads’ and ‘converting leads to customers’. Although the first step is the responsibility of marketing and the second is the responsibility of the sales function, the two have to work together to optimise their effectiveness.Generating the leads themselves is always the first task of any successful marketing exercise. Leads can be purchased, as in buying a mailing list of prospects, but gaining your own isn’t...

Cut The Costs Of Marketing

Every organisation with a sales force keeps an eye on the leads it generates - how many does each salesperson get and how many are converted into customers. But as most companies now appreciate, the costs of generating and converting leads need to be carefully managed or they can become a real drain on profitability.The basic tasks of lead management are to lower the costs of lead acquisition while at the same time increasing the rate of conversion into customers. To do this it’s best if you s...

Five Oversights That Can Kill Your Business

Business owners usually have long term visions for their enterprise, but most business failures happen quickly, before the owner is able to change course or implement strategies that will correct the situation.  The fatal gap between planning and performance is often the result of one of the following set of factors, although two or more of these can occur simultaneously and accelerate the organisation’s demise. Take a close look at your own business and be sure none of these are taking s...

Focus on your Core Competencies

A core competency is something that a company does well compared to others in its field; it’s an edge that can be used in marketing to offset competitors’ strengths. All successful businesses know their core competencies and conduct their business around them.  Core competencies are many and varied. They can be a technology, such as Apple's development of the miniaturised hard drive that made the iPod name synonymous with MP3 players. They can be a tradition of service like the Red Cro...

Become A Better Communicator

Most of us perform better in one part of the communications process, as either a Speaker or a Listener, but don’t go to the effort to make the most of our communicating abilities by improving the weaker skill. But our communication is likely to be so much better and more effective if we did. It’s not too difficult. Speakers need to be aware of their audience Speakers are good at sending out a message. They’re focused on what they’re saying and how they say it. What they too often m...

How a Customer Advisory Board Will Help Your Marketing

Customer Advisory Board Overview Success comes from meeting customers’ expectations and satisfying their needs. Both expectations and needs change over time and keeping abreast of these changes is essential. The owner of a small business usually knows their customers personally. This is an excellent beginning for the development of a relationship that can help you with you marketing and in the acquisition of new customers. What is a Customer Advisory Board A customer advisory board is a r...

Branding for Business to Business

In B2B marketing a poor brand is confusing to those who make purchasing decisions. Businesses place a higher value than consumers do on the reputation of their supplier so a single, well recognised brand, can be important to winning a sale and turning that into repeat sales.In the B2B context it’s much more effective to create a single powerful brand for the business that can be carried above the products it sells.Research shows branding’s importanceA study conducted by Accenture on the B2B ...

Improving Cashflow

Cash Flow Strategies Cash flow is often called ‘the lifeblood of a business’, and for several good reasons. But the flow of cash into most businesses is uneven and there can be times when a constrained cash flow creates serious problems, even if the long term situation is positive. There are, however, ways to improve the cash flow of any small business and remove some of the worries about bills not being paid or not having enough on hand to pay wages. These mainly involve no more than adjust...

Evaluating New Business Ideas

People who are self-employed generally like to stay that way. If they sell a business they quickly start another one, and successful owners seem to have a ‘knack’ for coming up with good ideas for new businesses. This ability is based largely on their experience and on a set of values or standards that should be applied to every business idea before going ahead with it. This system of evaluating business ideas applies to both products and services; we use the term ‘product’ to mean both....

Five Oversights That Can Kill Your Business

Business owners usually have long term visions for their enterprise, but most business failures happen quickly, before the owner is able to change course or implement strategies that will correct the situation.  The fatal gap between planning and performance is often the result of one of the following set of factors, although two or more of these can occur simultaneously and accelerate the organisation’s demise. Take a close look at your own business and be sure none of these are taking s...

Top four kinds of Marketing Advertising

Most of us tend to use the same kind of ad over and over again. If your ad is pulling in sales, stay with it. But if results aren’t quite what you’re looking for, try switching to one of these top four types of ads.Your ad can simply work to build your company’s image. Most of the banner ads big corporations have on the Internet are designed to do nothing more than familiarise people with the company name. A big chunk of the ads on TV do the same thing. And that’s not bad. Most customers...

Customers Are Only Human

Customers Are Only HumanAs businesses of all sizes increase their uptake of technology and use equipment to save money and take over functions previously provided by people, they’re also running the risk of alienating their customers.Extensive ‘telephone trees’ intended to direct callers into the most appropriate channel to handle their enquiry require customers to go through a series of options even though they already know what they want to accomplish with their call. Something that is m...

Delivering The Goods

Any business which involves selling a physical product requires the ability to arrange delivery of the product to customers in one way or another.Unlike larger organisations, small businesses don't have huge budgets and people available to develop their own carriage service so the most frequent option is to use a third party whose business is shipping so as to ensure logistics are carried out effectively.But to do it in the most cost effective way can involve some deliberation of the options. Th...

Create a Network of Wealthy Customers

Create a Network of Wealthy CustomersWhether the 80/20 rule applies to your business or not, if you can identify your wealthy customers you can target them directly with high-value offerings. And even if you don’t have 20% of customers that you’d consider ‘wealthy’ you can create a network of customers that will help you grow your business and greatly benefit your bottom line.Define your trading areaStart with an accurate definition of your trading area – where your customers are. The ...

Become an expert in your own industry

Whether you sell to businesses or consumers you can increase your level of success by becoming an industry expert – someone who’s well known and acknowledged as an authority on matters concerning your industry. It takes work to achieve this kind of commercial stardom but once you’re at the top it’s almost self perpetuating.Get ready for recognitionPrepare a clear definition of the industry you want to represent, whether it’s a broad one such as ‘retailing’, or very specific, such a...

Find Your Niche And Market To It

There are many definitions of a ‘niche’ market but essentially they’re a subset, a smaller segment, of your existing target market. This is very important because it means they may already be aware of you and are already prospects for your company’s offerings.Members of your targeted niche will share a similar set of characteristics. You can exploit that by satisfying those common needs and catering to their particular interests, and they can be extremely profitable if you provide them w...

Look Good to Lenders

Look Good To LendersBusinesses borrow money for a number of reasons. Additional capital may be needed to increase production capacity or to open a new retail outlet. It might be necessary to borrow to expand overseas or to upgrade the business’ IT facilities.Whatever the reason, borrowing money involves the need to favourably impress the lenders you are approaching for finance. There’s never a guarantee that they will support your proposal, but there are some preliminary steps you can take t...

Write a Business Plan With Investor Appeal

Every business should have a business plan in place that it works to and compares its performance against. These are usually functional plans that have the intention of serving as a guide to management, but may not be the best plan for impressing potential sources of funding for the business. Businesses often need to borrow money or attract investment capital, and when doing so need a business plan that’s both realistic and will demonstrate to those not involved in the enterprise that the busi...

Outsource To A Virtual Assistant

Many small businesses have already discovered the benefits of outsourcing certain functions of their organisations. Tasks including accounting and payroll are often handled by external providers more efficiently and economically than if kept in-house.As long as a business retains its core competencies internally there are few functions that can’t now be strategically outsourced, thanks to a new kind of entrepreneur known as a Virtual Assistant, or ‘VA’.  VAs are independent businesspe...