October 2009 - Where to Start
I’m often asked by small business operators “where to start”, when it comes to business development and marketing. There are so many books about marketing available that most people just throw up their hands and put marketing in the too hard basket. The more you simplify your key marketing tasks, the easier it will be to create a predictable and profitable cash-flow for your business.
Don’t try and do it all at once, try tackling the key issues in 4 bite-sized pieces.
1.
Start by defining precisely who your potential customers are:Identify as many customer segments as possible. Just list them as you think of them, don’t try to rank them in order of importance. When you’ve finished this first list, close your eyes and taking each group, one at a time, ask yourself this simple question:
“What other products or services could I sell to this group, and then, are there any other similar groups to this that I haven’t even thought of selling to yet?”
Keep going through this process until you have covered and listed down all of your primary customer segments as well as the “similar group customer segments”
2.
Next you rank all your segments in order of potential profitability:In most situations you will find that 80% of these customer segments are reasonably profitable and 20% are very profitable. This is called the 80/20 rule.
Now, it invariably takes as much time and money to sell to a reasonably profitable customer as it does to sell to a very profitable customer. Therefore you need to try and spend 80% of your time and money selling to the 20% of your customers that you’ve identified as being very profitable.
3.
Next you need to identify who these potential “profitable customers” are currently buying from and why?This is the Market Research stage of your marketing process. Given that you’ve now identified who these key potential high worth customers are you need answers to your who are they buying from and why questions.
The easiest, most accurate and cost effective method of achieving this is to visit them and ask them. Start by preparing a very short series of questions. Apart from getting answers to the who and why questions you also need to find out how much they are paying.
Don’t waste their time if you can’t get to see them just ring them up and ask them. Be brief, don’t be pushy and don’t try and sell them anything.
4.
Finally prepare and deliver your sales package to these “profitable customers”You now have everything you need to prepare a sales document to your customers with the right reasons for them to buy and the right price.
October 2009 - Where to Start
