Archive for the 'Sales & Marketing' CategoryPage 2 of 6

New business worksheets

Published
by
Business Link
on 17 March, 2008
in Management & Leadership, News & Opportunities, Sales & Marketing, Strategy & Operations and Top Tips
. 0 Comments

Business Link has designed a new range of practical guides and worksheets that can be used to capture your ideas, explore aspects of your business and help you think about the questions you should be asking to take your business to the next stage.

Starting your business - a plan for success

Starting a business is exciting but daunting - you need all the assistance that you can get. This worksheet highlights the key areas that you need to focus on.

Read our guide: Starting your business - a plan for success.

Running your business - a guide to being more efficient and competitive

Well structured food for thought exploring the areas you should be looking at and raising questions you should be asking to capitalise on the full potential of your business.

Read our guide: Running your business - a guide to being more efficient and competitive

Growing your business - a guide to turning ambitions into reality

Businesses cannot stand still - they must constantly find ways to move forward and grow. This worksheet has been designed to help you take your business to the next level.

Read our guide: Growing your business - a guide to turning ambitions into reality

Video interviews - see how we work with businesses

See how our service could work with your business by watching our series of short video clips: http://www.thinkbusinesslink.com/interviews/

Business awards: the best in the business

Published
by
Business Link
on 17 March, 2008
in Sales & Marketing and Strategy & Operations
. 0 Comments

Ask an award winner how they feel and you might be told that they didn’t think they had a chance of winning. Sometimes it’s hard to fully appreciate the significance of your own achievements - even harder to believe you are the best in the business.

In many ways such modesty represents the biggest challenge to overcome when thinking of applying for a business award. If you don’t think you are going to win, why bother? This attitude prevents many firms from entering business awards in the first place. But of course, the more pertinent questions may be: What have you got to lose? Or more importantly, what have you got to gain?

The only thing you stand to lose - aside from a touch of pride and a bit of time - is the awards competition itself. But even if you don’t win, the steps you take when entering or taking part could help you review your business performance and thus help it develop. Let’s say the application process asks you to evaluate your success based on several different factors, such as customer service, innovation, sales performance or operational efficiency. At best, the act of putting your success into words is a great boost to your confidence. At worst, the process may highlight areas where you need to improve.

Then there is the question of what you have to gain. First comes recognition, both with respect to your own achievements among peers in your industry - but also amongst customers, who will associate your business with success and prestige. This should increase their respect and loyalty towards your brand, and also give them a reason to feel good about themselves. Everybody likes to back a winner.

Winning business awards is also priceless from a promotional point of view. You will very quickly see the value in adding ‘award-winning’ to your ‘about us’ blurb, your flyers, product packaging, sales presentations, advertisements, and anywhere else you care to shout about your success. It makes consumers and competitors take note - it makes you seem unique and better - opening the door to new business. The PR and word-of-mouth opportunities are equally compelling. Local media may enjoy publishing stories of regional success, and if that happens word travels fast.

Of course, despite all the benefits, you may still be left wondering whether business awards are really just a game for the elite - the businesses at the cutting edge of technology or working in the most fashionable of industries. This may sometimes be the case, but often, business awards are less concerned by glamour and more by drive, performance and measurable results, whether that comes from a business working in new media, manufacturing, textiles, healthcare, or any number of other industries. And often, it’s not a case of what you do but how you do it. To name a few examples, business awards look for measures such as how you out-performed on your business plan, how you made your business a satisfying place to work, how you provided excellent customer service, or your versatility and imagination at solving your biggest problems.

You may need to buy a ticket to win the lottery, but to win a business award, it’s less about crossing your fingers and more about showcasing your hard work, determination and excellence. Someone has to win, and it really could be you.

Click here to view a list of current and future regional business awards

Customer care: the personal touch

Published
by
Business Link
on 18 February, 2008
in Sales & Marketing
. 0 Comments

A small business can be a better business by fostering excellent customer care. Indeed, it could be a key quality that differentiates a business from its bigger rivals. So much so that many large and growing firms go to great lengths to maintain the personal touch. It’s part of what keeps customers coming back for more.

In its simplest form, customer care is way of thinking. Many small businesses are hungry for new customers and passionate about keeping them. As a result, they may naturally invest more time into building one-to-one relationships with customers, or choose to ‘go the extra mile’. This could mean offering discounted prices to loyal customers, doing a bit extra without charging for it, or possibly just talking closely with customers about how they could be better served. There are many approaches, but often, it’s a business’s attitude, passion and commitment to the customer experience that counts.

Of course, customer care is often more complicated than that. Especially for large or growing businesses, where a more systematic approach may be required. For example, a business with thousands of customers may employ database technologies to segment customers into groups, in order to understand and serve them more effectively, or to identify lapsed customers so that efforts can be made to attract them back. Similarly, businesses with lots of employees - whose people perhaps don’t care so intrinsically for customer care - may struggle to maintain the personal touch, and as a result might have to encourage employees to care through training or incentives. Such issues might be especially important for growing businesses, where the transition away from close customer relationships may affect customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Big corporations often spend millions investing in customer care, and still fail to get it right. Conversely, a small business may spend nothing and deliver a truly unrivalled customer experience. This indicates that both tangible and intangible influences are vital to great customer care. In short, customer care is both a science and an art.

For businesses of any size, customer care offers a very real opportunity for competitive advantage. And crucially, it cannot be easily bought. It’s a unique opportunity to be different and better than the rest, and it should be treated as such.

More info - Manage your customer care

Assessing customer value

Published
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Business Link
on 28 January, 2008
in Sales & Marketing
. 0 Comments

Your customers are your most valuable asset. Ultimately, any business is weak without them. But each customer is different, offering a unique level of value to your business. By identifying and nurturing your most valuable customers, you can sell more, increase your profitability and grow your business.

Customer value can be viewed from three distinct perspectives:

• Current value is a measurement of current customer profitability, based on the products and services that customers have previously consumed.
• Lifetime value is an extrapolation of current value, which aims to predict a customer’s future spending based on previous consumption habits.
• Potential value seeks to estimate a customer’s propensity to become significantly more profitable in the future.

It’s important to remember that profitability by definition takes into account the costs you incurred when delivering products and services to customers. You may spend more time or money acquiring and servicing some customers than others, or you might charge higher prices to different customers in exchange for different levels of effort. In other words, customer value is more than just the sum of a customer’s spending. It’s a balance of that sum against the time, effort and money you spent on that customer.

Of course, when measuring the lifetime or potential value of customers, nothing is certain. High value customers may buck the trend, deciding to purchase elsewhere or curb their spending. Conversely, low value customers may become exponentially more profitable. Nevertheless, making sense of customer value - both current and potential - helps focus resources and crucially helps minimise the chance of high value customers going elsewhere.

Tracking spending habits and measuring customer profitability can be difficult tasks, so much so that large organisations with thousands or millions of customers invest heavily in gathering and analysing data in order to group customers by value. But businesses of any size can make use of such approaches. A small company selling products or services to a handful of clients could quite easily find the information they need to analyse customer behaviours. And though perhaps less systematically, could seek to predict a customer’s future spending and profitability. Even companies with more than a few customers can make sense of customer value by employing straightforward data collection and analysis methods to capture and interpret data. 

For any business of any size, the focus when assessing customer value should be on collecting the right information and subsequently evaluating it in the right ways. The task may be crude or complex, but either way the process should provide some level of insight into which customers offer most value to your business.

Learn more about assessing customer value - Identify and sell more to your most valuable customers

Get involved in Business Networking

Published
by
Business Link
on 28 January, 2008
in News & Opportunities and Sales & Marketing
. 0 Comments

Networking is a simple concept with the basic aim of bringing people and businesses together. It’s a chance for businesses to showcase or share their experience and knowledge, seek help and guidance, collaborate, find sales leads and customers, or maybe just swap contacts details. In short, the focus is on linking up like-minded people so that something positive can happen.

Traditional real life networks can sometimes be formal groups, with rules about who can participate. For example, there may be set joining criteria in order to attract members with common attitudes or characteristics (such as company size or background). This is not intended to foster a ‘clique’ - it’s really about maintaining relevance so that attendees can get equal value from the networking experience. Such groups encourage highly engaged participants, who recognise their role in contributing to the overall networking dynamic.

Of course, not all business networking is so involved. One recent trend to hit the business world is the emergence of ‘speed networking’, which are casual events based on the speed dating concept where participants spend just a few minutes talking to each other. There are usually less restrictions about who can take part, the assumption being that although there is a higher probability that participants will bump into undesirable contacts, they will not have to spend too much time with them and can move on to meet others as quickly as possible.

Online networking is another growing marketplace where business people can link up without leaving their desks. ‘LinkedIn’ is an online business community based on the concept of building a network of ‘trusted contacts’. ‘BT Tradespace’ aims to link small businesses, individual sellers and customers, through its online community and business listings. Focus is again on building trust - this time through user comments, reviews and ratings. Such sites aim to build trust through clever technology, rather than through personal judgement resulting from face to face contact.

The involved membership only approach, and the high volume approaches like speed networking and online communities represent two extremes when it comes to business networking. There is in fact much more in between, such as networking breakfasts where business people simply sit down to eat with like minded peers, and formal or informal networking events held by local Chambers of Commerce or other business support organisations. The trick is to do a bit of research to find out what’s going on in your local area. Once you have found a networking approach you are comfortable with, all that is left to do is get involved!

Find out more - Learning through networking with others