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Please read these articles and use them to change how you work and how you manage your business and its growth.
Batna
Negotiating
With Power And Leverage - How Do You Negotiate For Fun And
Profit?
One way to overcome your discomfort in negotiating is to discover
your BATNA. Using your 'best alternative to a negotiated
agreement' you can identify the power and leverage that you can
use to get what you want.
Marketing
Strategy
And Product Portfolio Mix - How Do You Develop Your Marketing
Portfolio?
Small companies must tailor their marketing strategy from the four
basic options to suit their own needs. The composite strategy for
the whole company often is formed from the marketing strategy for
each significant product. The outcome of the chosen marketing mix
also impacts the product portfolio.
Changing
Markets
For
Profit - How Do You See Your Market?
When you find that the market for your products and services puts
you are a disadvantage, the sensible action is to change it.
However, change involves the buyers and sellers so it is not easy
to achieve.
Team
Building, Delegation and Leadership - How do You Lead a Team of
Individuals?
As companies grow, the founding entrepreneur has to draw in others
to help scale the business. As the business grows further, the
individuals working in the company need to form into a team where
delegation, communication and leadership are formalized. These
changes are hard to make but vital for the continued growth of the
company.
Market
Research
With
Focused Questions - What Are The Right Research Questions To
Ask?
Many entrepreneurs do not research their market enough. They ask
their focus groups and survey their customers with useless
questions that only produce worthless answers. Since they do not
know what their customers want, their marketing results in poor
sales.
Marketing
For
Small
Businesses - How Effective Is Your Marketing?
Effective entrepreneurs view marketing (with sales) as a process
of finding out what people want, identifying who will buy (at a
price) and asking when they want to buy. All this is necessary
before asking the prospect for the sale.
Work-Life
Balance
For The Entrepreneur - How Do You Put The Brake On A Growing
Workload?
Many entrepreneurs struggle with a growing workload as they try
run their business. Yet the habit of balancing your home and work
life is based on a few, simple practices that anyone can adopt.
When the business person achieves this balance, suddenly work
becomes fun again.
Customer
Focused
Sales
- How About Giving Instead Of Selling?
A soft sales approach involves a switch in focus from what "I want
to sell" to "what they want to use". Taking a customer-centred
approach to helping prospective customers will delight and attract
them.
Business
Growth
Strategy:
How Do You Use Pareto Analysis To Focus Efforts On Your Clients'
Benefits?
Using Pareto Analysis, a small business team can focus their
efforts onto their best customers, prioritize their most
profitable sales lines and manage the investment in significant
cost activities. This approach enables a small business to
out-compete bigger companies that are less disciplined and more
over-worked.
Exhibitions
Trade
Shows Boost Business Visibility: How Do You Boost Your Business
At An Exhibition?
Business exhibitions and trade shows are an excellent way to
boost your business visibility. If you plan how you will attract
attention, and how your trained staff will welcome and interest
the show attendees, your marketing investment will yield excellent
results.
Recruit
Employees
Effectively: How Do You Recruit Good Employees For Your Team?
Many small business leaders struggle with long hours rather than
recruiting their first employees. With a team of staff, recruited
properly, the SME will grow even though the owner works fewer
hours.
Business
Turnaround,
Profitability and Motivation: How do you Breathe Life into a
Dying Company?
Finding that the family company is about to die can be a major
shock. However, with the proper approach, the value that persists
in the staff, brand and good will can be used to resuscitate the
business and bring it back to operational health.
Working
Capital,
Positive
Cashflows and Good Marketing: How Well do you Make your Money
Work?
When business success comes to your company, the good news can
turn into a bad cashflow that kills your company. Following these
commonsense precautions will ensure that sales growth will equal
profitability and your business will have a future.
Business
Growth,
Customer
Relationships and Profit: How do you Build Valuable
Relationships?
Many inexperienced business people think that fast sales are the
best sales, completely overlooking the value of the client
relationship. Companies that have grown consistently, year on
year, are run on a different reality - to grow your sales, you
need loyal and grateful customers who relate to you directly and
invest in your continued success.
Business
Marketing
Strategy Games: What Games are You Involved in?
Games happen throughout business although few business people seem
to be aware of the roles they are playing. with some insight into
your market conditions, you can see how to move onto the winning
side of the games in which you are embedded.
Decision
Taking,
Making
Effective Choices: How Do You Make Decisions?
Few business people are equipped to make big decisions in a
satisfying way. This skill is not taught at school or college. Yet
the principles are simple and the resulting decision process
enables anyone to make a decision that satisfies them.
Small
Business
Growth:
How Do You Grow Your Business?
Most big companies grow from being a small company and the first
transition that an entrepreneur has to face occurs when the first
couple of employees join the business. How the entrepreneur
handles that transition can determine whether the company
continues to grow or whether it stagnates.
Pricing
Strategies,
Revenues, Costs And Profits: How Does Profit Connect To Your
Sales Price
To the naive business leader, Profit equals Revenue minus Costs.
However, as you set your business goals, you need to be more
sophisticated in deciding which pricing strategy will enable you
to achieve your goals profitably.
After
Sales
Service,
Complaints Process: How Do You Get Value From Angry, Complaining
Clients
When customers complain about your products and services, the way
you handle them is the key to meeting their complaint, recovering
the situation and deepening your customer's loyalty. If you are
effective and professional, complaints can increase and profit
your business.
Competition,
Customer
Value, Success: How Can You Use The Theory Of Change
Some businesses stand out from the crowd and out-compete even
though the products and services that they offer appear to be
similar to their competitors. If you understand the difference
that you make to the lives of your customers and clients, you will
know the reasons for them to leave your competitors and to boost
your business success.
Business
Negotiation
Using Power and Influence: How Do You Exercise Your Power in
Negotiations?
Influence and power are basic elements in all negotiations. By
simply exploring and understanding the power you have, or you can
obtain, you can radically change the influence that you have and
negotiate a potential failure into a successful outcome.
Seasonal
Business
Preparations: Are You Ready To Benefit From The Christmas And
New Year Break?
Every year we have peak seasonal retail sales in December and
January yet small business leaders suffer stress where they have
not anticipated and planned properly. This simple action plan will
help you to get ready for the season and enjoy your holiday break
with your family.
Profitable
Business
Planning: How Do You Organise Your Small Business For Profit
Without a sound and robust business model, your small business
will fail to scale as life and your market conditions change.
Writing a simple and effective business plan will help you to
design and organise your business to be profitable and successful.
Business
Plan
Organisation
Management: How Do You Organise Your Business For Profit And
Growth?
Many banks and business advisors take an overly-complex approach
to writing business plans. This causes owners of small business to
be put off by the size of the document and their difficulty in
understanding its value. The measure of a simple, effective
Business Plan is that will earn you money as the business grows
and your market changes.
Business
Cashflow
Auditing: How Do You Manage And Plan The Cash Flows In Your
Business?
Unless you have a good grip on the cashflows in your business, you
are certain to have nasty shocks on a regular basis. Monitoring
your outflows and incomes is easy if you insist that it is
self-documenting and you apply these four simple ideas.
Business
Planning
Strategy: How Can You Use Numbers To Aid Your Business Judgement
And Marketing
Having an updated business plan is major factor in the success of
a small business. Written simply and briefly, the business plan
needs to answer seven key questions in a way that can be measured
and reviewed.
Business
Leader
Development
Information: Learn to Develop Yourself and Your Business
Have you have given up learning ideas or developing your skills?
It is bad for your business if you have stopped learning. You
could use at least 10 of these ideas to expose yourself to new
ideas, fresh knowledge and opportunities to improve your skills.
Debt
Management And Cash Flow: How Do You Encourage Timely Payment By
Your Customers?
Small businesses struggle with bad debts because they fail to
manage their payments properly. Yet practising a defined procedure
not only ensures a better flow of cash into your business but also
eliminates bad customers before they cause real harm.
Risk
Management and Competitive Innovation: How do you Manage Risk
through Business Innovation
Globalisation combines the pressure to buy goods from foreign
suppliers with lower labour costs and the increasing access to new
products and services over the Internet. Unless small businesses
invest in the future that they choose, they will cease to compete
and fail.
Business
Management
Effective Results Strategy: How Management Delivers The Results
In A Business
Many small businesses are poor at planning so they never achieve
their potential. With a robust approach to the selecting
appropriate measures and then carrying them through into measuring
the past, managing the present and aiming for the future, the
manager of a small business can be confident in achieving the
results they desire.
Marketing
Relationships
Customer Service: 8 Ways You can Build Deeper Customer
Relationships
In the long-term, client relationships are worth many years of
sales. Using specific approaches, you can build these
relationships and find your small business is growing through
excellent customer service.
Basic
Marketing
Strategy:
Simply Promoting Your Small Business All The Ways You Can Afford
Small businesses need not spend a load of money to achieve
effective marketing. With careful and enthusiastic self-promotion,
your first marketing strategy will reach a profitable circle of
clients.
Creative
And
Innovative
Thinking In Business: When And How Do You Think Creative Ideas?
When you realise that your business has settled into a pattern of
bland sameness, injecting new ideas into the business will lead to
new ways to excel. Using a simple innovation process can produce
ideas that solve your problems and help you to out-perform your
competitors.
Holiday
Breaks
and
Continuity Plans: How You Can Profit From Your Holiday Break
Entrepreneurs are not good at taking breaks from their business -
they tend to eat, sleep and dream work. Recognising that the
health of a small business depends on the health of the business
owner, a vital part of running a profitable business is the
planning you put into taking your summer break.
Small
Business
Sales:
Who Are Your Customers? Why Do They Buy?
Often the owners of small businesses are so busy running the
company and making sales that they forget to figure out who they
are selling to and why. It is only when there is a sales panic and
the monthly figure dip that SMEs are forced to review their
customer profiles, sales benefits and competitive advantages.
Business
Change,
Growth
Strategy and Productivity: How Do You Destroy Your Business
Creatively?
When your medium-sized company falters in its growth, pruning the
dead wood and the lower growth departments becomes a strategic
imperative. If you can master creative destruction, your company
will never atrophy.
Competitive
Strategy
for Small Businesses: How do you Compete Against the Big
Companies?
With market globalisation, big companies continually squeeze their
smaller competitors on price and volume. The response of
successful small companies is to maximise their strengths so that
they win their customers on service, convenience and
responsiveness.
Sales
Skills
Using
Emotions: How Do You Build Your Emotions Into Your Business?
Your Emotional Quotient can be a key indicator for how well you
work with your clients. Presenting your products and services to
clients, you need to sell yourself confidently, understand your
clients' needs and offer them a solution they want to buy.
Business
Market
Research
and Planning: What Size and Composition is your Market?
Many businesses have difficulty defining their market by size and
composition and so their marketing and sales planning is
ineffective. By analysing what you know about your customers,
finding what industry bodies know about your market and making
intelligent guesses, you can plan how to target your marketing and
sales effort to get the best return and satisfy the most
customers.
Time
Management and Productivity: If You Are Too Busy to Have Time to
Spare, You Need to Read This
Unless you learn how to manage your time, you will find that your
days are spent on low-value activities. By building the habit of
time management, you can avoid what 'not to do' and focus on how
and when 'to do' what you prioritise.
Business
Team
Building
and Employee Motivation: How Good is your Feedback
Building your business team to improve their performance requires
great feedback. Few leaders of small companies practice giving
great feedback but every one of them would add value to their
business by helping their staff to achieve.
Business
Media
Marketing:
How Good is Your PR and Who Does it Reach?
Placing a good PR story in your chosen media is a very
cost-effective means of burnishing your business image. By getting
your company talked about by the newspapers, radio stations and TV
channels, your prospects, customers, suppliers and employees will
all gain an interest in your products and services.
Business
Continuity
Management: How Do You React When Your Business Continuity is at
Risk?
Business continuity is a major worry for small businesses trying
to grow and thrive in difficult circumstances. Using a simple
technique, you can focus your efforts on those risks and events
that would have a significant impact on your profitability, then
you can manage your response to your business worries.
Business
Stress
and
Strain: How Can You Manage the Stress in Your High-powered Small
Business?
In modern, high-powered offices, depending on PCs, copiers,
printers, faxes and lots of other electronic equipment, it is easy
for staff members to become stressed and loose productivity. The
steps to combat a toxic office are simple and every team leader
should make it a personal priority to watch out for symptoms of
stress and to counteract them.
Business
Debts
Damage
SME Cashflow: How Do You Manage Late Payers Effectively to Keep
Solvent?
Without a tight grip on managing the poor payers among your
customers, you could find your small business is headed towards
bankruptcy. Following these easy steps, you can effectively manage
your debtors in a simple process that keeps your cash flowing.
Customer
Communication
by Email
When email is used well, it is a low-cost, high-value way of
reaching your prospects and customers; poor use of email is often
illegal and can destroy your sales. When the skills of creating
good email are described, many of them seem obvious, yet how many
do you forget in your rush to press the 'send' button?
Product
Marketing
Strategy: How Do You Use a Product Table to Focus Your Market
Growth?
Many small businesses lose sight of their marketing strategy when
they are in the middle of running their business. Using a simple
table to review your products will enable you to recognise the
marketing strategy that you need to pursue.
Creative
Business
Innovation: How Do You Innovate Your Way Out of Your Marketing
Box?
A simple nine-dot puzzle illustrates the value of thinking outside
of the box when looking at your customers' needs afresh. Using the
ideas that your customers give you, and consciously adopting seven
resolutions for innovation, you can develop new products that
enable you to produce tomorrow's products today.
Business
Work-Life
Balance: How Ready is your Small Business for the Festive Season
Close Down?
Every year, the festive season comes round without fail yet each
year, many small businesses seem to be surprised. Using a simple
festive checklist will ensure that you enjoy taking your holiday
break and are ready to return to work properly in the New Year.
Brainstorming
for
Small Businesses: How to Turn your Business inside out using
Reversals and Humour?
Using reversals can help you brainstorm how to improve your small
business. Working through the five typical questions is a fun way
to see your business from a new perspective and figure out what
you want to change.
Business
Improvement
In Practice And Process: How Small Businesses Get Ahead Of Their
Competitors
A way to out-perform your competitors is to improve your business
practices and processes. This requires an investment of effort and
energy into improving your business in a way that suits your
personality.
Strategy
For
Small
Businesses: What Is Your Business Strategy And How Will It Help
You Grow?
I notice that owners of small businesses who have a clear
marketing strategy tend to run buoyant, growing companies. By
observing the trends in your market and then focusing your
strategy to exploit them, your company can connect with your
customers' needs so that your income and profit grow.
Creating
New
Marketing
Ideas: How Do You Think Creatively About Your Business And Your
Customers?
Business growth comes from change, in the market, in the products
you sell and in the benefits that the customer is happy to buy.
There are three distinct stages in taking novel concepts into
implementation, using creativity to redefine your products and
services.
Adding
Business
Value:
How do you Add Value in your Business?
Often small businesses reach a ceiling in selling their goods to
their customers. By exploring how they add value to their
customers, they can find a range of extra products and services
that they can also sell at little or no cost to themselves. Truly
the sales ceiling is set by the entrepreneur's imagination.
Marketing
Communications:
How Do You Get Your Message Across to Your Customers?
All businesses, large and small, need to plan how they present
messages about their products and services to their market. The
message needs to be clear, consistently presented and taken up by
everyone in your company that contacts the public.
Basic
Sales
skills:
How Effective are you at Selling?
There are seven basic skills to selling goods, whether they are
products or services. An effective sales person constantly
practices these skills so that they can encourage their prospects
to buy from them and not from their competitors.
Product
Leaflets
Add
Value To Your Sale: How Does Your Product Information Boost Your
Sales Value?
Providing product information, advertising hand bills, product
data sheets or briefing newsletters is a route to encouraging your
customer to buy from you in a more informed way - increasing the
value they get from each sale. However, to be effective and
focused, the information you give them needs to catch their
interest and meet their needs.
Managing
Cash
Flow
And Debtors In Small Businesses: How Do You Chase Customer
Debts?
If small businesses do not manage their cash flow and debtors
tightly, they can quickly go out of business. Here are five simple
business habits that all directors and owners of small businesses
should build into their working lives.
Managing
Change
In
Small Businesses: How Business Owners Can Cope With The Impact
Of Change?
Learning to be agile and welcoming change is a key skill for the
owners and directors of small businesses. If you know how to apply
these 7 factors in your business, you can avoid being a victim of
change, you can learn to survive its surprises and then you will
find you can thrive on change.
Market
Trends:
Assessing
the Effects on Your SME Business
Why do entrepreneurs and the owners of small businesses fail to
act on what they know about their market? If you regularly review
the trends in the market around you, you can spot how to change
your products and services to anticipate your customers' needs.
Grow
the Value of your Business: Sack Half your Clients
Sometimes when I coach clients I get them to do actions they hate
- one recent client wanted me to help him double his revenue. So
he was quite clear about his goal but was not sure about creating
a feasible action plan for achieving it.
Telephone us on 07773 380133 between 9am to 9pm on weekdays to agree when we can start helping you.
Adrian Pepper runs Help 4 You Limited with the support of several coaching associates. The registered office is located at 6 Deal Castle Road, Deal, Kent CT14 7BB. We are a private limited company incorporated in England and Wales, number 4802324.
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