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Thinking
Big
A new series of articles aimed at growing your business, from sales and marketing author, coach and motivational speaker, Adam Caplan.
Do you want to grow your business?
If the answer to that is yes, these articles could help you really make a difference to your business throughout 2013. My sales training and executive coaching business concentrates on helping my clients grow their businesses, and these articles are designed to do the same for you. In my personal development book, Cellular Attitude: the 9 step guide to a happier life, I talk about the importance of knowing where you are now when first looking at improving your emotional wellbeing. It’s exactly the same for your business, where we will try and improve your financial wellbeing.
Where is your business now?
“There are two customers, the company and the decision maker: you should consider both”
The very first step in growing your business is working out where and how you want to grow it. It’s always best practice to spend some time really evaluating your business. We are often all so busy running the business that we seldom look at how we run it. Most businesses are reliant on sales. Without the revenue that sales bring in, there is no business. Sales are generated by customers and clients. It therefore makes sense to start with customers and clients as our first port of call when looking at growing our business. It might sound as though I’m teaching you to suck eggs; however, by going back to basics in this manner, you may
realise that you have forgotten some fundamental reasons that your business actually exists. The question that most of my clients ask when I first start working with them is: ‘How do I get more customers?’ My answer is always the same: ‘I don’t know. Fortunately,you do.’ I then ask a series of questions that help my client start the process of getting more customers in.
Who are your customers?
This might be obvious, but take a moment and consider who your customers are. Why do they buy from you? What do they want? I’d really like you to think about this for a moment. Who are they and what do they want? This can be broken down into two parts if your business sells to other businesses as opposed to end consumers. If you are B2B, consider both the company you are selling to and the decision maker you sell to. For example, if you are selling a service to a company that helps the company, it will be buying that benefit. However, the decision maker who actually buys your product will get a different benefit out of using you. For my clients, you could say that their company gets a better trained salesforce and more sales revenue while the sales director who booked me gets peace of mind, the satisfaction of seeing his team improve, approval from the CEO, etc.
There are two customers, the company and the decision maker: you should consider both.
What do you do for your customers?
How does your product or service benefit your customer? What does it do for them? This is an extremely important question for you to address. There’s a big difference between what your product does, and what it does for the customer. If you sold portable alarm clocks, your product would make a noise at a specific time set by the user. That’s what an alarm clock does. What it does for the customer is different, isn’t it? The alarm clock gives the customer the peace of mind that they will not oversleep for work the next day and therefore reduces worry and ultimately makes their life easier.
What benefits does your product or service provide to make your customer’s life easier?
Once you’ve identified these, look at your marketing and promotional material. Does it mention these benefits? If not, you might want to think about including them. If you don’t use marketing and promotional material, does your website focus on these benefits? Do your customers really understand what your product or service does for them?
How many new customers do you want? The next stage is to identify how many more customers
60 March 2013
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