What Your Business Needs!

How’s this for a title “What Your Business Needs!” Hopefully this grabs your attention because you need to pay attention to this. In this post we are going to cover “What Your Business Needs!” Because you need to get to work and cover the two most important and critical issues, here they are:

Cut your costs
Increase your income

That’s it, straight forward and to the point – it doesn’t get any clearer than this! Nothing new, everyone knows this. So if everyone knows this why is there so much nonsense going on and businesses closing down?

It’s the “doing” part of this that trips up most people. Most people want to grow their business but we have found over the years most don’t know where to start and most aren’t honest with themselves. Here are some of the issues that may be running through your mind:

Where do I start?
What is wrong?
Why won’t people buy from us?
Why have I lost my past customers?
Why do my employees not seem to care?
I tried to advertise but I lost money and it didn’t work.
We are losing money and I can’t hang in there.
I don’t know what to do…..

The first thing you must do is be honest with yourself. So many times when we work with clients they haven’t been honest. You can’t fix the problems if you won’t admit what they are.

If it’s that you need to change, figure out what you need to do and change.

If your customer service is bad, fix it! If your sales are bad, fix it! If your marketing is bad fix it! If your costs are out of control, fix them now!

Let’s look at each of these and please note this is a tiny list but the most glaring in many cases.

Customer Service:

Most people hate dealing with this yet it is easy to fix. Do you like be treated rudely by someone? Of course not, so don’t do it to others.

In fact, take a look at everything you offer whether it is products or services or both and go through each and every step of the customer’s life with your items.

What issues do they have or could they have?
What could you anticipate is going to happen down the road after they have purchased from you – both good and bad?
How do you answer the phone, is it pleasant?
How do you try to resolve problems, happily or grudgingly?
Could you send someone to their site?
Do you have pick-up and delivery?
Do you train your staff to handle these items and more properly?

Sales:

Most business owners and managers deal with the issue of slow sales by firing their sales staff and hiring new ones. There are certainly times to do this but usually it is something else. The problem is that no one wants to look at the “something else.” Doing this would cause them to have to look at themselves and maybe admit there are issues to deal with – deal with them!

Has your sales staff been trained properly?
Have they been trained professionally?
Do they know their material?
Do they know their competition?
Do they have the necessary materials to beat their competition?
Are they being supported properly within your company?
Are they doing other things besides selling? (Do not use your sales people as your collection agency – this never works out).
Do they have the proper tools to do their job?
The list can go on and on unless you address it.

Marketing:

Most of the marketing material that we see is terrible – that’s right, I said it!

Now before you stop reading, keep in mind that most people do not understand marketing. They don’t understand its role in their business and therefore don’t give it the proper resources to make it effective. Keep these things in mind:

Is your marketing clear?
Is it to the point?
Are you trying to be cute?
Does it address a particular need?
Does it take away anyone’s pain?
Are you resolving any issues?
Do you have a call to action?
Does it make the prospect want to stop everything and buy your products/services?
This list can keep going on as well.

Costs:

This is another big issue. As we are focusing on building our business and we get caught up in the day to day minutia of life, we aren’t paying attention to our costs.

Remember this: Your cash is like your blood, if you bleed too much you die. If you spend too much your business dies.

Gather all of your bills (and I mean ALL of your bills), and go through them and see what is important and what is not. Get rid of those that are not, try to cut the others and see how it works out.

We did this with a client and their costs went from $150,000.00 per month to $99,000.00 per month – big drop!