Category: Planning & Management

Want to win more business? “Lost” customers are the key! Many salespeople hit the delete key on former customers and focus on new prospects, but this is a big mistake!  Former customers make great future customers, so increase your sales by earning the business of customers you’ve “lost” over the years.

How can lost customers pay off? A study by Marketing Metrics shows there is a 20-40% chance of re-engaging a former customer versus only a 5-20% chance of turning a new prospect into a customer.

Now is a good time to focus on former customers. The consolidations, bankruptcy filings, and workforce reductions leave many struggling to do more with less. Maybe they didn’t need you these last few years but the new business world may create that need again.  There are HUGE opportunities for those who are ready to capture more business now.

Here are a few steps you can take to revisit your “lost” customers and increase sales:

1.    Review your past three years of sales data. Make a list of customers who have not bought/worked with you in that time. Then for each organization note:
o    When was your last contact with them?
o    Do you know what/whom they are working with in lieu of you?
o    On a scale of 1-10, how likely is it they would welcome contact from you again?  If the score is a 5 or higher, they are a good prospect!
o    What do you know about them that you can use to reconnect? History, experiences, challenges they had, people they work with, hobbies or any shared stories?

2.    Research your primary contact at each identified organization. Use Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, bizjojrnals.com or other search tools. Find out what he or she has been up to. Are they still with that company? In the same position?

3.    Review past business you did with this organization. What product/service did they use? What was their experience working with you and your company – favorable, neutral, bad? Why did they stop working with you? Do you know?

Identify whether this was a valuable customer to you and your company.  Sometimes customers can be more work than the value they bring, so there’s no sense in reconnecting with a customer who drained you.
How many “lost” customers do you have in your files who have the potential to become great future customers? Let us know in the Comment section, and we’ll give you more ways to turn lost into new customers in our next post.

About the Author:

Sharpenz is dedicated to providing sales managers the resources and tools they need to energize, engage and equip their sales team to sell each week. Our 30-minute power sales booster meetings help companies increase sales by providing the right tools and training – fast. Designed with the busy manager in mind, Sharpenz ready-to-go sales training kits will give your sales team the opportunity to grow and earn more – all in a half hour of power.  To learn more, visit www.sharpenz.com and sign up for your free ready-to-go sales training kit today!

Have you seen the effects of success blindness?

It is a condition where success can be your greatest impediment to growth and succeeding in the future. Success hides many ills. It masks fundamental weaknesses in the business. And can lead to poor decisions – decisions that could end up fatal to your business. We’ve all heard the adage – they’re throwing money at the problem. Well, today money is scarce for many. And simply stated many businesses literally can no longer afford to throw money at the problem to fix it.

We need a better approach, and it starts with creating a sound strategic vision as we work our way out of this recession. While your leadership team works on creating a *new* strategic vision, be careful to avoid these 3 mistakes that most organizations unknowingly make…

3 Top Mistakes Business Leaders Make While Creating Their New Strategic Vision and Direction

1. Failing to look at the organization’s current strategic vision for relevance and how the market has changed. Before you even start thinking about creating a new vision for your organization, you need to think about these two things…

•    Is your past/current strategic vision still relevant in today’s economy?
•    Has your market changed: for the better or for worse?

If you were selling subprime mortgages or providing goods and services to the real estate market then your market has changed for the worse. If on the other hand, you are selling goods or services to Apple, Walmart or Target, then you are likely doing reasonably well.

Strategy is multi-dimensional and what was successful in the past may not be successful in the future. Context and situation require change, at the very least, re-evaluation and validation. Without a current, sound strategic vision there is no direction for your company and forward momentum will become unlikely. Defining a strategic vision is the starting point as business growth resumes.

2. Failing to ask eight fundamental “business health check” questions. You see, far too often, small to medium size businesses fail to take an objective and dispassionate view of their operations when planning for their future. In many cases, they focus on only one component of the business, such as sales. How does this help you determine how to best position your organization for the future? You must ask these 8 questions…

•    What’s working now and how do you know?
•    What’s not working and how do you know?
•    What do you want to achieve?
•    What do you need to avoid?
•    What do you need to eliminate (“stop doing”)?
•    What do you need to safeguard/preserve?
•    What could you be doing to better prepare if an ongoing recession, and for the eminent rebound? (What else could you do to prepare for worse/best case scenarios?)
•    Then, what are your next best steps to sustain you now and position you for the rebound?

It is critical to ask (and listen to your team’s responses to) these questions when creating your new strategic vision.

And lastly, mistake #3 which is highly interdependent with #2, and most critical to execution- that is, operationalizing your vision to results:

3. Failing to *align* your leadership team with the new strategic vision of where you are headed. If only you or a few of the executives address the questions above in framing out and defining your strategic direction, it results in a gap – a lack of knowing by the very staff that will be making it happen (AKA: EXECUTING). Not knowing organizational priorities results in disarray due to individual agendas and priorities. (Think of individual employees as arrows pointing in different directions, verses focus and energies in a clear and common direction.)

For example, one of our leadership consulting clients was running a successful research business in the medical industry with a strong client base. The work product was good, as were sales. And for the most part clients were satisfied. What wasn’t working well was the leadership team. Why? Talented researchers were promoted to leadership positions with little (or no) management experience. This created a “learning curve” both for the newly promoted manager (learning how to be a manager) and their employees (learning how to cope with the new manager’s learning how to be a manager). The new managers that were thrown into a leadership role brought their baggage with them. That is the politics, behaviors and opinions they had as subordinates. No time was spent working to align the leadership team with the organizational vision and to align the team with itself. As a result, frustration grew – in both the new managers and the employees – and employee turnover became high. In a short time, clients felt the impact.

Lack of a commonly understood strategic direction leads to misaligned efforts and frankly poor decisions – and this can end up fatal to your business.

The recession has changed many businesses forever. What were opportune and successful strategies in the past will no longer work for many organizations. And believing you will soon return to business as usual is dangerous thinking.

Through addressing these 3 mistakes, you can re-surface from the recession by taking an intentional, dispassionate look at your current market situation, asking the tough questions, and defining a strategic vision that is desired and doable by you and your staff.

About the Authors:

Sara LaForest and Tony Kubica have more than 50+ years of combined experience in helping organizations create a sound strategic vision that improves business performance. Failing to create a vision for your organization is just one way to sabotage your business. To uncover more common, subtle ways you are harming your performance, get their free report now at: http://www.kubicalaforestconsulting.com/resources.php

Life is a continuum – so change is inevitable. In the life of a female entrepreneur, then, this inevitability affects her not only personally, but also professionally. While some change results in higher profits and greater personal and professional satisfaction, other change may result in a situation that drains a business owner’s resources and leaves her feeling unsure about the best next step for her business and for herself. This shift also may result in another shift: a previously content and confident business owner, living as her ideal entrepreneurial type, transforms into an entrepreneurial type that simply doesn’t fit.

Based on professional market research of more than 3,500 women in business, this study shows that each type of business owner has a unique approach to running a business and therefore each one has a unique combination of needs. When a woman is living as her ideal entrepreneurial type, she feels satisfied, personally and professionally. This article outlines three of the main circumstances that may cause a woman previously living as her ideal type to transform into a less-than-ideal type – and provides advice for changing these circumstances so they can work their way back to ideal.

1.    The business started undercapitalized and acquired more debt than can comfortably be carried given current revenue levels. One reason companies acquire debt in the early years is that, although the entrepreneur had some money set aside, their business did not hit its revenue projections on time. The result: the cash ran out before the revenue kicked in. Some women who fall into this category are savvy businesswomen who had previously run large corporate budgets, and were confident and accurate in determining the costs of running the business. However, when they projected how quickly sales would occur and money would come in, they were overly optimistic. They struggle to add more customers, watching their cash reserve run out, ultimately having to decide whether or not to go into (more) debt to keep the business afloat. Many of them end up making that investment because they have hopes for the business and they feel confident it will be profitable eventually.

Advice: Business owners must look at two aspects of the business financials right away to assess whether or not their business model is going to be profitable enough to help them transform back into their ideal entrepreneurial type. She should ask herself:  Is it possible to make enough money with the existing model, and if so, what should she focus on immediately to create the best possible chance for the business to survive and thrive?

Entrepreneurs need to assess how much money they can realistically expect to come in, and how much is realistically going out. Revenue and expenses, when viewed together, paint a vivid picture of how successful the business will be. If an entrepreneur discovers that by the time her expenses go out (mortgage/rent, phone, Internet, groceries, doctor’s visits, etc.), she is barely squeaking by, she can manipulate her business model to increase her income. Whether she increases her hourly rates or increases the number of billable hours she works each week, she can create concrete plans for increasing her income – using real, solid numbers.

2.    Fluctuating business environments drove the profitability out of the business, and the business owner finds herself struggling with cash flow, revenues and/or business cost challenges. For example, a brilliant and successful entrepreneur who established a niche in marketing specialty products grew her business successfully until “me too” companies started chipping away at her market share. Increasing competition took away some of her business.

Advice: If a business owner believes that something outside of her control has caused her to shift into a less-than-ideal entrepreneurial type, she must adapt accordingly – while focusing on cash flow, and possibly reinvesting in the business to give it the jumpstart it needs. To accomplish all this, she must set goals and then create specific, step-by-step action plans for achieving each goal.

This owner of the specialty products marketing company began marketing existing products to new niche markets, and started diversifying into other fields via new divisions that were related to the initial niche. Entrepreneurs should keep in mind that momentum will build as they begin to achieve their goals. The key is to prepare to act by choosing the right focal points and then succeed in those specific areas.

3.    The business owner is moving in too many directions at once. In some cases, a female entrepreneur has been successfully running her business for some time, and she decides to branch out. Her ultimate vision encompasses multiple streams of income and she tries to activate them all at once. This approach can be counterproductive in the short-term because the lack of a singular focus can make it difficult for her target market to understand her business model. In cases such as these, it is not possible to build marketing and sales efforts for such diverse income streams simultaneously.

Advice: Every entrepreneur, especially one who is struggling because she is not living as her ideal type, should examine her business concept, and her business model to ensure that her company in its current state can make the profit she needs. This will help her nail down a specific focus for getting back into her ideal type. When considering business concept, entrepreneurs may want to develop a one-sentence “catch phrase” to respond when someone asks, “What does your business do for people?” The key is to highlight a singular line of work, plus exactly what benefits customers can expect from using the business. For example, a business coach may say, “In my business, we’re experts at helping business leaders be more effective, so they can make more money with less stress.” In this statement, she has said who she helps (it’s deliberately open-ended to include a variety of business leaders), and what she does for them (helps them make more money with less stress). When considering business model, entrepreneurs must determine whether their customers would want to buy their product or service in the form in which they’re selling it. Maybe a business was running smoothly for years with the same business concept and business model – but with changes in the economy, it is not as profitable. In cases like this, a business owner can assess whether she could make focused minor or moderate changes to her business model to offer her services or products in a way that makes sense, now.

Change happens, always. The way a woman business owner reacts and adapts to change defines whether her company will simply survive or begin to thrive. By following the above advice during three common sets of circumstances, female entrepreneurs will hold the power they need to live their ideal type – and to find personal and professional satisfaction.

About the Author:

Michele DeKinder-Smith is the founder of Jane out of the Box, an online resource dedicated to the women entrepreneur community. Discover more incredibly useful information for running a small business by taking the FREE Jane Types Assessment at Jane out of the Box. Offering networking and marketing opportunities, key resources and mentorship from successful women in business, Jane Out of the Box is online at www.janeoutofthebox.com.