Know your customers and choose the right products/services for them
KNOW YOUR CUSTOMERS AND CHOOSE THE RIGHT PRODUCTS/SERVICES FOR THEM
Markets today are dynamic due to the competitiveness of the environment. Products and services are improved almost everyday hence staying ahead of the market has become more than just the provision of quality.
To boast only of quality service and think that is what your customers want is a sure way to plan for failure. Saying quality service is the reason your customers buy your products/services can only guarantee success in a market with no competition.
We have our customer, he is a regular, and he usually recommends us to others, but how do we deliver more value to this customer? How do we make sure that this customer does not change?
Markets today are dynamic due to the competitiveness of the environment. Products and services are improved almost everyday hence staying ahead of the market has become more than just the provision of quality.
To boast only of quality service and think that is what your customers want is a sure way to plan for failure. Saying quality service is the reason your customers buy your products/services can only guarantee success in a market with no competition.
But how do we stay ahead of the game? How do we ensure continue growing? This post will provide the answer to these concerns. Our focus will be on knowing our customer.
We have our customer, he is a regular, and he usually recommends us to others, but how do we deliver more value to this customer? How do we make sure that this customer does not change?
Think
of innovation of design, process, pricing, distribution and manufacture, all
can be quickly copied by your competition.
What
then is important? Communicating your Product/service’s competitiveness to your
consumer, the insight that makes it distinctive, the benefits it offers them,
the values and personality of the product/service, the way it supports those
values, the feature that differentiates it from others and the single concept that
sums up its essence. All are what keeps people from using your competitors’
products/services.
CHOOSE
THE RIGHT PRODUCTS/SERVICES FOR YOUR CUSTOMERS?
Choosing
the right products for customers means always making your customers happy and a
happy customer is more likely to come back and use your product/service or
refer you to others. But how do we know that our product/service is a good fit
for our customers?
The
first and most important thing is to know your customers. When you do this, you
will know how to communicate to them. There
are some characteristics about your customer that will help you know how to
communicate to them. Your customers have demographic characteristics such as
the age and sex. They have socio-economic characteristics for instance family
status, marital status, education status and employment status. These
characteristics will help you know how you will communicate to them and will
help you design a product/services suited for them. They have equally other
features that are important such as, their goals, ambitions, wants, needs,
motivations, hopes, dreams, aspirations, fears, doubts, worries and problems to
be solved. All these are important about your customers and will help you
deliver a responsive product/service.
Remember for your product/service to be
used repeatedly, it has to communicate its distinctive, the
benefits to your customers, the values and personality of the product/service,
the way it supports those values, the feature that differentiates it from
others and the single concept that sums up its essence. But all these can be
met if you know who your customers are, what they like, where they are found? What
are the problems that you can solved?
The secret to success is finding the
customers that agree with your product or service and then design all your
marketing and sales activities based on what they like. Concentrate all your
efforts on the customers, drive everything you have on delivering value to
them. Not to suggest that you have to be pushy about it, rather be professional
in your approach. The marketing for your product/service should be designed to
serve your customers. Create the right price for them, deliver value to them,
solve their problems and if you do that I bet you will make your millions.
Pay attention to your customer, know
them, understand them, and create a relationship with them. Because a customer
who finds that your product/service is different, solves the
problem, has a certain value and personality it communicates, it supports these
values, the feature that differentiates it from others are well communicated and
the single concept that sums up its essence is visible, will always use the
product/service.
REACH YOUR UNDECIDED CUSTOMER
You have customers who are undecided,
they want to use your product/service but they are just not decided. Let us
face it, it is difficulty to make a decision on which toothpaste to use because
there are many brands on the market and they all essentially solve the same
problem. Using brand A will work as good as using brand B in solving ‘X’
problem. That is why we will always have customers who just are not decided, today
they can use brand A’ tomorrow they use the other. The question is, how do we
convert them to use our product/service? How do we make them believe in our
product.
The solution to this problem is not
about making the great product, lowering the price or improving in our
delivery. The first and most important thing is to know the customer. Similar to the customers who is decided about
your product/service, your job is to figure out all the previous discussed
characteristics of the customer that will help you know who they are and figure
out ways to reach them. This is where marketing research plays a critical role.
Your job is to learn as much as you can on your undecided customers and figure
out ways to attract
and convert them into your customers.
After doing your marketing
research, you will know their problems, and will know how to design adverts
that will directly speak to them.
When designing an advert, keep in
mind that you are trying to convert customers, therefore try as much as
possible to; communicate the distinctive features, because you do
not want them to think as if it is just the same thing as the other product. The benefits it
will give them, because it is important to them. The benefits can be both tangible
and intangible.
The
values and personality of the product/service. Does it carry any massage to the
customers, is it educative, is it environmentally friendly, make sure all the
values it carries has to be communicated. In addition to the values, you have
to communicate the way it supports them. Finally, what is the one word that
describes your product/service?
Decisions before you go full time into business
Money can be tight in the initial stages of business. Most people find it hard to continue the business especially when it demands most of their time. Many entrepreneurs start their business with low costs, they start small or they keep their day time job while pushing for the business. In this post, am going to share with you five things that every aspiring business owner should know before starting a business.
NO. 1. It is not about the money
It is not always about money, the mission is very important. Starting a business is an exciting and challenging journey. Most of the people who start with the main aim of getting money out of the business do not usually succeed. They may quite in the face of challenges. In a 'documentary how we made our millions' Peter Jones one of the Dragons, asked Richard Reed, the found of Innocent a smoothie drinks company, if he was motivated by money when starting his company. Richard said that money is not really the motivation for most great companies. Richard Reed believes that most great companies are driven by a clear sense of mission. He added by giving an example of Google who have the mission of making information readily available to everyone in the world. I am not suggesting that money is not important but rather focusing on the mission is what makes businesses successful. The money should be seen as a bonus to after achieving the mission.
Designing a business around a clear sense of purpose will help you overcome the challenges that come with a business in the initial stages where there is more to do and little cash. This is true for both a traditional business model and a network marketing business. Focusing on the mission helps the business grow but this is not to say that it comes at a low cost.
NO. 2. Build your business around your passion
Doing business demands most of your time, if you do something that you are doing just for the sake of making money, the chances are that you will make it but if the passion is not present, the business is more likely to fail. Most great entrepreneurs will tell you that you should have passion for what you do. This is true because if the money is the motivation, the times when the money is tight will most likely be the hardest for you. If you build your business around what you love you will never have to work a single day and the chances are that you will overcome most of the challenges that may come your way.
If you are starting a network marketing business, the principle is just the same. The product, the company and the way they do things in the company have to reflect your beliefs, your values and your passion. If you are not excited about the product, or the business plans, do not start the business. You have to believe in the product, it has to work for you, if you cannot buy it then you will find it hard to convince someone to use it. The network marketing products range from beauty products to health supplements, so if you do not believe in using beauty products and are considering a network marketing business, the chances are that your business will not succeed, the product has to work for you, then the business will work as well.
NO. 3. Make sure you know the business
Knowing the business means you should understand your business model. A business model shows how your business makes money. Since a business is a set of repeated processes that are done to produce value, they have to be sustained by cash flow. You can only make money and avoid making mistakes in a business that you know and have confidence in. This means that you have to learn everyday because businesses operate in dynamic environments. These environments presents different challenges. Luckily, we have a course to help you prepare against uncertainty and you have many resources on the internet to help you know more about your business and how to prepare against uncertainty in the market.
Knowing the business will help you save a lot of money and time, because a single mistake can make the entire business system to fail. Take your time to learn about the business, but make sure that your are not just procrastinating. Make the decision when you are at least 70% sure that you know the business will work, you do not have to be 100% sure. Sometimes you will have to learn through the hard way as you go along on the journey. But to serve you time and money, you need to make sure that you learn the business.
NO. 4. It is about your customers not about you
The product/service has to solve a visible problem in the market. If you have a product/service and you think it is incredible the chances are that not everyone will agree with you. You have to solve the problems people are facing. This starts by developing skills that will help you understand the business environment and identify the problems that you can solve. This is key to any business success because people do not buy your products they buy the value that your product/service proposes. If your product/service solves that problem then bingo! you will make the money. It is important to note that the problem has to be seen in the eyes of your customers and not the way you see it. If you think there is a problem with something but your customer thinks its fine, the chances are that your proposed solution will not bring as much value as it could have done if your customer saw the problem. We have developed a course to help you learn how to identify problems in the market. subscribe using your email address and you will be receiving free courses from our team.
NO. 5. Know the numbers
Businesses have indicators of success or failure. Numbers do the talking then you make the decisions. For instance, your turnover, will tell you how much the business is bringing in, you can call it total sales. A good business is one were the turnover is seen to increase over time. This can be both an indication that your customer base is increasing or the product/service uptake is increasing in the market. Gross profit is turnover less the cost you incur when selling your product/service. Increasing Gross profits means your customer base is increasing. These however, are not the only indicators that will show if your business is doing well. But the point am stressing here is that you need to know the numbers, know how to interpret them this will serve you a lot of time and energy especially when you are working towards a failing business model, these indicators will show you to stop or change a direction if possible.
If you want to learn more about how you can understand your numbers, please subscribe with your email and we will be able to help you.
Doing business can be both exciting and challenging, many times you will feel like you cannot go on on the journey. That is why you need a an impersonal dream and proper mind set. The dream to serve others will help you get many partners on board and people will always support your work. This however, is only possible when your business proposes to solve their problems. Money making is but a bonus after the real value of your business has been delivered. Therefore, your attitude should be, deliver value first then get paid. If you put this in your business culture, you are on your way to immeasurable success and only the sky is the limit.
The business Plan
There
is a common saying which goes failing to
plan is planning to fail. And yet it is common to find businesses nowadays
operating without a clear plan. A plan in its
simplest form is a blue print, a written step by step document showing
how to get to some place, or how to achieve certain objectives. A business
needs a plan, to clearly identify the goals it has achieve. Think of it like a
map showing you where you are going and how to get there. Planning is a
processes and it involves setting objectives, deciding when to achieve them and
allocating resources for the achievement of the objectives. They are many types
of planning but here we are going to discuss business planning and why it is
important. We are going to define a business plan, and highlight how the
planning process can help the owner of the business. It is important to note
that, what we usually say in our everyday language that I have a plan is not in any way what we mean here when we talk
about planning. What we mean is that the all process to be relevant, a written
document has to be produced. This document is what we call a business plan.
We
have so far seen that planning is relevant, and the process of planning has to
produce a written document. In a business sense however, planning results in a
business plan. According to Dollinger, a Professor of Management and
Entrepreneurship, “a business plan is a formal, written document which
describes the nature of the business, operations and strategies for the
business”. In the discussion that follows, we are going to shed more light on a
business plan as we try to understand what it is.
A
business plan describes the nature of the business, this means that it is a
written document that will show your management and prospective funders that
you understand where your business belongs to in terms of the market, and what you do.
The markets/industries are many ranging from services to goods and are
different depending on the idea of the business. Within the industry, your
business plan will specify what you do. This implies that you have to clearly
define your vision, mission and goals. A vision is something that has to be
impersonal, that will show the value that your business will bring to the world,
it is a futuristic statement. Your mission has to do with something that you
want to achieve in terms of a broad business goal that cannot be achieved in a short
period of time. A mission is the broad statement that shows what you will do to
achieve the vision. And finally your goals are what you will achieve within a
short period to accomplish your mission.
Knowing
the market where the business is operating will help the entrepreneur come up
with better strategies to win a share of the market. The business plan has to
define clearly the nature of the business so that the owners are familiar with
the trends and technologies in the market. To do this, a passionate business
owner will have to research the competition in the market. The owner has to
read articles, news, books and magazines about the industry so that the
patterns of the trends will start showing.
A
business plan describes operations of the business. It describes your financial
system, from how you will capture your financial information to how you will
record them. It will describe how you will handle your sales and marketing,
your supplies, your inventories and so on. This will depend on the nature of
your business you are in. For instance if you are going to venture into a
retail business, the business plan has to describe your location, how you will
be bringing goods in the store, how you will handle your inventory, your sales,
your bookkeeping and all other operations that will make your business
complete.
A
business plan must describe the strategies. It must tell the prospective funder
how you intend to do the business. How you intend to find your clients, how you
will win a share of the market. This is important for a business because it
will show anyone you can approach to ask for funding that you truly know how to
get the results. The strategies will also show your partners that a business is
a proven model and therefore, worth of their time and money.
So
far we have focused on what a business plan is and have discussed that it is a
written document that will show your nature of the business, how you will
handle your operations and strategies of your business. However, it is
important to stress that this is not the only aspect of the business plan.
Writing a business plan according Burns, “underlies
the opportunities of the venture”. It causes someone to further investigate
the business and thus realize opportunities that when exploited will bring
money to your venture. In addition, “The
business plan helps to recognise strengths and weaknesses while adding
structure to the proposal of the entrepreneur.”
Having
established what a business plan is, we can now proceed to the features of a
good business plan.
A
good business plan should help to spell out why you are in business. In my
opinion, this is the most important thing in business. Businesses should be
built in such a way that they should produce something unique, they should
solve a problem in the economy. When this is done, a business will be supported
by its customers like they own the proposed solution. The business will succeed
because the customers will do anything possible to see that you succeed. That’s
why a good business plan should clearly show the problem that you want to
solve, underlie the solutions and show how it will be when the problem is
solved.
In
addition, the business plan should be focused on the customer and not on the
product, this means that you need to target a certain problem that is affecting
the customers you are targeting. Many businesses with a clear sense of why have
a higher chance of success. This is because people don’t buy what you are
selling, they buy what you stand for. They want to feel your business cares for
them, that’s why they will definitely be your partners. Truly, we are all in
business to make profits, but businesses that truly make profits focus on the
problems of the people they are serving.
A
good business plan should address both short term and long term business goals.
The business plan has to spell out where you want to be in 5 year time. By
making forecasts of the business turnover, gross profits and net profits will
help the owner of the business decide if the business model is working. We all
start businesses to make profits. But sometimes business do not make profits in
the first years of operation due to high start-up costs. The business plan
should address the short term sales and long term sales forecasts to help
decide whether the owner can stay in the business.
A
good business plan helps define the scope of the business (the range of
activities your organisation will be doing). In other words a good business
plan will help the business concentrate its resources on the activities that
will yield maximum returns. Concentration in business can be either on a
certain market segment, a product or a process that is bringing your company
profits. Sometimes companies lose focus when they introduce other products in
the market along with their product they are selling. The chances are that the
market might not appreciate the product introduced in the market. For instance,
in an attempt to create a more competitive product, Coca-Cola introduced a “New
coke,” in 1985, the company saw a drop in the sales of Coca-Cola, but after
asking its customers, the company discovered that they had to bring back the
old coke, which came with a new label called classic coke.
A
good business plan will help you anticipate change within the business
environment. This is very important for any business because success depends on
how the business will react to the changes in the market. The business
environment have many potential risks and in most cases, these risks if not
well managed will be the downfall of the entire business system. Therefore, it
is imperative for the business owner to be aware of the changes that occur in
the business environment. This will help you devise a mechanism for handling
the change from the environment.
The
change in the business environment can be in terms of cyclical change and evolutionary
change. Cyclical change involves variation that is repetitive and often
predictable for instance, fluctuations in the business cycles (times of boom
and recessionary times). Evolutionary change involves a more fundamental shift,
for instance the introduction of the iPad, changed the demand for eBooks. In
addition, the evolutionary change can be seen as a change in the taste of the
consumers due to an innovation being introduced in the market.
To
sum it all, a good business plan will help predict the future with educated
estimates that will help an already concentrated business to make sound
decisions. Will act as a guide to help the business owner deal with changes in
the market. The plan will also help the outside audience to see that you have a
well thought business and are ready to take on the market no matter what may
come your way.
A BUSINESS SYSTEM, “The cornerstone to business success.”
The success or failure of a business will depend on how efficient the business system is. Efficiency in this regard means achieving set objectives with minimal resources. How the business system is defined to help the business deliver its products/services with minimum resources is what makes a system relevant. The goal of any business is to maximize profits, therefore a business system should be tailored in such a way that it delivers maximum profits with minimum resources.
Most big companies and multinational corporations in particular have well defined systems. That is why it is not common for them to go out of business. They have well defined organisation charts, defining clearly the lines of authority and how information needs to move within the organisation. It is a challenge however for SME’s which in most cases find it hard to make a well-defined system. In my opinion this is among the contributing factors to why 90% of small business fail within the first five years of their operation.
How do we ensure success even before we start
operating?
I think the first and most important thing
every aspiring business owner should do before starting out is to have a
well-defined vision and mission statement. The vision is the dream of the
business owner, and the mission is the why he is doing business in the first
place. This will give the owner a clear sense of purpose for the business. The
vision and mission should represent the culture of the organisation/individual,
the thing that makes the organisation/individual different from all other
players in the market. This should clearly indicate the thing that the person
wants to champion. It can be talking about that person changing the way
marketing is done, the way communities deal with crime. It can represent
anything that the person wants to impact.
After writing and clearly defining the vision
and the mission statement, the next thing is to decide how you will achieve
them. You can break the vision and mission statement into small achievable
objectives that the business will be addressing. Writing answers to the
objectives helps the business owner develop a step by step plan of address the
vision and the mission statement. This all process will result into a business
plan which will clearly define the purpose and how it can be realised.
In this plan, the business owner will have to
answer a number of questions about themselves, the organisation and the market
they are trying to enter. This plan will act as a living document to guide the
owner on the right path. The plan will be a basis for instituting a business
system that will work to answer the problems that the business will face. These
will range from the reporting procedures, staffing, budgeting and so on.
An efficient system depends on a well-documented business plan and a good business plan is made when the purpose is clearly defined. This means that an efficient system depends on a purpose, because the procedures and processes have to be directed towards a worthy course.
An efficient system depends on a well-documented business plan and a good business plan is made when the purpose is clearly defined. This means that an efficient system depends on a purpose, because the procedures and processes have to be directed towards a worthy course.
In conclusion, business success depends on many
things and one important of them is a system you have instituted. The way
information flows, the way you organize your resources and the way the organisation
deals with others should be well defined and documented in a business plan. The
plan should clearly answer why the business exists, what it does, and how they
do what they do. Without the plan the system falls and without the system the
business fails. To avoid failure, care needs to be taken by carefully
developing a business plan. You can do it by yourself or you can engage a
business planning consultant to do the job for you.
I wish everyone out there who is trying to venture into a business all the best of luck and May God richly bless you.
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