SEARCH, INDEX, UPDATES, CONTENTS, IDEAS, BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT
Some businesses succeed, others fail, what makes the difference? Some general concepts affect many businesses. Do any of these affect your business?
| Potential customers need to know about you. | ||
| Does your market know you exist? | ||
| Does your market know what you do? | ||
| Is the market perception of you accurate? | ||
| Does your business plan identify your target market(s)? | ||
| What is your target market? | ||
| What is the future of your target market? | ||
| Do you have a marketing specialist or department, and does everyone in your firm contribute towards marketing? | ||
| How could you improve your marketing strategy? | ||
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Customers buy products and services which they believe are value for money. |
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| Have you designed a product or service, and now expect customers to buy it? | ||
| Has your competitor done some market research, and designed a product or service which is what customers want and appeals to them? | ||
| Does your marketing help potential customers appreciate the value of your product or service by emphasising its benefits to them? | ||
| Can you increase the perceived value of your product or service? | ||
| Can you increase your prices because customers want your product or service and are not too price sensitive? | ||
| Should you offer a premium product or service at a premium price and / or a basic product or service at a cheaper price? | ||
| Are you marketing and selling to end users or to buying departments? | ||
| How do customers make the buying decision for the product or service you provide? | ||
| Are you helping or preventing customers making that decision by, for example, your payment or delivery terms / times? | ||
| Are you treating all your customers with respect, but with attention appropriate to their buying power? | ||
| Do your sales techniques include listening to the customers requirements, then explaining how you can help? | ||
| At the appropriate time, do you actually ask to close the sale? | ||
| Do you record the conversion rate of your leads into sales and analyse them? | ||
| Customers talk to potential customers. | ||
| How do you deal with complaints? | ||
| Do you encourage feedback from happy and unhappy customers? Do you do customer surveys? | ||
| Do you know what has made customers happy and respond to that information? | ||
| Do you let unhappy customers buy from someone else and criticise your product or service? | ||
| Do you prefer unhappy customers to complain to you so that you can resolve their problems and make more sales to them? | ||
| Do you encourage happy customers to recommend your product or service? | ||
| Lower costs mean bigger profits. | ||
| What are your significant costs of production or overheads? | ||
| How can you reduce those costs (without sacrificing quality)? | ||
| Should you sacrifice quality in order to reduce costs? | ||
| How much time and effort should you devote to saving costs? Cost saving is always limited to a proportion of total costs, | ||
| What proportion of total costs can be saved by a given effort, and what does that represent in money terms? | ||
| What effect would putting the same effort put into increasing sales or margins make in make terms? | ||
| Better use of resources increases profits. | ||
| Are you using all your resources? | ||
| Do you have redundant stock? How can you reduce it? | ||
| Do you have overdue debtors? How can you collect them? | ||
| Do you have unused equipment? Should you dispose of it and invest the money or use the space? | ||
| How well do you delegate? | ||
| How do you train your assistants? | ||
| Do you build your own and your customers confidence in your assistants? | ||
| Are your assistants empowered to make decisions, or is their mindpower wasted? | ||
| Do you have enough assistants to whom you can delegate? | ||
| Do you encourage everyone think about your customers needs, and the long term profitability of the business? | ||
| How well do you motivate? | ||
| Do you build self confidence in your assistants? | ||
| Do you have fixed ideas which prevent you choosing the best person for the job? | ||
| Do you believe age or ability should determine seniority and pay rates? | ||
| Do your pay structures encourage everyone to think of the profitability of the business, or the amount of their personal pay? | ||
| Do you treat employees in the manner that you expect them to treat customers? | ||
| Does everyone (including you) feel appreciated? | ||
| Are your present methods the best possible, or can they be improved? | ||
| Should you invest in new equipment or technology? | ||
| Do you have a suggestion box and welcome suggestions from assistants and customers? | ||
| When did you last review your business structure and tax planning? | ||
| Do you have easy access to all the information that you require? | ||
| What are you doing to improve your sources of information? | ||
| Do you make decisions quickly as soon as you have all the facts? | ||
| Things change. | ||
| Does your business have any problems? | ||
| Will those problems solve themselves? | ||
| Can you take any action to solve those problems? | ||
| Why is any problem unsolvable? | ||
| How long will you put up with the problem? | ||
| Is the problem caused by any department or individual underperforming? | ||
| Do you know there are recommended procedures for resolving underperformance? | ||
| Are you complying with current / future regulations? | ||
| Do you understand the money laundering rules which were effective from 1 March 2004? | ||
| Will you need an audit after 30 March 2004? | ||
| Will you benefit from an audit after 30 March 2004? | ||
| How good is your crystal ball? | ||
| When did you predict that mobile phones would be a Christmas present for children? | ||
| When did you predict e-mail would become more common than snail-mail? | ||
| When did you predict the 2000 to 2003 stock market slide? | ||
| What is your business environment going to be? | ||
| Are you planning forward? | ||
| Are you devoting time to long term important matters which are not yet urgent, or do you spend all your time firefighting? | ||
| Do you occasionally try to separate the role of running the business from the role of developing it? | ||
| Who will be your competitors in the future, and what are they planning? | ||
| How will your product or service be different in 5, 10, 20 years time? | ||
| Dream - then make it come true. | ||
| What would you do if you had no restrictions? | ||
| Where is the business now? | ||
| What do you really want? | ||
| What are the steps to get there? | ||
| What problems do you have to overcome? | ||
| What grant and other assistance is available to you? | ||
| When are you going to put your aims on paper? | ||
| How are you going to share your aims with your people? | ||
| Do you or your people need extra training or resources and how can you provide them? | ||
| How will you monitor and evaluate success? | ||
| Do you have a real desire for change? | ||
| Have you been honest with all your answers? | ||
| Are you outward looking and facing the world and reality, or is management blindly burying its head in the sand? | ||
| Are there any real reasons why you should not improve, again and again? | ||
| It is certain that change will happen - make it work for you - be early. | ||
| Does the boss have an appetite for development? | ||
| Does the boss need training to overcome any weaknesses he may have? | ||
| How else can the boss be motivated? | ||
| Do we need the help of an independent specialist? | ||
| Is the problem too big to tackle? | ||
| Can it be broken down into parts? | ||
| Can you start now? | ||
| Why is there resistance to change? | ||
| Why is there fear of change? | ||
| How do we remove any fear of change? | ||
| Have we sold ourselves the benefits of (the) change? | ||
| Will we fail to provide adequate investment or funding? | ||
| Why is the change not self funding? Is it not worthwhile? | ||
| Does everyone have the support that they need and know - | ||
| why we want changes and what the rewards will be? | ||
| what changes we want? | ||
| ` | how we are going to make the changes? | |
| who exactly is going to make the changes? | ||
| where we are going to make the changes? | ||
| when we are going to make the changes? | ||
| when we expect to see the benefits? | ||
| when we are going to evaluate the benefits and look for further improvements? | ||
| Are you prepared to modify your plans to take account of events? | ||
| How flexible can you prove yourself to be? | ||
| How long does it take you to be flexible? | ||
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Reminder - disclaimer applies. Please feedback your comments. This page was last modified 29 February 2004.