HAVE A CLEAR VISION

Human beings have a lot in common. For instance most of us tend to:

• Be overly optimistic about our ability to perform and the timescales involved
• Expect things to work themselves out
• Underestimate our competitors
• Lazy in one form or another

These character traits can get us into a lot of trouble. They tend to stop us from making meaningful and realistic plans about our futures. I have found that the larger a company or team is the more likely they are to have a vision backed up by a fully thought out plan of action. This is normally because bigger organisations tend to be able to employ higher calibre personnel. Smaller firms tend not to have any systematic form of business planning and most don’t really have any idea of where they want to get to i.e. they have no Strategy so any broadly relevant direction will do.

If we are to be successful, grow and avoid the pitfalls of poor business planning it is imperative that we have some sort of idea where we are going, why and what it will take to get there. It starts with vision and a sense of mission and cascades down through strategic and tactical business planning. How else can our marketers know what is expected of them?

So be on a mission, know what is required, deploy your limited resources appropriately and you will succeed.

If you have any problems you know a man who can help.

DO YOU HAVE A PLUG?

One of our electrical consulting clients asked us if we had a plug to stop his bucket from leaking!

The bucket he was referring to was in fact the number of clients he was loosing each year.

He had worked out that he was loosing about 20% of his clients annually. Coupled with the fact that he wanted to grow his company by 15% each year meant he had to generate another 35% more clients. Not easy to do and think of the cost involved!

The obvious answer to his problem was to get him to reactivate his past or lost client relationships.

 Strangely enough few firms pay any attention to client retention, let alone have produced an automatic method of dealing with the problem.

So we got them to:

• Produce a complete list of clients that have stopped doing business with them within the past 12 months
• Break them down ( if practicable) into categories i.e. :

              -they have moved out of the area

              -your contact in their company has left them

              -there was a problem contract involved etc

• Establish who best to contact
• Determine a way to make contact with them that is sincere, personal and constructive
• Find a way to get them to tell you honestly what ,if anything, happened and why they aren’t buying from you
• Apologise and thank them for their feedback
• Fix the problem i.e. change or replace something, give a special discount, offer a special deal or service, offer a guarantee of some sort, a free service check-up and report
• Promise and ensure the same issue will not happen again
• Tell them about all the positive changes your company has made since last doing business with them
• Highlight all the new features and benefits they will receive in the future
• Monitor the situation closely going forward
• Deliver fully on all your promises
• On completion of their first order send them a welcome back gift

  These actions, if followed fully, will in due course help you to plug the hole in your business bucket.