Archives for September 2006
Fact-find your way to success
Fact-finding is also known as Intelligence Gathering and Market/Marketing Research.
Some companies regard research as an expense that should only be indulged when times are good or, even worse, use it in a tactical way to prove a point. What a waste! Take a look at the definition of research by the Chartered Institute of Marketing:
“The means used by those who provide goods and services to keep themselves in touch with the needs and wants of those who buy and use those goods and services… It is basically a fact finding activity and services management by decreasing the field of uncertainty within which often vital business decisions are taken.”
Let’s take some fairly obvious examples of when research is invaluable and where you may already be using it without giving it that label.
Launching a new product or service - No company should even consider launching a new product or service without first satisfying itself that it has:
- Established that there is a need for it
- Identified a market for it that can be reached cost effectively
- Confirmed that it can provide it at a price that will make profit for the business and that the market will pay
- Assessed that there’s room for another player in the market
Testing out a new or previously failed market – Research into the market can quietly test out the potential there before investing money and time in personnel and promotion to attempt to sell into it
Knowing the best source(s) to get customers - You should always establish where your customers come from and how they heard about you otherwise how do you know you’re spending your marketing and advertising budgets in the most cost effective, successful way?
Understanding who makes up the Decision Making Unit - for buying your product, service or solution, and the role of each individual involved. Many companies rely on just one contact at the companies they’re selling to when in fact there may well be an initiator, influencer, financial decision maker, user who each has a say and looks at it from his/her own perspective.
Knowing how to improve your offer – Talking with your existing customers enables you to ascertain the Decision Critical Factors that made them ‘come on board’ with you, why they stay, whether they’d recommend your company and why. You can use positive response as testimonials and nip any potential problems in the bud.
You don’t have to be a big company with huge resources to harness the intelligence that market/marketing research can provide. The best thing about this type of research is that we all have the ability to do it ourselves. You can check What you need to know to help you.
Happy fact-finding!
Linda Mattacks is the author of a series of training courses available at SellingForBusiness.co.uk developed to provide easily accessible training for small businesses who are not in a position (or may not want) to take time out to attend formal training sessions.
Who runs your business?
A while ago I spoke to a chap who runs a company that provides accounting solutions. The business has been established ten years and he sees it as a service company. They have about fifty active clients whose value to them is anything from £1,000 to £60,000 a year and once they gain clients they tend to keep them.
The bigger problem is getting new business. He would like to actively target more of the larger potential business. He told me he has spent “loads†of money on sales and marketing and it’s by and large been wasted. The company was up to ten staff at one point but now employs six full-time and two contracted.
He wants to get one new client per quarter rising to one a month. Although he hates telephone prospecting, because he finds it demoralising, he has engaged a lady to do some mail shots for him to follow up.
We went through the gold mine regarding best customer attributes, Decision Critical Factors and how they can both be applied to smarter prospecting and reduce rejection - “fully with you on this” – was one comment during the conversation. And I explained that he could freely access the 4-part “Build Firm Foundations†course from the Selling For Business website as a sanity check on his brand and brand positioning before he got stuck in to any prospecting.
So where is he now, four months on? Actually he’s in round about the same place. First VAT got in the way, then one of his customers was being particularly demanding, then someone was off sick, then people were on holiday… anyone who’s run a small business can probably identify with the scenario, and he’s nowhere near achieving his goal because he hasn’t followed through on any of the things we talked about.
He’s a nice person and nobody’s fool but is he running his business or is his business running him?
Another guy whom I first talked to about his sales and marketing activities about eighteen months ago agreed that a new approach was in order. He’s since worked through the ideas we came up with together, changed his business plan and gained twenty new clients, two of which are really substantial. He doesn’t have a yacht in the Bahamas yet, but he’s well on the way to where he wants his company to be!
The second guy isn’t any cleverer than the first and didn’t work any harder than him but he was prepared to stop bashing his head against a brick wall when he saw it wasn’t getting him anywhere fast and try a different way.
Linda Mattacks is the author of a series of training courses available at SellingForBusiness.co.uk developed to provide easily accessible training for small businesses who are not in a position (or may not want) to take time out to attend formal training sessions.
Has anyone received a good telemarketing call recently?
Most people I know get their fair share of bad telemarketing calls, the ones that are made by
- Some ill-prepared soul who telephones you to sell you a product or service about which they know only the very rudiments and haven’t really a clue as to how it could be of value to you.
- Someone reading from a script and expecting you to patiently wait until they have delivered their ‘pitch’ before you can get a word in!
- The pressurised, hard sell individual who implies, and sometimes actually says, that if you don’t take advantage of this offer immediately then you’re an absolute fool and you deserve to fail.
- Someone who doesn’t realise that the few seconds delay between you answering the call and them speaking to you is a dead give away that it’s a foreign call centre – confirmed fairly swiftly by them (usually) having problems with the pronunciation of your name that has just popped up on a screen in front of them.
- And what about that little gem in consumer marketing whereby a pre-recorded message is played to you as soon as you answer the incoming call? The purpose of this type of telemarketing appears to be to inform you that you’ve won something and get you to call a premium ‘phone line to find out more…
Having recently slammed a call centre that particularly bugged me, what I’d really like to hear about are good calls that you’ve received and what, in your opinion made it a good call.
Please help me bolster my faith that the good telemarketing call is not an endangered species!
Linda Mattacks is the author of a series of training courses available at SellingForBusiness.co.uk developed to provide easily accessible training for small businesses who are not in a position (or may not want) to take time out to attend formal training sessions.
