Steps to Take for a Successful Year Ahead

If you’ve decided to revisit your business planning, we have five ways to re-invent or re-visit your strategy to help you succeed in business over the next twelve months.

Step 1. Act as a new start-up

Imagine if you could start again. What parts of your business would you change to build a new, stronger business on the foundations of the old one? What would you do differently, and how would the business look?

You may want to:
• Delete unprofitable product or service lines
• Introduce new products or services that are experiencing growth
• Close down parts of the business that are no longer profitable
• Change the expertise mix of your staff (possibly letting some go)
• Invest in new research and development.

Investigate if you can expand your products or services by adding something new or different or a new approach to sell to customers with a trial offer, a free sample, a special price, or an extra service. If you can establish one or more new opportunities in an identifiable target market, can you pivot some or all of your business to meet that demand?

Step 2. Employ low-cost marketing techniques

Bootstrap the way you promote your business by finding inexpensive ways to get your business in front of customers. Work back through your promotional tactics and identify which worked the best, list them from the cheapest to the most expensive, and then start from the top. You may find the methods that cost very little are the best, such as:

• Contacting likely customers directly (remember the phone?)
• Increasing your presence on social media
• Using email campaigns to your existing contact list
• Building word-of-mouth by asking customers to refer
• Using virtual meeting invites to target customers outside your normal business area of operations.

Many of the best small business marketing ideas take time rather than money, which, in a crisis, you probably have more of.

Step 3. Sell more to existing customers

It should be easier to sell to your existing customers as you should already know them and have a track record or relationship with them. Ask if there is anything they need and offer them an incentive (from discounts to pre-payment deals to advance notice of new releases).

Other tactics to sell more to existing customers include:

• Using accounting software to identify and contact inactive customers
• Analyzing customer buying behavior to offer complementary products and services
• Run product demos.

Triple check costs and pricing to ensure you are making money from each sale. Extra revenue to existing customers that has low margin, cost overruns, extra waste or product returns isn’t going to help long term. Your sales strategy needs to concentrate on the best products and best customers, so focus on the 20% that generate 80% of your sales to increase the chance they will respond.

Step 4. Find new customers

If sales to your existing customers decline and you can’t quickly switch what you do as a business, focus on adding new customers by:

• Selling online by adding an online store to your website
• Using third party marketplaces like Amazon or specialist industry sites
• Promoting on social media to attract buyers
• Forming strategic alliances with complementary businesses
• Prospecting in the next street, town, or city.

Chances are new customers will look a lot like your existing customers. Profile your ideal prospects (order in volume, pay on time, repeat orders), and then research where they are and the best methods to reach them.

Step 5. Find new business models

To get through the coming months and to keep the cash coming in, consider adjusting your business model to uncover new opportunities, for example:

• Sell online if you don’t already
• Target growth segments such as government, military, education, health, etc.
• Set up a specialized hub to help buyers and sellers do business
• If you have helpful or interesting content, make money with services like Google AdSense
• Sub-contract to other businesses for short-term contracts
• Sell your expertise by the hour online.

If you do decide to trade out of your current predicament, make it a collaborative effort by including your staff, advisers, friends, and family to develop your plan of action and seek professional advice if decisions will impact your financial well-being.

Summary

In the next twelve months, much will change. Be as proactive as you can by taking time to decide where best to place your time and money, then implement your customer, product, service or business model as fast as you can to find out what works and what doesn’t.