Small Business Challenges

Customer Dependence Risk

Successful or not, if a single client makes up more than 50% of your income, you are more of a contractor than a business owner. So diversifying your customer base is vital to growing a business, but it can be difficult, especially when the customer in question pays on time. But there is an associated risk should that clients' business fail or move to an alternative provider. A business should have a diversified customer base to pick up the shortfall should any single client stop paying. So acquiring new clients, without losing existing ones, is the lifeblood of your business.?

Acquiring Customers

Even the likes of Apple, Google, Toyota and McDonald's don't just sit around waiting for the leads to come in — even the biggest, most successful companies have people working hard every single day to find new customers and that means “customer engagement and conversation” by opening up their?engagement channels?to enquiries.?

Whilst there is no single way to make this happen, one sure thing is that however you do it delivering the Right Message to the Right Person at the Right Time is key to that first customer engagement by appealing to their need to resolve their problem.

Understand more about what available engagement channels there are and the appropriate activity that could help you and why… then join us at one of the?Marketing 4 Humans Webinars.

Cost Management.

Removing the cost of doing business and having enough cash to cover the bills is a must for any business and individual. To avoid this problem, small business owners should either be heavily capitalised or able to pick up incremental profits and also drive down costs to drive up cash reserves when needed. The hard task of growing new additional paying customers is, therefore, key to resolving this. To help avoid the 'Feast and Famine" of only marketing when sales dip means creating a marketing framework that ensures a continual marketing effort will be maintained. Something that Marketing for Humans can build with you.

Burn Out and Fatigue

Maintaining the principles of filling your Family's Fridge, Sleeping well and building Know, Like & Trust with clients, staff and suppliers demands a punishing 100% focus from business owners. And fatigue can lead to rash decisions about the business sales process, purchasing and administration. Finding a pace that keeps the business humming without grinding down the owner is a challenge for any smaller business. So anything that can take the mental and physical strain away by improving efficiency and making life easier for all is a huge cost saving in itself.

Balancing Quality and Growth.

Sometimes issues created by growth seem to match or even outweigh the benefits. Whether a service or a product, at some point, a business must sacrifice to scale-up which may mean not being able to personally manage every client relationship or inspect every widget. And whilst working “in” the business rather than “on” it can mean new Sales Opportunity lead generation is often forgotten. Something?sales marketing and automation?can resolve by working 24/7 in the background for your business. One such example could be Video to deliver brand information or product/service overview to clients who visit your website.

Founder Dependence.

We all know this to be a potential business continuity risk at some point. And all a business owner has to do is give over more control to employees or partners, right? In practice, however, this is a big stumbling block for founders, because it usually involves a perceived risk of compromised quality of work being done until the person doing the work learns the ropes or just is it the fear of letting go? More often than not stepping back and taking the “helicopter” view, and using technology to help monitor, automate and manage workflow will often increase quality, efficiency and productivity allowing more freedom for the business owner.?

One such technology,?Unifying Communications, now allows a workforce or outsourced support, to be available from anywhere and on any desk-based or mobile device. Equipped with video, data, presence, text and telephony working from anywhere ticks all of those boxes for efficiency, productivity, cost reduction, mental wellbeing and environmental too.

To review how Marketing 4 Humans Initiative could help?why not contact Peter, Marvin or David for an informal chat.

Call

Peter on 07710 267899 OR Mail: [email protected]

Marvin on 07590 397164 OR Mail: [email protected]

David on 07824 661038 OR Mail: [email protected]