subject: How To Write Business Plan - Customer Insight Chart [print this page] Ever wondered how to get to market faster? 5 FAST MarketingPerformance Tips!
Budget slashed but still need togenerate a market response?Here are five performance tips fortough times that really help to focus onwhat counts and could save you heaps
Times are tough for many of the businesses I talk to, large and small, so here are five performance tips I use to market faster and harder for an improved response that wont cost the earth.
I hope these practical tips will be more useful than a purely theoretical explanation. Hopefully theyll be easier to remember and quicker to act on, which in the end is what its all about.
1Find out what really makes your customers tick
Can you separate their needs from their wants? What are their most pressing problems today? By when do they need to find answers? Who else are they talking to? Do they think your product or service solves their problem? What are their realistic alternatives to using your product or service? And, what do they think of you?
IN PRACTICE: Time invested with your customers is never wasted. Simple questions like these can be used to gain a valuable insight into your business opportunity not with just one customer but with groups of customers that share common issues too. Building your business through your existing customers is almost always the best strategy. And the better you know your customers, the better you know your business and your market. The best thing about this is that your customer will usually tell you the answers for free and theyll often be glad you asked. Building a stronger relationship with your customers in this environment is no bad thing.
2Focus your message (discriminators not differentiators)
Your customer has a reason for buying your product or service. This reason is what discriminated you from your competitors: price, brand, form, function, unique feature or just being in the right place at the right time (and convenience can be a powerful discriminator).Focusing on what matters to your customers is a vital discipline that can be liberating it can strip away out-dated assumptions and save you a lot of wasted effort and expense on things you just dont need to be doing or saying.
IN PRACTICE: Your discriminators are the few differentiators that your customer really cares about. That internally generated list of attributes attempting to characterise your product or service apart from that of your competitors isnt helping. The only thing that matters is what your customers think and it usually comes down to a few very simple criteria. Common sense dictates that we must find the main reason our customers want to buy from us and prioritise this reason in our communications (especially in our proposals), whilst removing or at least re-organising the rest to support our main message. If youve acted on point 1, this should be straightforward. If your customers reasons vary too greatly then its possible your market segmentation needs more work. These days, very few businesses make goods entirely to order. So trying to create the illusion that we are all things to all people, especially in our communications, is fooling no one. A simple competitive analysis of cost, service and quality usually draws out where the focus should really be, and in tough conditions this is essential. Find the main reason why youre product or service is special to your target customer and seek to reinforce it at every opportunity. If you dont know, ask. With the right encouragement, most customers will tell you.
3Go direct
Your customers budget has been slashed too, so they havent got time for general appointments and meetings. You need to get to the point, a point that must be worth their while. Make some assumptions, make a direct proposal (or use a worked illustration) and use this to provoke a direct response. If youre on top of points 1 and 2 then proposing a solution showing you understand their problem and want to help should be a welcome move. If not, there will be a good reason, such as sensitivity over timing or perhaps this just isnt the customer to be spending time with right now.
IN PRACTICE: Getting customers to respond is harder today than ever before. They are busier and almost certainly afflicted with information and email overload. Of the many break-through techniques, one of the most effective is the business case. If you can measure how much your product or service will directly benefit your customers costs, services, quality or sales opportunity, then they will be willing listeners. To get their attention, go direct, that means one-to-one. There are four principle steps: business case (letter), meeting, proposal and sale. A short letter is usually best. Put the key business case measures in the headline of the letter (its the one thing that has got to stand out when scanning or speed reading), justify your claims, leave some room for curiosity and ask for a meeting to explain. Attach a short outline proposal to the letter that describes how you will deliver the business case, listing the most important terms. Above all, the proposal is there to stop your letter looking like all the other junk and will buy you a few more seconds for your letter to be read. Make the proposal cover attractive (but not to be confused as a brochure) and make the cover title un-missable it should correspond with the title on your letter. If youre hitting the mark then your proposal will survive and be the basis of your meeting. The objective then is to refine the assumptions with your customers help and resubmit it as a final proposal to secure the sale (it is never the intention that the first proposal you send is final your customer needs to be involved in getting the final version precisely right for them.) Fortunately the cost of a meeting and a few emails or a letter is pretty low so this is a great technique one for those efficiency drives as long as you understand what your customer really wants!
4Test
Testing is the most essential of all techniques and the best way to speed up marketing and selling. However, the only people you should trust to give you direction are buyers. You need to work directly by asking your target audience to buy whilst measuring as much as possible. Everything from how you target, the communications and channels you select, through to the sales approach, the customer value proposition and their attitude to your campaign and brand. Refining your approach is then a careful balance between enhancements that will improve conversion rates and commercial viability, checking that you can still make a worthwhile profit before locking in sales.
IN PRACTICE: True testing is a continuously adapting cycle but it also is the key that can get you to market faster. With only an outline value proposition and a will to test, it is possible to create an almost instant market and build your service as you go. On the other hand, if your idea requires significant funding and development time then up-front testing of the validity and desirability of your design is vital. The point is to establish real buying interest early and reduce your risk of bringing to market something your target customers dont actually want when it appears. As long as this is a suitably well-sponsored and resourced activity, innovating rapidly with customers can be very rewarding. You should start by testing one-to-one, using the approach described in point 3. Target a friendly customer who you trust to give you frank and honest feedback and be up-front about what you are doing. A lower price for your first pilot is usually a small sacrifice for the benefit of live testing and a market reference and entry point. Co-operative development, with a careful eye on masterminding and controlling the design, is a great way to ensure your innovation hits the mark. Once this is successful, and youve ironed out the wrinkles, expand your pilot to others, perhaps by creating an early-adopters programme, before embarking on a market-wide launch. Exclusivity, however partially, is a great sales aid.
5Automate
Once you have built a working system youve gained a greater understanding of your customer, focused your message, interacted directly and tested everything it is time to switch on the machine. How much can be standardised and what can be automated? Can your system be broken down into steps that your suppliers or other specialists could do faster, or better, or cheaper than you? Where can efficiency and performance be improved? Can the costs and benefits be shared with your customers?
IN PRACTICE: Automation is not about saving effort, its about scalability, profit and an absolute focus on your core business (and what discriminates you, as discussed in point
2). Create faster workflows, automated routines and re-usable building blocks using methods such as Service-Oriented Architecture. For services, identify the points of weakness, the bottlenecks and the productivity killers and then work out how to speed them up. Similarly, identify the high points of efficiency and strength and work out how to replicate them. Even sales can be a source of automation, re-using techniques and resources and applying software such as sales management, customer relationship management and affiliate tracking systems. Analyse customer service and figure out ways to make the customer experience better. Use simple techniques such as publishing answers to frequently asked questions online. In fact, look at everything that can be replaced by a better alternative that reinforces the discriminators you identified in point 2. You should even be able to replace yourself!
by: executive-action
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