Sales & Marketing

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Finding Acres Of Diamonds By Marketing In Your Own Backyard

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Acres of Diamonds is an old story of an African farmer who sold his farm and wandered the countryside searching for diamonds. It later turned out that the land that he sold was full of diamonds and eventually became the site of a large mine.

Similarly, many businesses seek their customers far afield when they might find acres of diamonds in their own backyard. Despite globalization and the trend towards working at greater distances, it’s worth taking a serious look at promoting your business in your local area. There are advantages to finding new customers close to home - the cost of communicating with and meeting these customers will be lower. By working with local customers you will lower your environmental impact by not having to travel so far for meetings and making deliveries.

Here are six ways you can expand your local market with minimal cost.

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Keep Your Sales Pipeline Flowing

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Business owners spend a great deal of time and money marketing to many, in the hope of attracting the few to their business. This process can be likened to a pipeline with a wide mouth narrowing as it goes along. The wide mouth represents the number of prospects you need to get interested in your product, so as to end up with enough conversions to hit your sales targets – the (much) narrower end of the pipeline. If the pipeline isn’t constantly topped up with new prospects who are then moved through it to be converted into customers, sales become uneven, income is inconsistent, and running the business becomes crisis prone.

Classify and monitor prospects

The stages in a sales pipeline can be different from business to business, and particularly between business-to-business (B2B) and business=to-consumer (B2C) type businesses, but there are some essential similarities. In all businesses there is a need to generate inquiries. The technique may be through advertising, shopfront display, cold calling, word of mouth or networking.

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Use financial ratios to review your Company's results

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Financial ratios can be helpful tools in understanding your company’s financial health. They are a benchmark by which you can compare your business to industry standards and analyze changes over time.

In fact, benchmarking and comparing to your competition is so important to business success that I provide all my business clients with an annual report on the benchmarks and results for their particular industry or profession. Without this it can be like traveling back roads without a map.

One warning though. If you begin comparing your results and calculating your ratios with incorrect accounting information from your business you just may wind up making the wrong decisions. All of the financial review and performance measurement we can discuss is of no use if your business's basic

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Cross Promotion - A Low Cost Way to Grow Your Business

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With marketing budgets under pressure, business owners and managers are looking for ways to do more with less. One of the most effective ways you can find new customers with minimal expense is cross promotion.

Cross promotion is simply when two or more businesses combine resources to market their products or services to each other’s customers. The main criteria for success in cross promotion are that the businesses serve the same types of customers but don’t compete with each other.

There are hundreds of ways businesses can work together to achieve this. Here are a few cross-promotion ideas that can help you expand your market on a small budget.

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Choose your customer wisely, you don't want everyone

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Nearly every business is dependent on a constant flow of new accounts. It’s easy to ignore this because most businesses earn most of their revenue from old, established customers.

The problem is that a certain percentage of old customers will drift away or change their focus every year. They’ll change their buying habits, often for reasons that you can’t influence or life just happens.

So you need to continually market to recruit new customers, establish them, and start promoting them up your customer ladder, so that one day they’ll be part of your staple business clientele.

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Discounting is Dangerous

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Offering a discount in the heat of negotiations may seem like a good idea at the time but thoughtless discounting is an easy way to lose money fast.

Before you succumb to the temptation to win new business by offering a discount take a moment to consider these ten problems associated with discounting.

  1. Discounting eats away profit margins!

  2. Negotiating a discount focuses the customer’s attention on your price. If your only competitive advantage is price you are in trouble because price can always be matched by a competitor. The focus should be on the benefits of the product to the customer that make the price, if not