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Success_Tip__Making_Your_Business_Look_BIGGER_to_Your_Customers
| Success Tip : Making Your Business Look BIGGER to Your Customers
IT’S EASIER THAN YOU THINK NOT TO LOOK SMALL! Certain things
will make your company look and feel small to investors and
customers. By avoiding these easy to fix traps, you can go a
long way in making your company appear more mature. First you
must understand that every piece of paper and every word or
graphic you present to your customers or potential investors
will cause them to judge your professionalism. No detail is too
small. No mistake is unimportant when you are building your
reputation. The following details are especially important: ·
You need to have an effective website with minimal text that
tells the customer what he needs to know without making him dig
for it. Don’t have typos and poor grammar on your site. Make
sure your text can be read easily and can be printed off your
website. Your website should be easy to navigate and have only
that information which your customer needs to move to the next
step, which is to contact you directly. · You must have
well-written and tightly focused sales collateral, which easily
and quickly spells out your products and offerings. There should
be no typos or grammatical errors. Don’t underestimate the
importance of this. You should hire a professional writer to
write your sales and marketing collateral. · You need formal,
graphically designed company stationary and logo. All
communications should represent your company’s own particular
style. · Every presentation you make to your customer should be
well crafted on a PowerPoint design template that has been
created specifically for your company. · Even if your
organization is small, it should be organized to look big. This
means you should not have a flat organization. A flat
organization, by design, keeps a company from growing. On your
website you should have bios for each of the company’s officers.
The more officers your company has, the more mature you will
look. You might want to consider contracting with professional
consultants to fill important VP slots until you can hire
someone permanently. PACKAGE YOUR INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY Growing
a small business is extremely difficult. During the early days,
months, and years; as your business begins to grow; you string
together ideas, products, and services to create an enterprise
that reflects your own special talents. Somehow you must package
this collection of offerings and present potential clients with
a reason to buy from you. At some point, hopefully sooner rather
than later, you need to take a step back and analyze the
packaging to make sure it clearly reflects who you are today.
COMPETE WITH THE BIG BOYS As you grow your sales revenues and
begin to measure yourself against the competition, winning your
fair share of the market has its challenges. Larger competitors
have the advantage of mature sales and marketing organizations.
Even when they have inferior products, these competitors’ larger
look and feel often sets them ahead of you with customers.
Customers may be “sold” on the competitor’s “packaging”, and buy
the wrong product for the wrong reasons. Your challenge is not
only to help them understand that your product is the better
solution for their needs, but also to sell them on the viability
of your organization. Unfortunately, perception is everything,
and if your packaging makes you look small it really doesn’t
matter if you have the best product, sometimes it doesn’t even
matter if you have the best price. Buyers are often reluctant to
do business with a company that looks small and/or immature. One
thing you might want to consider is partnering with a consultant
who is willing to serve as your Vice President of Sales and
Marketing on a temporary basis. By doing this, you round out
your organizational landscape and reap the benefits of decades
of experience without having to pay a VP’s salary and benefits
until you are financially ready to do so. ANALYZE YOUR SALES AND
MARKETING INFRASTRUCTURE TO BECOME MORE COMPETITIVE The first
step in becoming more competitive is to perform a complete,
objective, analysis of your sales and marketing infrastructure.
It will be extremely difficult for you to view your business
dispassionately and perform an objective assessment. For this
reason, you will probably want to look at contracting with
outside professionals to perform your assessment. These industry
experts have decades of corporate experience in building
successful sales and marketing strategies to help them
understand your challenges and how to address them. An outside
consultant can provide you with a comprehensive analysis that
culminates in a gap analysis and steps to address the holes in
your sales and marketing efforts moving forward. Once you have
this assessment and know where the gaps are, you can begin to
build a sales and marketing plan that will enable your company
to effectively win against any and all competitors, big or
small. You can either perform the steps to execute the plan
internally, or hire outside expertise to perform those functions
that you don’t have the knowledge and experience to perform.
This straightforward and easy to implement process will get your
company on the fast track to more sales. GETTING STARTED: DON’T
HIRE PERMANENT EMPLOYEES! The catch 22 is this: you need help to
compete with the big boys, but you can’t afford to hire and
maintain the type of staff your bigger competitors have. How do
you compete? Eventually, as you reach your sales and revenue
goals and meet the growth expectations you have put into place,
you will be able to hire the expertise you need for all aspects
of your successful business. However, hiring permanent personnel
is not usually the best option in the early stages of your
business plan. Permanent employees will cost you much more in
the form of benefits and taxes and must be paid month after
month, even during times when their roles are not needed. By
contrast, outside consultants can be engaged on a project by
project basis and generally offer you more expertise than you
would be able to afford on a permanent basis. In short, hiring
an outside resource provides the expert sales and marketing
knowledge capital that allows a “small business” to look and
feel like a big company, without accruing the costs that come
with being big. By engaging a trained consultant on a project
basis, your company gains the added freedom to refocus resources
in other areas as your needs change. START WINNING IN THE
MARKETPLACE Sales and Marketing Pros can guide you through the
process of giving your company the look and feel of a much
larger organization. SMP’s Opportunity Maximizer Workshop
performs a full-scale assessment of your sales and marketing
infrastructure and provides you with a gap analysis and steps to
close the identified gaps. SMP also offers part or full time
Advisory Services, allowing you to just pick up the phone and
request help as you need it. SMP is ready to work with you and
your team to package your business so that it embraces the
future. Wouldn’t you like to put your competitors in the
position of having to explain why their offerings aren’t as good
as yours. Once you take away their size, all they have left is
their products…and you know you have them beat by a mile there.
It’s time to let your customers know that too. Contact Bob
Decker at 952-955-1200 or visit www.salesandmarketingpros.com
for more information.
About the author:
Mr. Decker is the Principal of Sales and Marketing Pros (SMP),
LLC, founded in 2003 to foster venture incubation, market entry,
and growth services to technology and services companies. Prior
to founding Sales and Marketing Pros, Mr. Decker was a Senior
Sales and Marketing Executive with IBM Corporation. He holds a
Bachelor in Business Administration Degree with a marketing
major from the University of Notre Dame.
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