Best Practice for Small Business. Marketing ideas for small business.

Following on from yesterday by continuing the theme of the challenges facing small businesses, today we look at the poor level of service sometimes given to small companies by firms offering professional services. Everyone’s a consumer at some level, and as Robert Craven argues, SMEs should be valued customers just as much as anyone else:

I run a consulting company that employs between seven and ten employees depending on the time of year and state of the economy.

My professional advisers - accountant, lawyer, architect, financial adviser - are very important to me. Many run their own businesses, just like me. But for whatever reason, they often don’t think of themselves as being a small business. And that can cause problems for people like me. So what is it that I want my advisers to be able to do? First and foremost, I want my adviser to understand me.

Show an interest in me

From where I stand, I am totally unique. No-one else has the same specific problems that I have and no-one else has the same worries and concerns. When I am going to talk about money and my business I want the other person to have a real interest in me and my aspirations.

Second, I want my adviser to understand the needs of a small business. I want them to really understand (or at least be able to empathise with) just how brilliantly skilful I must have been to grow my business despite all the odds!

Business is not simply about money. Business is about people; employing and motivating people, getting people to buy from you and finding people to buy from. Business is about sales and marketing and about delivering your service or product.

I don’t expect an adviser to understand everything about small businesses, but a decent rudimentary
understanding is not unreasonable. Most businesses are fairly simple - understand how a business works, not in theory but in reality – that’s what I want my adviser to be able to do.

Third, I want my adviser to understand my business. I have specific problems - problems that are specific to my industry, to my market and to the way that I run my business.

The adviser should know this and be able to assist with specific industry-­related support – often, a bit of research would do no harm!

Swift action

Fourth, I want swift action. The systems used by most competing advisers appear to be relatively similar, so I will accept whatever calculations or recommendations are made.

What I cannot accept are the intolerable delays that sometimes seem to occur. I want swift action, answers delivered when promised or, if all else fails, to be offered a date when work will be completed. A little courtesy is all that I ask.

Fifth, I want to know what I am paying for and I want to know how much I am going to pay. If an accountant or lawyer charges by the hour, then they are incentivised to work slowly. Other professional service firms (architects, dentists, doctors) work to a price, so what’s the problem? Surely fixed price agreements would incentivise them to work more efficiently.

What I want is an adviser that understands me, understands my business, gives me decisions when promised and explains how they charge. Not much to ask, surely!

The above article originally appeared in the October 2007 edition of Better Business magazine

from b2bsee * The Market Research Blog

Without vast marketing budgets to call upon and with acute time-pressure upon employees, small businesses can sometimes struggle to generate interest in their company.

Finding the most efficacious promotional strategy possible is something of a Holy Grail for SMEs – But without enough care, this can soon become an exercise in not seeing the wood for the trees. In essence, focus is key.

That’s why the notion of guerrilla marketing has become a bit of a buzzword amongst marketers in recent years. A simplified distillation of this technique is as follows:

• Concentrate your efforts on small, focussed areas of promotion that are effective; and
• Repeat them over and over again.

Colin Campbell, a sales and marketing professional from a large corporate background started his own business recently. In the following article, he reflects upon his own experiences of going guerrilla, and argues that a pared-down, but channelled, marketing strategy is what most SMEs need:

I launched my business at the end of 2005, and six months later I found myself in a position of trying to carry out too many marketing activities - yet I had too little business coming in.

I was going from developing my websites, to writing marketing collateral, to developing newsletters, to making contacts and attending networking meetings. All this was taking time and money.

Step back

Taking time out to think about what I was doing and how I was trying to develop my business proved to be the best thing I did.

I immediately discovered some problems. My marketing consisted of a series of activities - they were not linked up. I was meeting people, picking up business cards and not following up sufficiently quickly - people didn’t have a clear enough perspective of how I could help them or how they could help me.

I turned to the internet for answers - Perhaps people with similar business challenges could provide me with some new ideas. I went on some online networking communities and it was here that I came across the concept of guerrilla marketing.

Don’t do too much

The first key with guerrilla marketing is to seize responsibility and analyse the best marketing activities to undertake. One of my problems was that I was trying to do too much at the same time.

On top of this, I was attending a lot of networking meetings as I knew other people had very successful businesses through having a wide and deep network. I’d failed to realise that all these other people had achieved initial success through using one of these strategies, not all of them all at once!

Narrow your focus

The second key with guerrilla marketing is to focus on a small number of marketing activities and carry them out to the best of your ability. CJ Hayden, author of Get Clients Now! says that businesses often know what to do - they just don’t do enough of it, or get distracted.

I therefore concentrated my efforts on networking and following up. By doing this I was able to focus on building relationships with people I already knew and go to events to meet new people. When they showed an interest in what I did, only then did I hand them some of my marketing material. By putting people first, my business increased rapidly.

Repeat it again and again

The third key is to execute and repeat whatever works over and over again. In his Guerrilla Marketing books, Jay Conrad Levinson says:

Mediocre marketing with commitment works better than brilliant marketing without commitment.

I started a programme and five weeks later my business doubled. The growth was far greater than I could have expected if I’d continued with my previous approach.

Factors for success

Here are some other factors that are critical to success.

• Establish how much business you have today.
• Establish how much business you would like in the long term.
• Establish how much business you could add in 28 days, if you put your mind to it.
• Work out where you are stuck or need most effort - Most people think they need to fill the sales pipeline, in fact, most need to focus on following up!
• Work every day on putting the ingredients for success in place.
• Monitor your progress every day.
• Stick to your plan and it will work.

So what are you waiting for? Grab your gun and start your own bit of guerrilla warfare!

The above article originally appeared in the October 2007 edition of Better Business magazine

from b2bsee * The Market Research Blog