Jumpstart Your Business

CRM applications in particular need to be constantly modernized because the majority of today’s business organizations have become “subject to change without notice”. A CRM application which was developed or acquired to solve yesterday’s business problem based on yesterday’s business requirement, may not fulfill the needs of today’s business process. The application must be aligned to the business needs and this is not a one-time alignment but rather an on-going need.

Just take a look at the war between Macmillan and Amazon and you’ll realize that Macmillan is behaving just like the newspaper industry and not wanting to recognize that paper books and paper book publishers are on their way out. Amazon.com is right to not want to gouge customers with a price of $14.99 for an e-book that is costing the paper book publisher a mere fraction of the amount it did for printing and distributing the classical hard or soft cover book.

Your marketing message must describe to your favorite buyer how your product or service will solve the buyer’s problem and ease the pain the buyer is feeling. Here are the key components that must be in this message:

1. Who is it for – your target market and your favorite buyer. If you have several target markets your marketing message may need to be different for each of them.

Regardless of the type of product or service you are trying to sell in your small business, there are 3 very important factors that you have to be on top of. These key critical success factors needed to be handled in the order that they are listed here:

1. Identify and thoroughly analyze your target market or your favorite client or customer. You need to understand the way they think, the pain they are suffering, the reason they buy from you and the language they use when they refer to your product.

Click on this picture to donate to the Red Cross for Haiti Relief

. . . Or, tell us, if you were given the opportunity, what kind of small business you would start up in Haiti when the rebuilding begins and the most important thing you’d do to ensure that your business can recover from a disaster like this. We’ll donate $1.00 for every comment we receive to this post.

So you are seriously thinking of going into business, and make a ton of money and have a lot of spare time to spend with your family. Well that is another story for another day but first, let us figure out if the idea has merit. Here are five keys to evaluating your business idea:

1. Who is it targeted at?

Which specific segment of customers are you targeting and do you understand how they think and communicate? This latter point is important since it will help you craft your marketing message.

Much of today’s small business for profit and not-for-profit application software was written over a decade ago. The million dollar question is: Are these applications still worth running ? Considering all of the technology innovation that has occurred since then, can we expect an application designed and built with yesterday’s technology for yesterday’s business world to fit today’s?

The answer is no.

As you try to draw up your marketing strategy for your start up or existing small business, you need to remember that there are several factors that are outside of your control.

The composition and the behavior of your target market
You cannot change or impact the demographics of your target market neither can you control how they make buying decisions or how they behave with the media. You can only monitor and try to understand the effects of these characteristics upon your marketing plan.

If you are a customer, use this system to rate your favorite bar/restaurant. If you are the bar/restaurant owner, think like your customer and use this to rate yourself. Take 5 points for each answer that you get right. If you score more than 90 you are in great shape. Less than 60 and you are in trouble.

1. Provide a nice environment for your dining/drinking experience (ambience)

2. Take the time to understand your eating and drinking habits.

As a small business owner, you owe it to the business to decide whether your lender is right for your business or not. Banks and lending institutions use five factors to grant credit to you or your business and these are:

Capacity
Your ability to repay the loan. They look at your cash flow and your expected business performance over time to see whether you have the ability now and in the future to be able to keep up with the loan payments.