Jumpstart Your Business

Got your attention didn’t we?

Now, you could write a book on going rogue and rake in the money like Ms. Palin does but first you have to run for VPOTUS and we know that is not in the cards. So, if you are like the rest of us mortals, here are twenty questions to ask yourself to see whether you have what it takes to go rogue as an entrepreneur:

In Part 1 we discussed some of the reasons why CRM applications are failing. In Part 2 we address some of the fixes that you can make to prevent failing CRM applications.

How does a company ensure a successful CRM application implementation?

Three basic steps:
• A complete understanding of the target customer and the way he/she thinks.
• A productive data capture environment. That includes the customer needs, pain points, business language, key words and phrases used when looking for your products or services
• The right marketing message that resonates with the target customer.

How to pick a good CRM application software suite?

Firstly, you need to think of CRM as a marketing process and not as a way to manage sales cycles. Most of the applications in use today do not fit today’s marketing needs because they were built for sales cycle management.

Also, applications which automate the sales cycle process have totally different characteristics from their sibling tools used for designing and constructing marketing strategy and marketing messages. These tools must be able to satisfy both the company and the customer needs.

Lately, there’s been much talk about the failure of installed Customer Relationship Management applications to deliver the increase in sales volumes that companies are looking for. The reason often given is that most of the installed applications are old and don’t relate to the complexity of today’s environment. Customers are being urged to invest in the new breed of applications with the promise of better results because of the currency of these apps.

Interestingly enough, a close look at the application landscape reveals that the newer applications are just as irrelevant as the old ones because they both concentrate on increasing sales volumes without assisting companies to better understand their markets and better segment them to get at the targeted markets they need to pursue.

The newest game in town is CRM application modernization. Many an IS director and many a Business Executive is being hotly courted to re-engineer or modernize their CRM application portfolio. This article looks at the basic reasons why you may not be entirely ready for CRM modernization. It also discusses some of the pitfalls to avoid.

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.

All of your life you have been told to learn to think outside the box. All through school you have been taught to think outside the box and now comes this idiot who says the time has come to think inside the box. When did he arrive from Pluto or was it Uranus?

The Wikipedia definition of the term “Thinking outside the box is to think differently, unconventionally or from a new perspective. This phrase often refers to novel, creative and smart thinking.” Thinking outside the box inspires our creative juices and gets us looking at all the different possibilities that lay around us. It makes us look at all the options and then some, before we choose the strategic path upon which to tread.

This is told in the first person as seen from the eyes of someone who would like to be your favorite customer.

1. You ignored me when I arrived and now I’m leaving, your nose is still in the guest book. How about noticing and acknowledging your customers.

Small business executives have to wear multiple hats and generally have little time and very limited budgets to devote to marketing activities. Nevertheless, they need to understand their target markets and favorite customers even moreso than their larger counterparts because of the very little room they have for mistakes. So how does Social Media come into play in this environment?

Interestingly enough, social media gives the small business the unique opportunity of gathering marketing data and encouraging customer loyalty with very minimal outlay. Creating a Facebook page for your business or a Twitter account and getting your customers to join a select group can get you valuable information if you encourage them to tweet or post, and collect and analyze their tweets or their Facebook comments.

Using the Internet to do business is here to stay and more and more small businesses are having an online presence. You need to think of your business in terms of what it takes to build a more relevant and targeted customer base to meet your market head on rather than how to push your product or service out to unsuspecting prospects. Here are five things to do to set up a web strategy to compete effectively in today’s online world.

1. Build a web site with content that is written around the key phrases that your customers use to find a business or products/services like yours.

When you’re starting up a business, there are so many pieces of detail that confront you that it becomes really tempting to look for paint-by-numbers solutions. One of these pieces of detail that we often can’t ignore is the business plan that the bank needs before they’ll consider you for a loan or the landlord wants before taking your lease application seriously.

The pressure is so great and you hate so much to write that you look for something that tells you exactly where to start, what to do, and how to do it. Something that works a lot like a run book that explains what buttons to push. Something like one of the computer based business planning software applications that are around today.

Here are twenty-five reasons why your existing small business can fail even in great economic times. If any, or worse yet, several of these are happening to your business, you need to get advice from a small business counselor. Check your local chamber of commerce or your local Small Business Development Center or local office of SCORE, if you’re in the USA, to see whether free counseling is available for you.

1. Your business plan is several years old and has never been updated
2. You don’t have a profile of your favorite customer