10 Steps To Increased Profits For Your Business

Here is a good article about how to increase your business revenues and profits without spending a fortune. These strategies are based on sound business principles that have been proven through the ages.

10 Simple Tactics To Improve Your Business
By Leslie Sprankling

These ten simple tactics are just that, simple. Each one is a nil cost or low cost ways to improve your business and together they form a formidable armory of weapons at your disposal to make your business grow.

So, read, study and think about them all so that you can devise the best ways to implement them in your business. Here then are ten simple tactics to improve your business.

1. Concentrate your efforts on those people who are most likely to buy from you. If you sell only apples, don’t waste your time on people who really want to buy oranges. Qualify the people who come to you (your prospects) and pre-qualify the viewers and readers of your ads so that you don’t spend all day dealing with lookers and tire kickers.

When you qualify the inquiries as they come in, you’ll be able to spend the majority of your time with people who want or need your product or service, want it now and have the ability to pay for it now. All others are just a waste of your time.

2. Get ‘connected’ to your customers, at least the top 20% who may produce as much as 80% of your business. Get in touch with these ones personally and stay in touch with them regularly. Cultivate them and reward them for their loyalty to you. After all, these are the ones who provide the bulk of your income.

However, do not neglect the rest of your customers. Assign members of your staff or sales force to look after them as their ‘personal customer care officer’ as these ones, with proper attention have the potential to join the top 20%.

3. Follow up with all qualified prospects, not with blatant sales blurbs or pressure tactics, but do so with additional information on the product or service they inquired about, or to provide free advice, some additional benefits or solutions to their problems.

You can offer a free booklet, tips etc or ways to assist in meeting their desired goals. Never, never, never give them a sales pitch without at least offering help, advice or a solution.

4. Don’t take it for granted that your customers and prospects know all the benefits of doing business with you, compared with your competition. The fact is, unless you tell them, they don’t know, and couldn’t care less about you. Customers and prospective customers are selfish people, they want what’s best for them, not you.

Think about this for a moment, as a prospective customer, about to spend your dollars on something you want. Do you care about the person you’re doing business with? Or do you want to know ‘What’s in it for me’? Well your customers are the same, so spell out to them all the advantages and benefits of doing business with you instead of your competitor over the road or down the street.

This means telling about your great warranty or guarantee, your extended hours of business, your 24/7 home service, your lower prices, your greater range of products, sizes, colors etc., your uniqueness and whatever else puts you a step ahead of your competition. Even if you don’t do anything differently, tell ‘em what you do because they probably don’t know that your competitors do it too.

5. Spend whatever time and resources are needed to determine your customers’ Marginal Net Worth. This is the amount, in dollars, that a typical customer is worth to you over the duration of the time he does business with you. Without this valuable information you could be handing most of your business over to your competitors.

In simple terms a customer’s Marginal Net Worth (or LifeTime Value) is the average profit on each purchase, multiplied by the number of times in a year that he buys from you, multiplied by the number of years he stays your customer. As an example, if a customer’s average purchase is $100 (of which $50 is profit), if he buys 8 times a year and stays with you for 3 years, you net profit from this customers is $50 X 8 X 3 which equals $1,200.00 net profit. This is his Marginal Net Worth.

See The Simple Secrets to Business Growth at http://www.better-n-chocolate.com, for detailed information on how to determine your customers’ MNW.

6. Follow up all inquiries promptly. In contemplating the reasons for this use empathy here by putting yourself in the place of your prospective customer. How long would you wait for a follow-up before you went somewhere else. We live in a society where instant gratification is demanded. We want it, and we want it now!

So, if a customer has come to you, by phone or in person, get back to him while he is ‘hot.’ The longer you leave it before you follow up, the ‘colder’ he will get or, worse, the more likely it is that he’ll go to your competitor. Always follow up with useful information, advice or some benefit to him, but never solely with a blatant sales pitch.

7. In any transaction, there is a risk. For the customer the risks include that the item he buys from you will be defective, unsuitable, won’t match his color scheme or some other reason. He needs assurance that the item will be repaired, replaced, exchanged or his money returned if need be.

By reversing all those risks and taking them upon yourself you remove those risks from the customer. He will therefore be free of the normal transaction risks and will be more inclined to buy. Yes, you will get a few who may unfairly take advantage of your risk reversal, but you’ll get far more additional business than you will refunds.

8. In a disagreement with a customer, separate personal feelings from business relationships. Hurt feelings can be gotten over in a few hours, a damaged relationship can be financially disastrous and long lasting. Always listen politely to a complaint and act on it on the assumption that the customer is right (even if you feel he is wrong).

It’s much better to lose a little face, or a few dollars, if you can salvage and restore a business relationship. And remember this, the old man in the frayed sweater and dirty jeans may have enough cash in that shopping bag he’s carrying to buy and sell you three times over.

9. There are only three ways to grow a business: get more customers, get your customers to buy more, and get them to buy more often.

10. Hidden Assets are items in your business that, on the surface have no fundamental value but which you can sell or exploit to raise cash. These can include:

* disused or surplus materials, equipment, appliances or office furniture,
* unused space in your warehouse, factory, office or store that you can rent out to a sub-tenant,
* a good relationship with your customers (who can provide referrals or bring in new customers),
* relationships with your suppliers (who may be willing to meet all or part of your advertising costs, or even supply you with stock on credit),
* old merchandise that you have stashed away because you no longer handle those products,
* your reputation in the community as a person or business to get free publicity through press or media releases, informative and advisory articles in local newspapers, magazines etc., radio and/or TV interviews,
* component suppliers who may be willing to include you in their marketing at no cost to you or, if you are a component supplier, your customers may be willing to include you in their marketing.

© 2005 Leslie H F Sprankling. All Rights Reserved. Leslie H F Sprankling is an Australian business consultant and author of a number of business manuals and other publications. He has been involved in the start-up and operation of a number of successful businesses over some 40 years. His business experience covers three continents, North America, Africa and Australia. His web-site, http://www.better-n-chocolate.com offers a wide range of business products, including exclusive software, business books and manuals for experienced business people and for those entering business for the first time. For anyone considering how to get into business on the internet without risking large sums of money and time, as well as for some exclusive free software and business advice http://www.better-n-chocolate.com is well worth a visit.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com

---

Business Goals And Strategies - Decide What You Are In Business To Do!

What Will You Get From Being In Business? What Are You Intentions? What Do You Want To Do? What problems are you going to solve? What value are you going to add that people are willing to pay you for and buy your products? (key words being "what people are willing to pay you for")

Before we do anything else, we need to make up a business plan for our new business. I am in fact in the middle of doing that for this new site. Spend some time on this, it will pay huge dividends later.

It is tremendously important to know what we want to accomplish so we have guidelines drawn up, so we can make the right decisions regarding the direction we take in our business dealings.

Why Is It Important To Set Goals For Our Business?

Goals are very important when it comes to the success or failure of our business. Why are they so important? Goals act as a roadmap for us to follow. They let us know where we are going, and if we are getting there on time.

You wouldn’t get in your car and start driving without having a destination planned out, so why would you approach your business that way? (Actually sometimes I do just get into the car and drive, but more often than not, I an just getting away to think or just enjoy the time on the road. Depends on your goal though doesn't it?)

All goals should have a few things in common. A goal should define what we are trying to accomplish and when we want to accomplish it by. Goals should be realistic and there should be a way to measure them.

All goals should be written down and viewed on a regular basis. Simply writing the goal down will significantly increase our odds of achieving it and having it displayed as a visual reminder will also help motivate us. We want to be thinking about our direction constantly and take advantage of opportunities to move forward when they show.

Even if you have never taken the time to set goals for your business, you are actually very familiar with the process. At some point in your life, you have more than likely taken out a pen and paper and mapped out a plan for accomplishing some type of task. Writing out goals for your business is no different than writing out your grocery list.

By clearly defining your goal, you are telling yourself where you are going. Instead of having a goal of “I plan to spend more time promoting my Virtual Assistant business”, clearly define the goal as “during the next three weeks, my goal is to spend 10 hours per week promoting my Virtual Assistant business”. The second goal tells you what you are going to do and for how long you are going to do it.

Once you know where you are going and when you want to be there, you can figure out how you are going to get there. Using the example above, you know that for the next three weeks, you need to be spending 10 hours per week promoting your business.

Now you can start defining mini-goals, such as writing articles and submitting them to reprint directories, emailing past clients and letting them know you are accepting new projects, sending press releases to the media, and so forth.

Goals can also serve as a great way to challenge yourself. Are there some things you have been meaning to do, but keep putting off? Start setting weekly challenge goals, such as blogging one post each day for a week straight or adding a new message each day to your auto responder or even writing an article each day and submitting it to a reprint directory.

The important thing is to be specific and measurable for easy monitoring results. Always keep your focus on how you can help more people get what they want. Price your product or service properly (according to your perceived added value) and you will sustain the business profitably long term.

Have fun with your goals and reward yourself with a point when you accomplish one of them. Once you have collected 10 points, treat yourself to a spa day or some other indulgence.

By setting and achieving goals you will find your business taking off and will feel a great sense of enthusiasm and accomplishment. And you will obviously be excited about your profit growth and the income stream that begins because of it.

If you need more information on setting proper goals, then see the link below and search out what info you need. There is a ton of info on our other site.

The Realgoalgetter Blog (Our Original Goal Setting Blog)

How's Your Time Management?

Time Management For Internet Marketers Really Does Come Down To Changing Habits!

I was reading my favorite blogs earlier and came across an "aha" moment. What a timely post over at SSWT. I couldn't count how many times I have worked through backlogs, organized everything just right, updated all work to a current status . . . and then started to fall behind the very next day.

Check out Lynn Terry's blog post titled "Why Time Management Techniques Fail" and then dig out that old time management system and change your way of doing things.

Any time management system will work if you work it properly according to your goal achievement plans. You do not need to go out and spend more money on that latest greatest program.

Don't change your time management system, Change How You Use It!

By the way we will be introducing a FREE eCourse pertaining to time management habit change very soon.