What Marketing Phase Are You In?
Last night I was talking to a friend who commented that I had become quite a marketer. I really don’t think of myself as a marketing person, just someone who knows a lot about finance/accounting and a little bit about marketing. Today I thought it would be fun to share with you my history as it relates to marketing. Read on for a good laugh!
Phase I – Minimal Effort
When I first started my business, I was naïve enough to think I did not have to do any marketing or what I refer to as my minimal marketing phase. I made a few contacts, had a few clients and thought I was golden. When I found myself sitting around twiddling my thumbs, I then entered the stop/start phase.
Phase II – Start Again/Stop Again
This is when I would start marketing doing a variety of activities, get new business, stop marketing because I was busy, wait for the “busyness” to slow down and then start the cycle all over again. After I had repeated this a couple of times, I entered the “let’s run around like a chicken without a head” phase.
Phase III – Running Around Like a Chicken without a Head
In this phase, you probably met me because I attended every possible networking event that existed – no kidding! I was exhausted from all of this running around and completely discouraged because I was seeing very little return for all of my marketing efforts. Let’s not forget to mention all of the money I spent attending these events.
Phase IV – Peace and Consistency
Somehow sanity returned and I entered the peace and consistency phase! Ok, a mentor of mine sat me down and said “What are you doing? Take a look at what has worked in the past, what you like and don’t like about it and come up with a new plan.” That is exactly what I did.
When you are the owner of a small business, marketing is the lifeblood of your business. Without it, there are no clients – without clients there is no cash – without cash there is no business. Here are a few tips that helped me regain my marketing sanity, are effective and helped me to even out the flow of new business my company receives each year.
Target Your Marketing Efforts – you cannot be everything to everyone, when you try, your marketing message is confusing and not effective. Take the time to truly define who you are targeting. The more you can niche your business the clearer your marketing message is. Don’t worry, this doesn’t mean that you won’t work with anyone outside of your niche. The clearer your marketing message, the more prospective clients are attracted to you.
Tips for Developing Budgets
Everybody knows what budgeting is – you just figure out where you are going to spend the money you earn, and that’s all there is to it – right? Well yes and no. Yes, going through the budget process does identify how you are going to spend the money you earn in the short term. It is a tool you use from day to day and from month to month. But it is a wasted effort if it is not also focused on the longer term and achieving your strategic objective – the vision of your business as it will be when it is fully developed.
Your strategic objective is a clear written statement, a detailed picture of the future of what your business will look like, act like, and how it will perform when it is fully developed. It is a commitment to the future, not just a wish.
The idea, then, is to establish the pattern of profits and sales that will get you to your strategic objective in the time frame you have set, and create a budget to make it happen. It’s a matter of plotting the annual progress you intend to achieve, and breaking those annual goals into a progression of monthly results.
Budgeting is one of those core business practices that every well-run business uses and is a crucial aspect of financial planning. It’s a fundamental management tool that not only keeps you and your people on course, but provides the radar to tell you when you’re off course and how far off course you are. Whether you are a beginner or a veteran at budgeting, it pays to review the basics. Here is an overview of the main activities of the budgeting process.
Budget Setup
The first step is to outline the ground rules you will follow to prepare your budget. What is the layout and formatting of the budget itself – will you build your budget on a monthly, quarterly or annual basis? Who will be accountable for generating the numbers and producing budget documents? How the review process will work – what reports will you need to compare actual results to budget and on what frequency?
Plan and Forecast
The budgeting cycle begins by doing the planning and forecasting that will shape your business in the months to come based upon your strategic objective or goals. Fortunately, most goals have a dollar amount attached to them and the basis from which you can create your budget – revenues and profits. And of the two, profits are the more important because profits are the key to the long-term financial value of your business.
The idea, then, is to establish the patterns of profits and sales that will get you to your strategic objective in the time frame you have set, and create a budget to make it happen. One way to create your budget is to base it on sales (revenue) forecasts and work through the line items to net profit. If that profit meets your goals, you’re set; if not, you can review the various line items to see where you can make adjustments to meet the profit goal. The better way is to start your profit goal and calculate the revenue you have to generate in order to achieve the required profits.
Chances are the initial budget you set won’t be perfect. Update your forecast quarterly or when new information or events impacts your company. Compare initial plans (budget) to what actually occurred (actual), and adjust remaining budget figures accordingly (forecast). By doing so, your budget will keep touch with reality and provide you useful information as part of your monthly, ongoing review.
Monitor and Report
Use your accounting system to gather and organize actual results, and create monthly budget variance reports that point out where actual results differ from your plan and how much they differ by. Then do some research as to what is causing the favorable or unfavorable variance. This information is the key to help you make the right decisions to move your company forward towards your strategic objective.
Review and Manage
Budgeting is where planning and implementation meet. Managing your budget is translating information into action. Your budget tells you what you need to accomplish. Your variance reports tell you what you are actually accomplishing. Your budget review process gives you the specific direction you need to focus your attention where it will do the most good, where it will get the best results for your business.
Study your budget and variance reports for clues on how to improve your business, spot problems before they become serious and generally “keep in touch” with the pulse of your business. Use this opportunity to review and confirm budget assumptions and revise them, as necessary. The point is, your budget gives you a “standard” to work for as derived from your strategic objective, your variance report shows you where you are in relation to that standard, and your review and analysis process helps you ask the right questions to ensure you get back on course.
As you refine your budgeting skills, fine tune your budget numbers, and become more imaginative in your review and analysis of your variance reports, all this will become second nature. You’ll scan the monthly variance reports, instantly honing in on the things that matter. You’ll have a firm grasp on the leverage points of your business. You’ll see problems long before they become serious, and opportunities will become visible at an early stage when you can maximize their benefit to you and achieving your strategic objective.
© 2009 Linda A. Hunt. Reprint rights granted to all online venues so long as it remains complete and unaltered (including the “about the author” info at the end). Send a courtesy copy of the reprint to info@lahenterprises.com.
Linda Hunt delivers simple, practical strategies for creating systems and structure that create stability helping business owners to grow their business and earn more money. For more FREE tips like these, visit her at http://www.sumsolutions.com
Show Them The Value
The fees you charge have NOTHING to do with supply and demand,
and
EVERYTHING to do with VALUE.
That’s right – the fees that you charge directly correlate to the value you provide to your clients. The key is to show them and keep showing them that value. This keeps current clients happy and makes the buying decision for new clients that much easier.
Client focus on value, we focus on price. Clients want a price they can justify and it is our job (besides providing the bookkeeping services) to EDUCATE them on the VALUE of the results your service delivers.
In order to educate your clients on that value, you must first understand what that value is and then, how it is perceived by your client. There are a couple of ways to do this but let’s start with pretending you are a customer who is buying a service. What are the questions you ask as you evaluate whether or not you are going to purchase the service? What answers are you looking for? What problem are you looking for this service to solve for you? How will you know they are meeting your expectations?
It is essential for you to understand the value you provide first, so that you can then help your client to understand it. Remember, your client isn’t purchasing the number of checks that you write on their behalf. They are purchasing the end result – accurate and complete financial records! Of course, this is not the only result that you provide to clients.
Now let’s turn around those questions that we would ask when we are purchasing a service and ask them of ourselves as they apply to your service.
- What problems do I and my company help my clients solve?
- What am I an expert at helping people accomplish?
- What am I an expert at helping people achieve? What is the end result?
- What am I an expert at helping people feel?
You will want to write down as many answers that come to mind as possible. If you find yourself getting stuck, just pretend you are a customer looking to hire you. Looking at it from a different prospective will help you to think and ask different questions.
The next step is to quantify and qualify those answers by asking your clients what matters most to them. Asking your client will either give you confirmation of what you believe is the value you provide and/or you uncover something that is important to your clients that you had not thought of.
The important thing is to not accept vague, fluffy answers to these questions. Your objective is to find out how using your service will make a difference in their business. The answers give you the information you need to meet and exceed your clients expectations every time and the confidence in the services you provide.
Linda Hunt delivers simple, practical strategies for creating systems and structure that create stability helping business owners to grow their business and earn more money. For more FREE tips like these, visit her at http://www.sumsolutions.com
It has been a real pleasure working with Linda. She has helped me to see what area of my business is really my passion and focus my attention on that area.