Is your business being all that it can be? Some business owners feel their company is doing well (37% in a Gallup poll), which tells us that most are not happy and feel their business has untapped potential. It’s frustrating when you know that your business isn’t achieving its business potential. The good news is that there are always steps that you can take to help your business unleash its potential, which helps you to compete at a higher level, make more money, grow, and enjoy the rewards of performing at a much higher standard. This post looks at a few steps you can take to help your business to reach its potential – keep reading to find out more.
Steps to reach your business potential
Reaching your business potential starts with a thorough evaluation of your current business performance. Benchmarking against other businesses in your industry or ones that perform the same tasks is a great way to ground this analysis in the true business potential for your market. Benchmarking involves collecting metrics from other companies and then comparing your performance across various metrics.
For instance, a cement company found it failed to deliver cement to construction sites in a timely manner, causing extra expense for the contractor that was paying workers to stand around waiting for the material. The company benchmarked against Dominos Pizza with their 30-minutes or free offer. To make the effort a little more exciting, they used gamification to motivate employees to their highest performance. For every week that Dominos posted a higher percentage of on-time deliveries than the cement company, the cement company bought all employees pizza. And, Dominos employees reciprocated. The owner of the cement company reported eating a LOT of pizza after the first month.
Analyze the competition
Beyond benchmarking, you must analyze the competition to reach your business potential. Your competitors offer alternatives to your product so you need something to entice customers to buy from you. We call this your competitive advantage and you won’t succeed unless your competitive advantage is significant to some segment of consumers (your target market) and sustainable.
This is why you need to analyze your competition to identify areas of strength and weakness of your company relative to others in the industry or close substitutes. In addition to identifying ways to improve your competitive advantage by analyzing your competition, you can also learn from them to improve your performance. When you consider that SEMRUSH benefits is a great way to analyze your online competition while simultaneously boosting your SEO, it could well be the ideal route to take.
Research your target market
In addition to your competitors, you also need to ensure you have strong knowledge of your target market. You need to know the demographics, wants, needs, likes, and dislikes of your target market. Beyond that, you also need to know where you can find your target market both in terms of geography as well as where to reach them.
More important, however, in driving purchase intentions are psychographic differences, such as lifestyles, values, and peer groups. Finally, behavioral variables impact customer choice such that you may face a market where 80% of consumption comes from just 20% of consumers, such as owners of big dogs who buy most of the dog food in the country (except for fresh food).
Building marketing campaigns designed to specifically appeal to your target market based on your deep understanding of them generates better returns in attracting and keeping customers, as well as increasing the average order size per customer.
Improve customer service standards
Now that you have a handle on the basics, it’s time to move on to deliver a high-quality product with superior service. Selling the right product, for the right price, at the right place is the key wor achieving your business potential. The name of the game in marketing now is to recognize that you need a trusting relationship with customers who make purchases over time, not trying to hoodwink a customer into making a one-time purchase that doesn’t suit them. Plus, in today’s digital world, shoddy products don’t stay unknown for long with your poor reputation spreading far and wide.
Superior customer service is also needed to reach your business potential. If your customer service is slow, unprofessional, and/or not helpful, you’ll not only lose customers but also suffer a reputation hit that makes it harder to attract new ones. Instead, you need to make sure that your customer service standards are high to attract and retain customers and develop a positive reputation. Obviously, this involves being friendly yet professional and always willing to go the extra mile. Empathy also matters in dealing with customer complaints. On top of this, it is also helpful to have a chatbot that allows you to provide instant and 24/7 customer service.
Encourage staff to come forward
Your employees are your greatest asset, if managed properly. They have first-hand information from customers that makes inviting their input valuable. Plus, properly motivated and managed employees show creativity, perform better and more productively, and stay with the company to reduce the high cost of employee turnover. Happy employees make for happy customers and happiness in the workplace is contagious.
Use project management tools
If you have projects that often fall apart or are difficult to manage, then you probably know how this contributes to your frustrations with business performance. And, face it, without the right tools in place, helping projects go smoothly just isn’t in the cards.
The best solution to this problem is to use project management tools that make it much easier to manage and oversee your projects, ease communication among team members, and identify problems before they derail your project. One such tool, Swanly – Roadmap Planning & Reporting for Jira Cloud is an app that links your Jira data from mutable teams and projects and organizes it in a neat and tidy manner so that it is easy to utilize and so that you can make intelligent project decisions.
Use an experienced digital marketing agency
Often, a business struggles to reach its potential simply because there’s not enough brand awareness or the business isn’t good at driving potential customers down the pipeline (called the sales funnel) to reach conversion. Instead, potential customers arrive at the website or physical store and leak out of the funnel during the process for a variety of reasons.
This is frustrating when you know that you have high-quality products/services that your target customer wants.
Hiring a digital marketing agency with the experience to manage the entire funnel, creating content for each stage in the customer experience, and deploying the content in a way that achieves your goals is a great way to reach your business potential. They can boost your visibility through social media marketing, SEO (search engine optimization), and online advertising. They can also help design landing pages, sales funnels, and optimize content for each stage.
Reinvest profits in the business
Another smart strategy to use to help to take your business to new heights is to reinvest your profits back into the business. To grow and improve, you often need to spend money, but you need to think about where this money comes from. Borrowing money is not ideal as the debt follows you around and eats into your finances. Appeals to investors seem like free money but, in fact, obligate management to certain performance standards and reduce their control over strategic actions.
So instead, you should consider using your existing profits to fund your own growth. This money could be used to address weaknesses, update software, improve the office, increase marketing efforts, train your staff, or any other good use of the money.
Strengthen your workforce
As mentioned earlier, your employees have a huge bearing on your success, so often, this is the area that benefits the most from attention when making plans to reach your potential. There are many ways you can strengthen your workforce, including recruiting new staff to address skills gaps, using staff training to improve performance, and outsourcing to lighten the load. In addition to this, you also need to keep morale high and know how to motivate your team. This may include policies like flexible working, positive feedback, and career development opportunities.
Conclusion
This post should give you a few ideas for ways that you can unleash your business’s potential. It is frustrating when you know that your business is not reaching its potential because it means that you are losing out on money and customers. There are always ways to improve, though, and combining a few of the above together could have a massive impact on your success levels.
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Hausman and Associates, the publisher of MKT Maven, is a full-service marketing agency operating at the intersection of marketing and digital media. Check out our full range of services.
