Fewer than 50% of businesses survive beyond five years. If you closely examine government figures you will see the evidence
The analysts state the reason for this tragedy is the unfortunate ones just ran out of funds. This deliberation is not very useful and so I decided to look for those directly and indirectly involved in failed businesses to see if I could discover the details, establish any recurring reasons for failure and post them on the net in the hope that my insights would help others avoid a similar fate. I discovered eight consistent reasons for business death. Here are three of them:
No Vision, mission or strategy
“If you have not worked out where you are heading for then how are you going to get there?” You must have a clear illustration of what you want to achieve and how circumstances will be for your business if you achieve it. To achieve anything you need a strategy. Strategy is like a road map it shows you how to get there. It’s a systematic plan of actions. Strategy is only effective if it is translated into a business plan which can be used as a benchmark for business performance. A key instrument for tracking and measuring business perfomance is the sales forecast.
Lack of a system for marketing or sales
Marketing is about identifying markets and testing strategies to position your offering in the minds of prospects and drawing them into your sales pipeline. Sales is about engaging the prospect and getting them to buy your product or service. Marketing is a process of measuring and improvement of the ways you use to engage prospects. selling is the process of getting leads, forecasting sales and closing business. In successful companies a decent marketing and sales system is consistently underpinned by a well designed sales forecasting software system. The tools in these systems help you to track and measure what is happening in the sales and marketing processes. Results arederived from reports produced by the software which can then be used to compare what you predicted would happen versus the real outcomes. The point I am making is what gets measured gets improved or discontinued. This is the key formula for success.
Lack a system to get sales from their current customer base
There is a well known rule that 80 percent of your sales should come from twenty percent of your customers. Your focus is to achieve or exceed this figure. Customers that have already purchased from you are easier and more cost effective to persuade to buy from you than prospects that haven’t. A combination of decent web based crm software and sales forecasting software should give you the knowledge of recent activity and allow you to search for opportunities in your current customer lists.
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