Doing Business in Canada - Help for Entrepreneurs http://www.irspd.ca Financing and Management Tue, 12 Oct 2010 15:43:12 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.6.3 en 6 Sure Ways to Increase Sales http://www.irspd.ca/sales/6-sure-ways-to-increase-sales http://www.irspd.ca/sales/6-sure-ways-to-increase-sales#comments Tue, 12 Oct 2010 15:43:12 +0000 admin http://www.irspd.ca/?p=15 Want to increase sales dramatically? Then shift your sales focus from attracting new customers to enticing your proven customers to buy again. The best sales prospect is a prospect that’s already converted – in other words, one of your current customers.

Think of it this way; if your business is located in a small town with a population of 1000 people and you sell a sprocket to everyone in that town, man, woman, and child, you’ve sold 1000 sprockets – and saturated your market. Your sprocket selling days are over. Is it time to pack up and move on?

No! If you start focusing your sales efforts on your proven customers, you’ll be able to increase your sprocket sales dramatically. And these sure ways to increase sales will help build customer loyalty, too. Try some or all of these ideas to increase your sales:

1. Set up a sales incentive program.

Give your sales staff a reason to get out there and sell, sell, sell. Why do so many businesses that rely on their sales staff to drive sales have incentive programs in place? Because offering their sales staff the trips and/or TVs for x amount of sales works. See Paul Shearstone’s Creating Sales Incentive Programs That Work for how to make your sales incentive program “sweet and simple and attainable”.

2. Encourage your sales staff to upsell.

Essentially, upselling involves adding related products and/or services to your line and making it convenient and necessary for customer to buy them. Just placing more products near your usual products isn’t going to increase your sales much. To upsell successfully, the customer has to be persuaded of the benefit. For instance, when I last had my carpets cleaned, the cleaner noticed a pet stain. Instead of just cleaning it up, he drew my attention to it, and showed me how easily and effectively the spot cleaning solution removed all trace of the stain. Did I buy the spot cleaning solution? You bet. He persuaded me that buying it was beneficial to me and made it convenient to purchase it. Result: increased sales for the carpet cleaning company.

3. Give your customers the inside scoop.

Recently I was shopping at a retail housewares store. I had picked out an item and was mulling over whether to buy it or not when a salesperson came up to me and said, “I see you’re interested in that blender. We’re having a sale next week and all our blenders will be 20 percent off. You might want to come back then.” Guess what? I did – and bought two other items as well. Lesson: if you have a promotion or sale coming up, tell your customers about it. They’ll come back – and probably bring some friends with them too. (And don’t forget - you can give your customers the inside scoop by emailing or calling them, too.)

4. Tier your customers.

There should be a clear and obvious difference between regular customers and other customers – a difference that your regular customers perceive as showing that you value them. How can you expect customer loyalty if all customers are treated as “someone off the street”? There are all kinds of ways that you can show your regular customers that you value them, from small things such as greeting them by name through larger benefits such as giving regulars extended credit or discounts.

5. Set up a customer rewards program.

We’re all familiar with the customer rewards programs that so many large businesses have in place. But there’s no reason that a small business can’t have a customer rewards program, too. It can be as simple as a discount on a customer’s birthday or as complex as a points system that earns various rewards such as discounts on merchandise. Done right, rewards programs can really help build customer loyalty and increase sales.

6. Distribute free samples to customers.

Why do so many businesses include free samples of other products when you buy something from them? Because it can increase sales in so many ways. As the customer who bought the original product, I might try and like the sample of the new product and buy some of it, too. Or I might pass on the sample to someone else, who might try the product, like it, and buy that and other products from the company. At the very least, the original customer will be thinking warm thoughts about your company, and hopefully telling other people about your products.

Attracting new customers is a good thing. But attracting new customers is not the only way to increase your sales, and is, in fact, the hard way of going about it. Shifting your sales focus to enticing your current customers can make increasing your sales easier – and best of all, build the customer loyalty that results in repeat sales.

Source: http://sbinfocanada.about.com/od/salesselling/a/increasesales.htm

]]> http://www.irspd.ca/sales/6-sure-ways-to-increase-sales/feed 3 Keys to Successful Green Marketing http://www.irspd.ca/marketing/3-keys-to-successful-green-marketing http://www.irspd.ca/marketing/3-keys-to-successful-green-marketing#comments Tue, 05 Oct 2010 15:45:38 +0000 admin http://www.irspd.ca/?p=17 Show potential customers that you follow green business practices and you could reap more green on your bottom line. Green marketing isn’t just a catchphrase; it’s a marketing strategy that can help you get more customers and make more money. But only if you do it right.

For green marketing to be effective, you have to do three things; be genuine, educate your customers, and give them the opportunity to participate.

1) Being genuine means that
a) that you are actually doing what you claim to be doing in your green marketing campaign and
b) that the rest of your business policies are consistent with whatever you are doing that’s environmentally friendly. Both these conditions have to be met for your business to establish the kind of environmental credentials that will allow a green marketing campaign to succeed.

2) Educating your customers isn’t just a matter of letting people know you’re doing whatever you’re doing to protect the environment, but also a matter of letting them know why it matters. Otherwise, for a significant portion of your target market, it’s a case of “So what?” and your green marketing campaign goes nowhere.

3) Giving your customers an opportunity to participate means personalizing the benefits of your environmentally friendly actions, normally through letting the customer take part in positive environmental action.

Let’s put the three essential elements of a successful green marketing campaign together by looking at an example.

Suppose that you have decided that your business will no longer use plastic bags to wrap customer purchases. You know that the traditional plastic bag takes about one thousand years to decompose (cbc.ca) and want to do your part to stop the proliferation of plastic bags in landfills. You feel that this is the kind of environmental action that will be popular with potential customers and a good opportunity to do some green marketing.

To be genuine, you have to ensure that none of your business practices contradict your decision not to use plastic bags. What if customers who happen to walk behind your store see an overflowing trash bin filled with paper, cardboard and plastic bottles? Obviously, he or she will decide that you don’t care as much about recycling as you say you do in your green marketing.

Not using plastic bags appears to be environmental no-brainer, but you will still need to educate your target market. Did you know that a single use plastic bag takes about one thousand years to decompose? I didn’t until I researched this article and probably a fair number of otherwise environmentally conscious people don’t either. This one little factoid about plastic bags could be used as part of your green marketing campaign - all by itself it lets the public know why single use plastic bags are environmentally disastrous and that you and your business care about the environment.

And the third element? By shopping at your store, the customer is taking action to protect the environment by preventing at least one single use plastic bag from going into a landfill. It doesn’t sound like much, but he or she gets the satisfaction of physically doing something that fulfills their beliefs. You can also reinforce your customers’ green decisions and increase their participation by offering them additional related actions, such as buying cloth bags to use for future purchases.

Sometimes the best thing to do with a bandwagon is jump on it. You have to walk the talk and actually implement green policies and act in environmentally friendly ways for green marketing to work, but if you do, you’ve got a powerful selling point with those who are environmentally conscious and want to act to make the world a greener place - a market that’s growing exponentially right now.

Source: http://sbinfocanada.about.com/od/marketing/a/greenmarketing.htm ]]> http://www.irspd.ca/marketing/3-keys-to-successful-green-marketing/feed Small Business Marketing Makeover http://www.irspd.ca/marketing/small-business-marketing-makeover http://www.irspd.ca/marketing/small-business-marketing-makeover#comments Tue, 05 Oct 2010 15:40:37 +0000 admin http://www.irspd.ca/?p=11 I have to assume that you’re unhappy with your small business marketing. If you weren’t, why would you have clicked your way to an article on effective marketing strategies for small businesses?

I’m also going to assume that you’re unhappy with your small business marketing because it hasn’t been doing anything for your bottom line. After all, that’s the bottom line for effective marketing. Effective marketing strategies are the ones that result in more sales and more profits.

This Small Business Marketing Makeover will show you how to avoid wasting time and money on ineffective marketing strategies and how to pick and implement effective marketing strategies instead. Follow these steps:

1) Look at your small business marketing from the right end of the telescope.

Too many small businesses get and stay hung up on the cost factor of marketing. The first question they ask about any marketing strategy is, “How much does that cost?”

This is entirely the wrong question. The right question is “Will that target the right market?”, the market of potential customers for your products and/or services.

For instance, creating and distributing flyers is an inexpensive marketing strategy that small businesses often use – probably because it’s so inexpensive. Now suppose that you run a small business selling ski equipment. You design a bunch of flyers on your home computer, print them, and then go down to your local Community Centre and put one of the windshield of every vehicle in the parking lot - the night of the big Annual Horticultural Society meeting. Unless a lot of little old ladies suddenly decide to take up snowboarding, you’ve just wasted most of your time and energy.

Sure, it was inexpensive marketing – but it’s not effective marketing.

You need to switch your telescope around and look through it from the right end - the end that will keep you focused on customer-directed rather than cost-directed marketing.

2) Focus on your target market.

Dump the idea that everyone in interested in your products and/or services. They’re not. The reality is that only people who feel they have a need for your products and/or services will be interested in them – and those are the people your marketing has to reach. They are your target market.

Step 1 of effective small business marketing is knowing who these people are.

So first, read How to Find and Sell to Your Target Market and learn how to zero in on your target market by using market segmentation.

Then work through Writing a Business Plan: The Market Analysis. This article, part of The Business Plan Outline series, directs you to write out your Market Analysis in paragraph form. You don’t have to do that as you’re not writing a business plan, but you do need to write down answers to the questions about your target market.

3) Find your target market.

Step 2 of effective small business marketing is focusing your efforts on your target market and no one else. To do this, you have to know how the people in your target market behave.

You already know a fair bit about these people from the Market Analysis you just completed. To help choose the most effective marketing strategies to reach these people, you need to know the answers to just two more questions:

  • How do the people in your target market access information?

For example, do they read newspapers and magazines, watch television, text, web surf, email? Each of these ways of accessing information demands different marketing strategies.

  • Where do the people in your target market hang out?

Mainly at home? Shopping malls? Gyms or fitness centres? Skateboard parks?

I find the easiest way to do this is to pretend my target market is an individual. Try it. Create an avatar, a fictional person that represents a person in your target market, and answer the two questions above as completely as you can.

4) Evaluate your current small business marketing efforts.

Now that you know exactly who your small business marketing efforts need to reach, you’re ready to judge what you’ve been doing.

List all the marketing strategies you’re currently using. By each, write how likely your target market avatar is to see and pay attention to your marketing message.

For example, suppose that my business involves selling lingerie. I’ve created an avatar named Julie, who is young (30), married, working, with one young child. (This is all statistical; stats say that a woman of that age would be all these things, generally.)

In terms of my questions, Julie does not read print newspapers at all; she gets most of her information off the Internet through her Blackberry, and spends a fair bit of time emailing and texting. She also has a Facebook page and a Twitter account. Occasionally Julie picks up a glossy women’s magazine when she’s going through the grocery checkout.

Where does Julie hang out? Well, like everyone else, Julie does things such as taking her young daughterto preschool and out to the local park with a playground. Other than that, Julie is very physically active; she takes yoga classes, works out regularly at the gym, and she and her husband participate in a lot of different seasonal sports, such as biking, skiing and snowboarding. Julie’s hobby is cooking; she doesn’t have a lot of time for it but likes to try out gourmet recipes now and again.

I could go on but the point is that you want to make your avatar as complete as possible, because the fuller the mental image of your target market person you have, the easier it will be for you to figure out how to reach him or her.

(Page one of this article explained how to identify and focus on your target market and use that information to evaluate your current marketing strategies. Go to page one of the Small Business Marketing Makeover or continue reading about how to choose and implement effective marketing strategies for your small business.)

Now here’s an example list of my marketing efforts to date for my fictional lingerie business:

  • Yellow page ad
  • Several different newspaper ads
  • Several radio ads
  • An on-site radio promotion (Sweetheart day for Valentine’s Day)

Going over the list and asking myself, how likely Julie is to have seen my marketing messages, I have to say not very. She doesn’t read print newspapers, remember? As for the radio promotions, she might listen to the radio in the car when she’s driving around, but she’s more likely listening to preprogrammed music. In fact, these marketing efforts are probably a complete waste of time as far as Julie is concerned – and Julie is the one I’m trying to market to!

Your turn. List all your recent marketing efforts and for each, note how likely it is your avatar saw and noted your marketing message.

5) Choose and implement at least two effective marketing strategies.

If you worked through this marketing makeover to this point and the results of the last exercise were that your avatar was extremely likely to see and respond to all of your current marketing efforts, that’s excellent! I recommend choosing and implementing at least one more marketing strategy that has a very likely chance of reaching your target market avatar and tweaking your current marketing efforts to make sure they pinpoint your target market avatar’s needs as much as possible.

Remember, most people need to see and hear a message three to seven times before they will buy, so marketing strategies that allow repetition of the message over time are always going to be more effective than one-shot marketing strategies.

If, as in my example of selling lingerie to Julie, your marketing efforts to this point have been a wash-out, the good news is that you’re starting with a clean slate. As “Julie” has never seen or heard your marketing messages before, they’ll all be fresh and new to her!

You want to choose two new marketing strategies that would be most likely to reach your target market avatar and implement them.

Following through with the Julie example, I have to get my message where Julie is if I’m going to reach her. One thing I want to do is get my marketing onto the ‘Net because that’s where Julie gets most of her information.

My first marketing strategy is going to be to create a Facebook page or a website to give me and Julie the chance to find each other.

Based on what I know about Julie, I have three main points of connection; young children, exercise and cooking. One marketing strategy I could use to connect with Julie is to place ads on websites about these topics. Another might be to create and use a Twitter account (which I would use to tweet about these topics as well as my lingerie products).

Note that these are not the only marketing strategies that I might use that would be successful. These are just three of many that I’ve chosen for this example.

6) Set time frames to evaluate your marketing efforts.

The trick to this step of effective marketing is to make sure that your time frames are reasonable. Marketing, like exercise, does not produce instant results; it’s the repeated practice that gets you to your goal.

So don’t make the mistake that so many people make of implementing your new marketing strategy for a month or so and then abandoning it because “it’s not getting results.” Give it the time it needs to succeed.

How long? That depends on which marketing strategies you’re working. For instance, if I had created a Facebook page or a website, I would be evaluating its effectiveness at six months and again at the one year mark, at which point I would decide whether or not it was worth continuing.

A strategy such as placing online ads, though, would have a shorter time frame for evaluation, such as three months (assuming that I had placed a cycle of ads rather than ‘one-shots’).

Do what you need to do to remind yourself to return and evaluate your marketing efforts in terms of their effectiveness in reaching your target market; make an entry in your Blackberry, your Day-Timer, your email or whatever other calendar system you use to do this on a specific date for each marketing strategy.

Add to Your Small Business Marketing Repertoire

Once you’ve “mastered” the new effective marketing strategies you’ve chosen (i.e. you’ve gotten the results you wanted out of them or made a considered decision to abandon one or more of these marketing strategies based on your evaluation of results), it will be time to add more marketing strategies to your small business marketing repertoire – always bearing in mind, of course, that effective small business marketing is targeted marketing and that a target market is made up of real people, people that need to be persuaded to buy your products and/or services.

Source: http://sbinfocanada.about.com/od/marketing/a/marketingmakeover.htm

]]> http://www.irspd.ca/marketing/small-business-marketing-makeover/feed SWOT Analysis for the business owner http://www.irspd.ca/business-analysis/swot-analysis-for-the-business-owner http://www.irspd.ca/business-analysis/swot-analysis-for-the-business-owner#comments Tue, 14 Sep 2010 14:29:45 +0000 admin http://www.irspd.ca/?p=8 The SWOT analysis is a business analysis tool available in the tool box of any small business owner. However, running a business forces you to focus on the issues and fires burning today, not tomorrow. Learn how to apply a SWOT analysis to your business and position yourself ahead of competitors.

What is A SWOT Analysis?

A SWOT analysis may sound like a form of mission planning for James Bond. A SWOT simply stands for: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. Each area forms a box on a grid and you fill in each section to help formulate a marketing strategy.

Strengths and weaknesses focuses your business to look internally at what your business can do. Many business are great at looking inward but fail to look outside their company. Threats and opportunities are external; focusing on the conditions of the real-world. This is where a SWOT analysis is helpful. It challenges you to see beyond your company walls to determine what opportunities are open for your company and how to capitalize on your strengths.

While most of your analysis will be subjective, the SWOT can provide multiple benefits to your small business. These benefits can include:

  • insight into where your business can focus to grow.
  • understand the industry structure by using a SWOT in your business plan.
  • focus your advertising and marketing on areas that give you a competitive advantage in the marketplace.
  • the foresight to see looming threats and react proactively.

To develop your own SWOT analysis, consider each section with a certain degree of realism and be specific. Avoid the standard line, “we are great at everything & have no competitors”. Your customers will know you in the marketplace for certain attributes or things that make them say, “WOW”. Don’t forget the complaints of late shipments or customer issues. To effectively complete a SWOT for your organization, look at the following examples:

    Strengths

    Consider your strengths relative to your competitors and from your customers’ perspective. For example, all your competitors may sell using the telephone, whereas you use direct face-to-face selling. Anything a customer wants that you provide and your competitor doesn’t, can be a possible strength.

  • business location or product exclusivity
  • patents or proprietary goods
  • an established distribution channel

    • Weaknesses

    It is far easier writing down your corporate strengths than weaknesses. Think of objections your customers raise during the sales process. Think of your competitors’ remarks. Is there any truth to what they say?

  • limited human resources and staff
  • high cost of production
  • products or service similar to competitors’

    • Opportunities

    Your small business is influenced by the external environment, such as: legal, political, technological, and cultural factors. Consider what can make your business obsolete, and what will replace it. Threats can become opportunities or vice versa.

  • government regulation softening
  • development of new technology
  • growing trend and customer base

    • Threats

  • new substitute products emerging
  • price competition
  • economic pressure

The SWOT analysis is a quick and simple tool to understand the overall big picture. It is the starting point of strategic planning. Once you have a SWOT complete, you may want to try more advanced analysis, such as Porter’s Five Forces.

The most important take-away from this exercise is to apply this knowledge to your small business. Take all necessary actions to reduce the threats to your company and position yourself to take advantage of the opportunities.

SWOT Analysis for Small Business
Small Business Information Resources