“Unlocking the Potentiality Lying in Your Existing Client Base!”

Today I want to share one secret with you of how to unlock the REAL potentiality of your clients and customers – allowing you to harvest the windfall profits lying dormant in your business. And the idea is based on this focused question;

Are you maximising and realising the true potentiality of your clients and customers?

Whenever I start with a new client on a coaching or consultancy engagement I have three accelerator questions I always ask.

The first is how many customers do you have? And of course with a bit of digging into records most businesses can give me this information.

The second question is what do those customers spend with you in total? – and to keep the exercise simple I base this on an annualised spend. Again with some research we can identify this figure.

And the third and most important question; How much could they spend with you based on your current product and service offering? Or phrased a different way how many of your clients or customers are multi sourcing or simply buying elsewhere products and services they could be buying from you?

Most clients don’t know the answer to this question so we set a project plan for the customer service or sales people to go and speak with all their customers – making sure they educate them on the full range of products and service they can buy from them and ascertaining their real potentiality through some well thought out and structured questions that we prepare together.

You can imagine how excited the sales and customer teams are once they’ve done this exercise and the typical responses which come back from the customers. “I didn’t know you did that”, or “I’d never thought about coming to you for that product”, being just two of the typical responses.

And yet we’ve already invested the time and effort to develop the relationships with those customers – they’ve already bought from your business – they’re already bought into your brand – to you and your team – now is the time to realise their true potentiality and worth to you and your business.

Having done this exercise with hundreds of businesses I’ve yet to work with any business where the potentiality v the current spend hasn’t been at least double – yes double and sometimes the potentiality of the existing customers has been as much as 10 fold the current spend.

Perhaps it would be worthwhile running a session with your team and answering those three focused questions

I wonder what this figure would be for your business?

Written by Royston Guest, Sales and Marketing Director of Pti International, the UK's leading personal and business growth organisation.

Are You Dealing With The RIGHT Customers / Clients?

You also need to consider, are you actually targeting and dealing with the right type of customers. There have been numerous studies carried out over the years into customer profitability within business and here is a snippet from a study carried out by KPMG:

“KPMG studies have found that rather than 80%, more like 140% to 170% of your profits come from 20% of your customers. Another interesting twist – 20% of your customers typically generate 80% of your losses while the majority of your customers, approximately 60%, range from mildly profitable to breakeven to unprofitable.”
Source: Customer, Vol 4, 1999, p19

If this is true, and I have no reason to believe that it is not then it raises serious questions about whether we actually want to work with all the clients that we currently have?

In my experience of working with many companies over the years this appears to be correct. In fact my colleagues and myself have done some work with one of the major banks and they themselves carried out an evaluation and established that over 80% of the contribution to their business did in fact come from 20% of their customers.

Maybe you would like to evaluate your own client base to establish how profitable they really are to you.

If you don't understand the profitability of your customers it is difficuelt to truly plan profitable business growth with any certainty.

Guest Article

Strategic Internet Marketing - 5 Basic Keys to Online Business Success
By Gley Yahya

If you don't know where you are going, you will probably end up somewhere else. Laurence J. Peter US educator & writer (1919 - 1988)...

When you think about starting your online business, success depends on the value of your strategic Internet marketing plan. It acts like a roadmap to guide you from one milestone to the next along your business journey.

What's Strategic Internet Marketing Plan?

There's an old saying that goes like that, "Success depends on planning your work, and then working your plan."

In the most successful business, the strategic Internet marketing plan is a fundamental written document which crafts a business idea in terms of goals, objectives, time lines, financial declarations, marketing consequences, competitive positions, directorial factors and goes on to show how the business owner will realize those goals, including a detailed marketing strategy. A complete business plan also contains a formal break-even analysis and a profit-and-loss projection analysis designed to give you an idea about the business's profitability, growth and cash flow.

Your plan must clearly define each step in the process. Be accurate and honest. Identify time lags and non-value-adding steps. Identify responsibility for each step. Brainstorm For problems in the process. Each step should illustrate an action in specific, clear and measurable terms. Keep your business plan flexible and simple so that you can quickly make changes as necessary. More importantly, your employees need to read and understand your company's goals, the activities required to achieve them, the timetable for accomplishing assigned tasks and each individual's responsibilities as part of the team.

The people most successful are those who have clear, specific goals and a timeframe; and they have an internal mechanism for monitoring the progress of business. They have been passionate about their business and eager to find ways to improve their own performance continuously in the search for excellence.

These people dedicate themselves to learning everything they need to know about the business to achieve their dreams. They have exceptional knowledge of creating, managing, marketing and running their business with integrity and responsibility. And they pursue their dreams with persistence, passion and a continual confidence that they will succeed at any cost.

Is the importance of creating a personal plan before starting a business sounds dull? Miss this step and you'll almost certainly fail in whatever you try and accomplish. If you still doubt why I stress the importance of planning, go throw the web and ask any one you come across and you will learn in practical terms what happened to most of them in the creation of any project.

The reason behind the MOST online failures is that people believe in the hype they heard from unethical marketers. They believe in “give me your money seat back doing no thing and you will start making $12.000.00 by the next month scheme”. If it’s that ease why they need your money!

If all people understand there is no sweet thing without hard work, we would be seeing many more online success stories and fewer online failures.

Remember, you need 5 basic keys to be successful:

1 - You need a strategic Internet marketing plan (even if you are starting small business and you are not going to lean money).

2 - The need skills to run manage and market your business.

3 - You need the right tools to crate a system that works on autopilot.

4 - You need to invest time and money (investing time is a must but investing money is up to you).

5 - You need to be passionate and self disciplined.

If your online marketing plan consists only of a Website, you are not using all the channels the Internet has to offer. Strategic Internet Marketing plan opens multiple channels and exponentially more opportunities to help you achieve your business and marketing objectives.

Here you will discover exactly how to draw up a highly potent action plan that will focus your mind and help you achieve your goals in a reasonable time.

Why Strategic Internet Marketing Plan Is a MUST?

As a small business owner, you do not have infinite resources to compete with the big guys. You need to prioritize how you spend your money to build and market your business during tough time. By following the step-by-step strategic Internet marketing plan, you can create your very own home-based Internet business and position it in the right place at the right time and with less risk.

Your strategic Internet marketing plan must uncovers the following:

- Get the needed skills to build your business.

- Search your market well before you decide you are ready. Find out what your targeted market wants and needs. Analyze your competitor’s strength and weakness.

- Find a product to sell: Create your product, buy reseller rights of hot product, find an affiliate program, use Google ad sense.... etc - Select the most effective, low cost marketing tools and strategies that fit your business needs and budget.

- Analyze information before; during and after you implement the Strategic Internet Marketing plan.

- Continuously revise your plan as you learn what works and what doesn’t.
Errors are part of the process. Don't try to avoid them. When a strategy fails, view it as part of trial-and-error that you can learn from.

If you are truly passionate about your business success, build your business with your customers in mind. In other words you must think about:

- How to attract targeted visitors to your website.

- How to entice them to take action (Either they buy your product or they subscribe to your email list)

- How to make them enthusiastic about the quality of your product and/ or service

- How to build relationship to convert them to loyal customers - How to bring them back to your website.

- How to continuously add fresh subscribers to your list.

Conclusion: To make good money online you need an opt in email list. To build an opt in email list you need to build your business with your customers in mind. After you build your list then and only then look for ways on how to make money from your list. Once you find the combination that works for you the sky is your limit.

Here's your chance to 'short-cut' the learning faze and follow a step-by-step blueprint to success by going through these steps.

Gley Yahya owns the Strategic Internet marketing, designed to help small business owners build their opt in email lists by following a proven to work procedure, that leads online people to their websites, and take them through the process from position to position, to convert them to loyal customers. If you need information and assistance with your online growth, we can help. You can learn more by visiting http://www.email-list-builder.com. You can reach him at: gley_yahya@email-list-builder.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Gley_Yahya