Archive for the ‘Business to Business’ Category

In many practices of marketing, companies'  large, medium and, of course small or individual ones' facing the challenge of identifying their client. Client here meant someone purchasing the product. One thing to be realized, this step is a crucial step. Miscalculation in this step always meant wrong target of marketing, which also meant you will waste much money just for big nothing.
Hence, before you need to always review your marketing practices to ensure yourselves in the position of getting optimum result. By reviewing, you will understand how your business performs in the particular duration, i.e monthly, 3 month, a year, etc.

Of course, this reviewing process needs money to be completed. But rest easy, it's not always that expensive. In fact, even the expensive reviewing process also consists of the same thing as the cheaper ones. Any reviewing process will always consists of these seven steps:

1.    Determine your top three buyers
2.    Understand why they choose you for their business
3.    Elaborate their detailed competitive edge
4.    Find out more about their greatest challenge
5.    Identify their main competitors in business
6.    Identify trends potentially impacting their business
7.    Conclude about what your buyer have in common

 
1.    Determine your top three buyers
 
You will need to review your sales report. Of course, this step is for the ones established their business already. As for you, newcomers, just figure out your three biggest targeted fishes. In determining these top three buyers, you ought not just deciding based one the money they pay you. You may establish your own criteria there. Maybe, you'll choose the one has provided steady business in this several months or even years. Or maybe you prefer one is easy to service and pay you promptly after you serviced them. It's all up to you. 
Make your categories and review regularly. After that, you'll need yourself to ensure they got excellent service. Also, you'll have to make sure you stay in contact with them more and more often.
 
2.    Understand why they choose you for their business
 
Understanding why your client chose you can be a very beneficial to you. You'll find out about how to further expand your business. This is important for as time passed, many business owners tend to forget to keep their business grows. This happened mainly for they don't know what else to be added. Hence, by asking your clients (directly, if possible), you will always have such opportunity of improving your business.
 
3.    Elaborate their detailed competitive edge
 
Now, after you understand why your clients chose you, it's time to ask the opposite. Would you choose them in doing business? Try to talk about this with them. Usually, you'll find out that even with your current business, there will be something you and your clients can do together. You may even propose how your company's role when having business together with theirs. In many cases, this will help you get more loyal clients and a new partner simultaneously.
 
4.    Find out more about their greatest challenge
 
Remember this when asking your clients to complete this step: Don't push them! Just back off if you don't want to tell you yet and go to next step. It's reasonable for them for wanting to share such sensitive information with trusted colleagues. But, if they did tell you, well, listen well and don't give feedback except you are an expert for the problem. Even just by listening you still help them, and eventually help you creating more loyal clients. More, if you able to help them solving the problems, well, you just got yourself a jackpot. Congratulations!
 
5.    Identify their main competitors in business
 
By identifying your clients' main competitors, you will find out more about how you should market your products. Examining the competitors, your clients' position in business will be revealed. You need to assess whether it's the right way to market your product for such market position of your clients.
More, doing this gives you even more benefits. You'll be able to examine wider perspective of your market. You may understand that even your clients' competitor is a potential client for you. But please, take a great consideration in doing this. Be very careful as if you do ruin your reputation, you will absolutely spend a very long time regaining.
 
6.    Identify trends potentially impacting their business
 
Your ability in identifying trends of your clients' business will take your business to whole new higher level. You just shape your business more robust and adaptable. Understanding the future trends and how that will affect your clients' business will help you create a scheme for your future. Scheme, in which you will be able to ensure your position in the winning side, you must design. 
 
7.    Conclude about what your buyer have in common
 
This last step is the one that will help you identifying more clients similar to those three big fishes already in your nets. By understanding the common traits of your big fishes, you'll more likely to land more fishes, hopefully, bigger. Then, you'll need to make sure all elements in your company recognizes the pattern and prepares well to give their best when opportunity arrives.
 
 
OK, hopefully those 7 simple steps will help you expanding your business while making sure that your business been taken care of and keep giving you the flows of money. Always remind yourselves to do these steps periodically so that your business' performance will be calculable with much higher accuracy.

Franchise businesses have gained popularity over the years. Many business-minded individuals have seen greater potentials for success in franchising rather than starting their own businesses from scratch. This makes the concept of franchising even more powerful. The development of the franchise industry gives more franchisers an increasing opportunity to gain higher profits and revenues.

A franchise is an exact copy of a certain unique idea that has gained popularity and profitability through years of expertise in its particular niche. It’s actually replicating or even spreading the original successful formula of a certain established business to other unsaturated locations. Your success level in buying a franchise business lies in the manner of how you follow the original business proven formula.

The Basics of Franchising

The original business creator establishes a solid formula that will endlessly repeat the same successful results for different owners at different locations. Once this formula is carefully evaluated, it is then packaged and sold to potential franchisees. Once business professional purchases the magical formulated package, he then receives the full rights and responsibilities of a legal franchisee. He now proceeds to follow the entire formula of the purchased business package in a very careful manner to generate more successful results.

Franchising vs. Self Expanding

You might probably wonder why these great successful original business developers will bother selling a franchise, when in fact, they can really afford branching out to different locations or even spread globally. Yes, they could surely do that. Yet, what makes them even more successful is that they have learned to determine the time and energy required to establish potential branches globally without getting stressed out.

Franchising yields the possibility to gain more profits and fame while reducing stress as you introduce it to the global market to attract more potential franchisees to share your business goals for more success.

The Franchising Advantage

Starting a business requires a focused idea on niche selection. It even needs the correct process of implementing a business plan for long-term success. Setting up your own business from scratch requires an even more complex process that involves more of your time and efforts for greater results to happen.

The advantage of buying an established franchise business of your choice basically lies in the fact that this particular business package has been proven for years to generate more income or endless successful outcome. Some new business owners who have enough funds readily available to buy a franchise business package automatically do so, rather than starting from scratch.

Franchising is indeed a fair way to generate more income and successful benefits for both the franchiser and the franchisee. The original business developer or the franchiser earns his share by selling the profound formula for a successful business. The franchisee, in return, gains successful results in the form of profits and revenues by carefully following the unique formula associated with the purchased business package. Management training and product knowledge are even included in the franchise to let the franchisee run the franchise business successfully through the years.   
         
 

Business owners should think about their business strategy. Regardless of the size of your enterprise, you need to be concerned about developing a strategy. Strategy formulation is an important element of business management. Whether your business is a small one-person affair you run from home or a global one you operate online, the success of your business depends on the effectiveness of the strategy you adopt.

The problem with many small or home business entrepreneurs, especially the first-timers, is their fear of strategizing. Many are satisfied with creating simple plans of what they intend to do for the week or for the month, at most. If you’re one of them, you may find some difficulty when it is time for expansion. So this early, start thinking about developing strategic plans for your business. The process is not really complicated, and you can refer to various business strategy models. This article discusses two business strategy models: the Goal-Focus Graph and the Kaizen Model.

The Goal-Focus Graph

If what you want is an easy and simple approach to strategic planning, you can develop a strategy graph to help you define your goals for your business. The goal-focus graph is something any business owner can make, even one who did not go to business school. All you need is a few hours to work on this graph.

To create your graph, get a blank sheet of unlined paper. This paper represents your strategic plan for a five-year period. Start at the bottom of the paper and mark it as year zero, your starting point, or where you are now. Write about the present state of your operations. The top portion is your fifth year where you must write your goals, or what you want for your business five years from now.

Divide the space between year zero and year five into the number of months or years you expect to achieve concrete steps that will take you to your end goals. Write the major tasks you need to do and the quantifiable achievements you aim for each month or year. When completed, your goal-focus graph should give you clear directions on how to steer your business toward the goals you’ve set.

The Kaizen Model

Kaizen is a Japanese model for continuous improvement to increase business productivity. You, too, can adopt this practical strategy to create a specific culture for your business. Japanese establishments in the West practice the Kaizen way to improve overall performance and ensure accomplishment of their objectives. The Kaizen approach is straight forward but two-pronged: external and internal. If you wish to follow the model, focus on improving your relationship with your customers and boosting the morale of your employees.

The internal strategy aims to promote teamwork, improve quality of output, instill discipline, and encourage thrift. The external strategy is geared toward satisfying customers, providing greater value, cultivating long term relationships, and opening communication channels. Applying the Kaizen principle to your own small or home business operations will half-guarantee the success of your endeavor. The Kaizen model has been proven to be an effective strategy in developing customer loyalty and establishing a healthy relationship among co-workers.

Try to take on a forward thinking attitude when you are creating your business strategy. Once you get started, you won’t find it to be difficult at all. Just be clear about your goals, or what you want to achieve. The key to succeeding is to consciously direct all your efforts within the strategic plans you have carefully laid out.

Have you recently started a company with a great product or service but you are having difficulty coming up with a name? The name of your start-up company is a major part of branding and should be chosen carefully. Branding helps increase sales and is important for promoting a company. To be more successful in your niche, it is recommended that your company name is a brand. Your brand is the identity of your entire company from products or services to logos.

A brand is a name used to identify and distinguish a specific product, service or business^.

People Need To Recognize

By having a brand name, you are making it easy for people to remember and recognize your company. Whether they are your customers or people in a different country, a brand name should be easy to recognize. When people recognize your name, they are more likely to come to you than any other company.

Brand names are what make companies more appealing and successful. Franchises and independently owned companies benefit from a brand name. Brand recognition also leads to customer loyalty. With a brand name, you are creating an identity for your company that you can use to promote and market. You will know who your target audience is and your marketing campaigns will be more targeted. In many cases brand names is what actually make people to buy  by making them feel safe with a reputable.

As described in this  post ,  brand names come in many different forms and shapes:

http://www.adslogans.co.uk/site/pages/new-slogans.php

http://www.adslogans.co.uk/site/pages/new-slogans.php

Creating  a Brand Name

The biggest brand names are unique, clever and easy to remember. The companies themselves are more successful because of the brand. To create the perfect brand name for your company, think about brands out there that pop in your head.

Be Unique: Brand names such as “Google” or “Yahoo” offer a unique identity of the company. These names are also easy to remember and will definitely go down in the history books. These names are put together by combining letters arbitrarily to create a sound. The word itself does not have a true meaning.

Be Memorable: To help people remember and associate your company with something tangible, choose words that exist in real life. The perfect examples is the company “Apple.” They use words that we already know and this makes it easy to remember.

Get to the Point: You can create a brand name that also tells your audience who you are. “Bank of America,” for example, is a brand name that offers a description of the company. Everyone knows the company is a bank.

Brand Awerness

Selecting a good brand name is not a panacea. The next most important aspect is to make people aware of your brand. The process of creating and supporting a brand is known by many as  brand management. Brand awerness is  difficult and includes a number of different activities. Some of the activities that can be followed are  advertising campaigns, banners, taking part in social activities, getting publicity in known magazines and trade shows, printing and sharing  t-shirts,pens and mugs with your brand logo, giving free products in competitions (i.e. Radio, TV).  Especially now, the Internet is sometimes the cheapest medium to fast brand awerness (i.e . supporting known blogs,  posting really good content and by having a Web site that people will want to visit,email signatures, submitting white papers and presentations).  Many corporations today invest in such brand awerness methods  before ever having their products or Web Site on the market.

Branding Slogan

Before closing this post , we need to remember that a tag line or a branding  slogan is a critical factor for success for your brand .  The slogan will be the one that will draw customers attention to your brand. The slogan should be a phrase that will  summarize the most important aspects of your brand and provide the  advantages. Remember that the slogan could be at the centre of your marketing strategy so the process of choosing one should not be neglected. Some of the known brands and their slogans are given below:

• Barclays – Fluent in Finance; Its our business to know your business
• British airways – The Way to Fly
• CITIGROUP or CITIBANK – The Citi Never Sleeps
• BLOGGER.COM – Push Button Publishing
• Ernst and Young – Quality in Everything we Do
• FIAT – Driven by Passion
• JVC – The Perfect Experience
• LEE – The jeans that built America
• Macromedia – What the web can be.
• PHILLIPS – Sense and Simplicity
• Windows XP – Do More with Less
• Standard Chartered Bank – Your Right Partner
• NYSE (New York Stock Exchange) – The world puts its stock in us
• Monster.com – Never Settle
• Microsoft – Where Do You Want to Go Today ; Your Potential Our Passion
• Apple Macintosh – Think Different.
• Nike – Just do it
• Burger King – Have it your way
• American Express – Don’t leave home without it
• Maxwell House- Good to the Last Drop
• Wheaties – Breakfast of Champions

More slogans can be found in this site.

Wholesale Lots

Many start-ups online are managed by people who work from home and profit from selling goods to other people. Many such businesses belong to retirees that have still the strength be active in the job field. The key to increasing profits is identifying and buying cheap overstocked wholesale and surplus products that you can resell to your customers. There are many wholesale companies that offer all sorts of products and are very eager to work with new businesses. Wholesalers turn to offer their overstocked products in really small prices. Along with this it is pretty easy to identify liquidators which buy and sell products from closeout businesses.  Buying such products may give a huge competitive advantage over rival businesses. Getting into B2B auctions will allow you to even bid and buy such products in even smaller prices. In today’s economical crisis such advantage is what may keep you in the business.

The Benefits

Save Money: By buying wholesale products to resell, you are saving a lot more money. This is especially beneficial in the long run because you will save a great deal of money on one transaction. Not only will you save by turning to wholesalers and liquidators, but buying in bulk will help you keep even more money in your pocket.

Better Customer Service: Wholesale and closeouts products are not just beneficial for saving money. You can also improve your inventory by having more of a single product or a variety of different products. In other words, you can keep restocking because you can actually afford it. Your customers will come to you because your supply will always be full and they will not have to wait long for their package. In turn, you will keep your customers and get more new ones, which will ultimately increase your sales.

Surplus Products

Flexible Negotiations : Dealing with wholesale companies for cheap products means that you will eventually find a wholesaler that you like. By building a relationship with your wholesale company, you can also start to negotiate and agree on better deals. When you buy in bulk, you can also get more discounts.

Easy starts: As a start-up business you can always turn to surplus and closeouts products, in order to fill your on line store and e-business.  New entrepreneurs can easily start-up a new business spending the least amount of money possible.