Growth Strategies for Small Business
I gave this talk at Small Business conference almost a year ago.
Table of Content
I started writing this book early this year but got involved in a turnaround and a new start-up. I’m happy to report that the turnaround was successful. The company is cashflow positive. The start-up is steadily growing. This, however, left me with no time to finish this book. I’m publishing all contents that I wrote and research material that I collected, so other can benefit from them. I’ll come back to finish this book, as and when I find time.
- Table of Content
- Red Queen Effect – An Introduction
- The Billionaire Code
- Cracking the Code
- Implementation Plan
- Renovation or Innovation?
- Implementation Process
- Baseline Current Go-To-Market Activities
- Protect & Renew
- Plan for New Sales
- Targeting the Right Market
- Market Segmentation
- Prioritizing Target Markets
- Align with Your Customers
- Example of Customer Experience Mapping
- Mapping Customer Experience
- Drawing Customer Persona
- Customer's Moments of Truth
- Identifying Appropriate Levers to WOW Customers
- Establish Channels to Deliver the WOW Experience
- Market Coverage Maps
- Economic / Revenue Modeling
- Targeting the Right Market
- Sales Force
- Partner (Indirect) Sales Channel
- Renovation or Innovation?
Channel Productivity
Building strong internal infrastructure, establishing sound policies, recruiting right partners, empowering partners with effective trainings, sale and marketing tools, and setting up a scorecard to link rewards with partner's performance is not the full recipe for success. Partners are independent people, businesses. They have different business objectives than yours. They are accountable to their stakeholders and their bottom-line. Therefore it is critical to take the steward’s role and become trusted business advisors in building their sales. Business that takes this step and engage with partners in building their business always get fascinating results i.e. increased revenue, deeper market penetration and strong customer loyalty. There are many ways to increase your partners’ productivity, few are listed below:
Communicating Expectations
After deciding on how to track the performance of your partners, next step is to set clear expectations and communicate it to them. Expectations or targets should be realistic for the channel, particularly for new partners.