Grow Your Business In Difficult Trading Times
In difficult business times such as we are in at the moment, the businesses that are most successful and come out of the other side of the economic slowdown are not necessarily those who went into the period as the strongest. In an economic period such as we are going through at the moment being the biggest player within your field is not always the best position to be in. Sometimes biggest is not always best and the smaller more agile businesses can suddenly have the upper hand. Ensuring that your business is flexible enough to change when the market dictates that change is needed is something that many larger corporations cannot prepare themselves for, what should you do to make sure that you are not one of the businesses that get caught out in this period of economic slowdown?
The first thing that you need in any business is good communication between departments, if the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing then there is bound to be difficulty in reacting to the market place. Depending on the size of your organization you will probably have people in charge of separate departments that work completely autonomously to other divisions. Bringing all of the departments together regularly will help all concerned understand what is going on within the market at the present time.
Within any workplace it can seem that all we do on a day to day basis is fire fight problems that arise rather than putting time to one side to enable us to be creative and proactive. Finding time in the working day to do this can be difficult when we have to deal with everything that is going on around us. Putting two time slots per day to one side is a great way of helping you to clear your head of problems and look to the future, moments of inspiration can come in a flash but in reality are more likely to happen when you have got time to be inspired.
Using this time wisely is the key to making the difference between you and your competition. Spend the time looking at promotions, marketing and planning for the future, you will get a better idea of where you need to be if you have also reviewed your current performance position. Sometimes it can be all too easy to take on the world single headedly but as we all know, two heads are better than one. If you have a colleague that you can brainstorm with then it may be an idea to spend a couple of your sessions per week throwing ideas at each other. You might be surprised at the results you come up with.
Arranging promotions in which your customers have to commit to buy your products over a period of time can be a good way of tying up a certain amount of business during slower times. Offering incentives to those customers who support you is always a good way of building a brand loyalty and guaranteeing that you get a certain amount of support, there are many options that you can offer in the way of incentives to cover these promotions.
Offering an out and out straight discount off of your service or product is not always the best option as you are devaluing your product to your customer, the thing to remember with giving discounts is that once you have given them it is very difficult to get the price back up to its original position.
Offering value added product is sometimes a good option, especially as value added deals can in turn be offered from your customer to the end user, ensuring that the products sell through, hopefully guaranteeing further sales. Offering your customers a loyalty scheme to purchase your goods or services is another good option for growing sales. If you have a business that is valued in the market place you may find that your customers can get mileage by associating themselves with you, hence strengthening their position in the market place and strengthening their ties with you.
Offering corporate gifts to guarantee the tie up between customer and supplier has always been a very grey area. To cover yourself and your business where corporate gifts are concerned I would always recommend giving a gift that can be used in conjunction with the business, this way you are always keeping your side of the deal clean, if the recipient decides to use any corporate gift for their own personal use then that is their choice. Many countries have different tax laws where business gifts are concerned, where possible you should always cover any tax liability to the recipient. A gift given is not quite so favourably looked on when the tax man descends!
There are many ways to ensure that your business does not feel the pinch excessively in this difficult trading times, just make sure that you think about where you need your business to be at the end of the period without burying your head in the sand, communicate and be proactive and you should be able to achieve your business goals.
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Corporate Gifts
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Harwood E Woodpecker
