How are You Feeding Your Business?
Businesses are like organisms that need food to grow.
This is a little bit back to the prospecting and sales side, which is a key part of how you grow or “feed” your business.
Your business is a living, growing entity. You will have to feed it and care for it, for it to continue to grow. That is you job as the business owner and founder. You have to make sure that it is always taken care of.
Feeding through prospects
One of the key ways that you ensure your business stays feed if by prospecting. I’ve talked about this on several previous posts, but in short make sure you have a good sales funnel with a lot of prospects going through that funnel. You will find great new customers that way which will continue to keep your business fed. It will also lead to improvement ideas as your current and new customers will have ever changing needs. I also want to say that as your customers needs do change, you may not be the answer to every problem they have, you will have to say no at times. Otherwise you will stretch yourself and your business too thin and you will not stay well fed. If you want more details on prospecting check out my previous posts, and here. Just make sure you are filling the funnel, so you can keep your business fed.
Maintaining through Customer Service
Once you have the customers in the door, make sure you service them above and beyond their needs. This will ensure they stay customers as well as pass on the good word to their friends and family. While prospecting is a great way to feed your business with new customers, this is a great way to feed your business with existing customers. Ensuring that they come back for more and more. Customer service ensures that a one time customers becomes a multi time customer. It also ensures that your customers will be advocates for you, which keeps your business feed as well. It also means free marketing!
Building a system to expand
The final thought I had on feeding your company is around building a system to feed the business automatically, especially as you expand. Building a good system allows your team to cover more ground. You can also allow you to automate reorders, or customer communication. If you know people always buy product B 6 months after product A, build a system for engaging that customer at month 5. That way it will be a simple reminder that they need to start the ordering process. Or maybe your product is subscription based. How easy is it for customers to know when their next order is coming? Can they adjust what is part of that order? These are places where a system can help you expand faster, which keeps your business feed through expansion. It does not have to be a complicated system, it may even start with simple reminders for when to follow-up with customers after the initial sale. Just be on the look out for repetitive tasks and always be asking yourself if there is a system that will handle that for you.
So Remember:
You business needs to be fed to continue to grow.
Prospecting brings new food in the door for your business.
Customer Service and Systems maximum the food from existing customers.
Thank you for your time reading this post. I hope you found at least one nugget to help your business grow. If you did, or know someone that could benefit from this, please share it with a friend or twenty. :-)