How To Turn a Failing Business Around
“At the stage when we started the Kando Business Coaching we were 10 years in business and ready to throw in the towel. But after working with Rudi for only 10 weeks our sales are up by 65% and our productivity and focus have dramatically increased. Rudi has constantly exceeded our expectations. He has given us the confidence we needed to move ourselves and the business forward. We now have a vision and are being guided towards it. We know how to delegate, instil trust with staff and lead a team. Rudi’s ideas on marketing and sales have opened new doors for us. We have put in a client relationship system which is already generating more sales. Rudi has helped streamline our targets, ensured we are not wasting time and has generally increased our clarity and motivation. The coaching really makes you go outside the goldfish bowl and look in at yourself - and take responsibility for your business.” John Powell, Managing Director of Kim’s Chilled Couriers Ltd in Sutton in Ashfield
Here are a few practical simple steps within the Kando Success System, which will get you started in helping your profitability improve
Step 1 - Implement a Contact Data Base - or CRM system This ensures you keep track of who your past, present and future customers.
Ensure your CRM system can mail and e-mail merge for time saving.
Ensure your CRM integrates with your diary.Step 2 - Create a Follow Up System for “After The Sale” A lot of businesses ignore their customers (to some extent) after a sale has happened. Yet a lot of people admit that Word Of Mouth is their best source of business.Realise that Word Of Mouth comes from people who have already bought from you.So put a system in place to stay in touch with them.
Systematically ask them for referrals.
Systematically ask them for testimonials.
But whatever you do – STAY IN TOUCH with them.Step 3 - Create Operational Systems. OK – now there I’ve lost 95% of the population.
But seriously - if you want to learn how to create systems in your business in less than 10 minutes – then have a look at the following to see how simple this really is.A) Take a Blank Sheet of Paper - and a pen.
B) Draw a Circular Line (or Flow Chart).
C) The first point on the flow chart is the first contact that a potential customer has with you.
The second point would be the next step in your operations and so you continue till you listed every step that takes place until you have delivered your product/ service and received money for it.
D) Now go over the steps and ask yourself what steps you could insert/ remove in order to make things work better AND in order to improve the perception of your customers.
E) Now go over the steps again and create a Standard Form for every step of the way (e.g. when you answer the phone - create a form which you can print out and put by your telephone which has on it all the questions you should ask people who call you up - by being a standard form, it doesn't matter who answers the phone - you or anybody else, the phone will always get answered in exactly the same way).
Do this for every step.
And that is a brief description on how to create a basic system!!
Step 4
And then – only after you’ve got the entire above sorted, do you take a look at your marketing and sales activities.ACTIVITIES.
That means – on a spreadsheet, week after week keep track of your activities (i.e. – what you are doing to get new business in the door, and how many such activities you have, e.g. attended networking events X 4, sent out direct mail letters X 20, made cold calls X 3 etc.) If business isn’t great, you will probably be shocked at how few activities there actually are. And then increase the activities.
If you are now thinking – it can’t be as easy as that – well, it is!
Do it – apply those 4 steps in your business and you will see the results.
Turning your business around is simple - not necessarily easy - but definitely simple.
Only you know what you want your business to do for you.
Only you are holding it back from being what it can become.
Take a look at where you are, decide where you want to be in five or ten years and then determine what steps to take.
Start now by taking the first steps out of your “un-comfortable” zone.
