Tuesday 2 July 2013

How To Keep Reinventing Your Business And Why You Need To

We all know that in business if you are not growing you are probably failing, so how do your keep your business on a healthy growth trajectory? 

This article gives you some tips to help you monitor whether it's time to reinvent your core products or services and suggests a method for generating new ideas, so that your business keeps pace with the fast moving world we live in today.

You have probably heard the saying ‘if it isn’t broke don’t fix it’ and that still holds true, but you need to ensure you are ready to change and can spot issues before they become a threat to your business.

You may already have a gut feeling that something is not quite right or perhaps you are completely oblivious, either way there is nothing like hard evidence. The best way to gather evidence is by looking at, or in other words monitoring, what is happening in your business.

I have a marketing mantra: take massive action, monitor and measure and build on what works. 

It is the monitoring and measuring that is often overlooked, yet it need not be complicated to put in place a method to measure how well your products or services are selling. The type of thing to keep track of is the number of sales per product, or product type, month on month, or the frequency of repurchase by existing customers, or how your new customers heard about you and most of all customer satisfaction levels.

If you notice negative trends the time to act is as soon as possible, before things get worse.

You need to give yourself some space to review your performance and come up with new ideas or solutions. Set aside some quality time to think creatively about your products and services and how you might develop or improve them - one approach that works well is to run a workshop.
  • Get your key people into a room with some post-it notes and start to throw out ideas on how to improve your products or services - post them all up on the wall and try to keep an open mind.
  • Analyse how well the ideas fit with what you already do, your company strengths and skills, your knowledge and existing customer base, new opportunities in the marketplace, etc.
  • Short list the best ideas and draw up an action plan to do more work on them to see if they are viable.
If you have come up with new product or service ideas, work out how you can market test them, without spending too much time or money.

You might find you need to go through an iterative process – if good ideas are not forth coming the first time around, sleep on it and try again. You will eventually find the solutions you are seeking.

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