A new year awaits and prospects for economic improvement
look good. Some businesses will grow, others will tread water, and some will
fail. Such is the market. But more and more as I am involved with building
business prospects for businesses in a variety of professional fields, it becomes
apparent that some businesses “make their own luck”, while others just hope for
the best and pray for the phone to ring. If I had to guess at five things many
professional businesses will fail to do this year which could help them “make
their own luck” here’s my list…
1. Fail to
communicate at all. Incredible as it sounds to me, there are plenty of
businesses who will start 2014 without any sort of B2B communication plan. No
calendar of activity, no ideas about content, no commitment to frequency and no
budget. It’s remarkable how popular clairvoyance in business has become and
clearly business development by telepathy has a lot of committed followers. I
am not among them.
2. Fail to
freshen contact lists. The database of clients, prospects, suppliers and
others is often one of the more neglected pieces of business infrastructure I
see. Far more neglected than the accounts. You hopefully wouldn’t find too many
dead people on your list of 30 day debtors but too often business client lists
are littered with contacts who have ‘moved on’ – in either the earthly sense,
or just by switching jobs. Clients have moved address, changed name, or had wholesale
changes of senior staff. None of this is recorded in the database of a lot of
businesses though, simply because it wasn’t a discipline to ensure that lists
were maintained.
3. Fail to
update collateral. If you made the mistake of printing 20 times the number
of company brochures as you really needed three years ago, that’s really a
problem of your own making. But don’t think this is an excuse to keep relying
on the two or three year old brochure to continue representing your business in
2014. And if it’s a website you rely on, the same applies. Spending time on
updating material about yourself is a typical ‘fail’ that many businesses don’t
pay sufficient attention to.
4. Fail to
mention your people. In professional businesses, you employ people called ‘professionals.’
This is where the business value lies. So why is it that so many businesses
fail to project their people and what they can offer clients, preferring instead
to hide behind the anonymity of a corporate logo and inanimate projects? The
worst excuse I’ve heard is “people come and go so we didn’t want to have to
update our collateral.” DOH. If you haven’t yet twigged to the importance of
dealing with people, just try calling the Telstra complaints line a few times
and talk to the computer in between listening to the hold message.
5. Bore your
audience to death. A constant source of interest to me is how, the moment
we have a keyboard in front of us, many of us revert to a bland style of ‘corporate
speak’ which is long on words but totally devoid of interest. If you tried be
as boring as possible, that’s what some businesses do as routine. I don’t think
it’s deliberate: instead, I suspect it’s a refuge in the ‘vanilla’ language of
corporate speak where the difference between one company and the next is reflected
entirely in a logo. Another fail in this area is to confuse things of interest
to you, and those of interest to your clients. If you’re still sending clients
pictures of staff members’ new babies or weddings or triathlon conquests,
please stop. Save that for the in-house news sheet.
There you go. There are plenty more but in the interests of
not boring you, I’ll keep this one short and sweet. If you’re starting 2014 and
plan to make your own luck, avoiding the sorts of traps above should be high on
your list.
