SMART Choices You Need to Make to Grow Your Business

Every business leader wants to move their team from ‘we think’ to ‘we know’. Do you know the difference between what you think your customers want vs what they actually do want? Your business must learn to know your customer intimately.

What are their buying habits? What kinds of keywords do they search for? What would make them change their mind from one product to another? When you understand these things, it will help you sell more effectively. Here are tips to help you collect the information you need!


Collect the Right Information

The amount of data we produce every day is truly astounding. There are 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created each day. This number is expected to continue to grow rapidly. In fact, in the last two years, 90 percent of the data in the world was generated.

Here are some interesting daily statistics:

  • 500 million tweets are sent
  • 294 billion emails are sent
  • 4 petabytes of data are created on Facebook
  • 4 terabytes of data are created from each connected car
  • 65 billion messages are sent on WhatsApp
  • 5 billion searches are made

It is estimated that by 2025, 463 exabytes of data will be created each day around the world. This is equivalent to 212,765,957 DVDs per day!

With so much data out there, how do you know which is relevant to you? It is easy to get lost and go through “paralysis of analysis.” Here is where you should start. It begins with asking the right questions:

  • What are the global and domestic trends in your industry?
  • Are trends changing dramatically?
  • If they have, how have they changed, what are the results, and why did the change occur?
  • What are your top competitors doing?
  • What are they investing in?

Competitor Analysis

Competitor analysis can give you important insight. It can help you set benchmarks to track your progress and understand best practices. While you want to focus on your mission and not get distracted by the competition, researching the competition can help you more than you realize.

Focusing on your own venture and giving it your all is important, but you need to understand how your business fits into the wider world too. For example, if you work in the chemical industry then undertaking lab work with Chemyo Labs can help you expand your knowledge base. Changes in society, as well as advancements being made by your competitors, can all affect your business, and in some cases can even render it obsolete.

Even big businesses aren’t immune to this – look at how Blockbuster Video collapsed as streaming sites became more popular. Stay up to date on current market conditions. Be mindful of what your competitors are doing and how this could possibly affect you.

The results of your market and competitor research may be eye-opening and show you are behind the curve. Hiring a business consultant to help you with strategic planning can be an effective way to formulate a realistic plan of action.

Knowing your competition helps you understand your strengths, weaknesses, and competitive advantages. This can help you target your audience more effectively, giving you a greater return on your marketing investment.


Look into Outsourcing

Growing a business can be a huge strain financially. While a larger business will allow you to make more money, the cost and hassle of hiring new employees and moving to a larger location can be difficult.

One option is to outsource. This is where you hire third party companies to do certain tasks or even run entire departments of your business. They will already have everything in place (such as equipment, staff, and expertise) to do the jobs you need doing.

As you are starting out, it may make sense to outsource now. Then as your business grows, you could look at hiring and bringing in-house the tasks and functions you have outsourced. The key here is to be flexible and not be focused solely on one plan.

Going back to the Blockbuster Video example, the advice is to be flexible when it comes to your business. Being flexible allows you to move with the times and not be left in the dark ages. Many business owners can be very fixed about what their business is and should be, but this kind of ego won’t help you. You need to stay flexible and prepared to make changes if needed, particularly in this fast-paced world that we live in.


Employee Feedback

Get feedback from your employees. They see things management often do not. They are in the trenches and have a different perspective, one you shouldn’t ignore. Create a safe environment where your employees feel comfortable constantly encourage employee feedback so you can gauge employee sentiment.

What trends do managers absorb when speaking with employees? What has caused the most non-blameful employee faults? What holds them back from achieving their potential at work? When the C-suite better understand this, your top team will become more focussed on internal improvements. 

We often focus on customer, market and competitor analysis and not so much on employee feedback. Improve your business from the inside out so you understand what is going on externally. These data sources will help you focus on the right type of information you need to grow your business.

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