A successful business is a sequence of good decisions. When pondering how to proceed, aspiring entrepreneurs often trip up their businesses. In this article, we tell you how to avoid making typical mistakes and succeed in business.
1. Learn to Delegate
A one-person business is impossible to scale: no one entrepreneur can know and manage everything. Delegating doesn’t mean losing control – hire professionals you trust and let them do their jobs. If it seems that there are no professionals around, reconsider your approach to staffing.
2. Analyze and Plan
Suppose you want to sell yoga mats in a town where the only yoga center has recently closed. You decided that people like to practice at home, but it turns out that no one likes yoga as physical activity, and no one needs the mats. To avoid this happening, study the market and learn as much as possible about your chosen niche. Pay attention to competitors’ offers, ask for quotes from 10-15 suppliers and make at least a sketchy business plan. Don’t rely on assumptions, but on figures, so that you can accurately determine the advantages and weaknesses of your product concerning the market.
3. Understand Your Target Audience
Ignorance of your target audience and their behavior leads to the most ridiculous and hurtful mistakes. For example, they are the reason why premium car ads appear in the subway and at public transport stops. Without a portrait of the target audience, it is difficult to choose a suitable promotion channel and build a sales model that corresponds to the usual behavior of the consumer. By understanding your audience, you can address the customer directly and present a product that solves their problem – and is truly needed.
4. Use Strong Marketing Tools
Inattention to marketing tools leads to the fact that the budget is spent, and the costs do not pay off. An ill-conceived sales funnel (the customer’s path from product introduction to purchasing), advertising in social networks without audience segmentation – and there you are selling to the wrong people. Marketing tools help attract the most relevant audience only if the initial parameters are set correctly. It’s also naive to turn to marketing agencies to guarantee a sales boom. Agencies can provide traffic, but they are not responsible for the quality of the product and the actual uniqueness of the selling proposition – that is the task of the company itself.
5. Apply Different Sales Techniques
Observe how well-known brands work. The cafe will offer you a dessert to go with your takeout drink, and the website will offer a fancy strap to a dress you’ve placed in your shopping cart. It’s a cross-selling method that allows you to sell more. And if the shoe store offers you higher-priced boots made of natural leather instead of artificial leather, it’s up-sales – sales aimed at increasing the average check. Take care of the customer and sell them products that they didn’t have time to think about, using different sales techniques.
6. Take Care of Your Old Customers
In the pursuit of new customers, don’t forget about the older, more loyal audience, which is easier to decide to buy. Their retention will require fewer resources than attracting a new one but will have a positive impact on sales. Analyze the profile of a loyal customer – this will allow you to expand your reach with users who are similar in behavior.
7. Try New Things
Even the most stable and recognizable companies occasionally decide to rebrand and try to surprise the customer and refresh the perception of the products. Business requires a willingness to change, from firing an ineffective employee who has been with the company since its founding to an experimental mailing list. Say yes to social networks, the latest equipment, and specialists who use unconventional techniques or advanced pay stub generator to keep up with the competition. If there’s something you don’t know, find someone who can advise you or take over.
8. Don’t Skimp On Everything
The desire to minimize costs is understandable, especially in the early stages of business development. But it is not worth it to save money to rent premises with a leaky roof, buy equipment used, refuse expert advice, and hire interns and relatives with no experience in the field instead of professionals. Office, employees, equipment – all these resources, without which there will be no business. If the quality of these resources leaves much to be desired, the result will be the same.