5 classic ‘fails’ of many business this year

Ross Elliott has some good advice for all small business owners this year; very relevant to maintenance of CRM systems and marketing for Real Estate Businesses.

A new year awaits and prospects for economic improvement look good. Some businesses will grow, others will tread water, and some will fail. 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.