Strategies Archives - GUJRAT INDIA

Proving Your Value in Recruitment – Key Recruitment and Staffing Metrics for Recruitment Strategies

Do your employers know how much value you provide to them? Do they know how much more value your staffing services offer over your competitors? How do they know for sure the strategic value that your company provides?

Measuring the impacts to your efforts to your employer’s bottom-line is one of the most credible ways for recruitment professionals to gain respect as true strategic business partners. Quantifying your value demonstrates your strategic value especially at the executive level where important decisions are made. Also accurate and consistent measurement allows you to set goals, chart your progress, and improve your processes to achieve better results. Despite all the strategic benefits of measuring your recruitment value, many recruitment professionals do not engage in these important activities. There are many key measurements related to recruitment. We will focus on a few major measurements that can help you demonstrate your value as a staffing agency to your employers.

The message that you want to communicate to your employers with these measurements is that you help them find quality candidates, quickly and in a cost-effective manner. The goal is to show the employer that you can provide a better staffing service than your competitors and maybe even better than the employer themselves. While this may appear daunting, here are a few simple measurements that can help support your case:

Quality of hire

In today’s war for talent, it is important for you to show the employer that you not only put bodies in seats but that you place quality candidates in their organization. The quality of hire is one of simplest measurements to demonstrate the quality of your candidates. This measurement can be obtained from surveys, screening ratios and acceptance rates..

Screening ratios can indicate the quality of the candidates you send to the hiring manager. This ratio can be determined by looking at the number interviews granted per application sent. The goal is to prove that you provide better candidates based on the num

The offer and acceptance rates can also be telling of quality. The purpose of this metric is to show the quality of your candidates based on the number of job offers or acceptances per number of applications or job interviews completed. For example, suppose the employer interviewed 10 of your candidates and from this, the employer made 6 job offers. In this case, your offer rate is 60%. Now suppose without your help, using the same definition above, the employer’s offer rate is 20%. You now have a compelling evidence to support the assertion that your employer receives better candidates with your help. Using offer and acceptance rates is a simple way to demonstrate the quality of your candidates to your client.

A typical quality of hire survey will ask the hiring manager key questions pertaining to their new hire. These questions can relate to your candidate’s work quality, processes, and so on. The most important question in this type of survey would be to assess the hiring manager’s overall satisfaction with this hiring decision. An example of a possible question would include “would you re-hire the candidate again?”. Today there are many online surveying tools that can make this very cost-effective to implement.

The purpose of the above quality of hire metrics is to provide your employer a tangible metric to prove that you provide quality candidates. In developing these metrics, it would be ideal if you could align your measurement to your client’s to facilitate an easy comparison and benchmark. The goal is to show the employer that you provide quality candidates, maybe even better than ones they can find. How powerful would it be for you if 90% of your client’s managers would hire your candidates again while only 70% would hire the ones sourced without you.

Time to fill In the business world, speed is essential to success. The purpose to measuring the time to fill a vacancy will is to demonstrate your responsiveness to an employer’s hiring needs. The time required for an individual recruiter to fill a vacant position says a great deal about his or her market and client knowledge, sourcing and screening abilities and processes. Filling a vacancy quickly can save your client more than just than just time. For employers, the time a vacancy remains open can mean lost revenue, opportunities, productivity and so on.

The time to fill a vacancy can be measured in the time between receiving your client’s request and the day your candidate accepted the offer. Be sure the start and end dates you chose in this measurement does not include factors beyond your control. Therefore the start and end dates you choose will depend on exactly what you want to measure. For example, some HR professionals use the employee’s first day of work as the end point of their metric. For recruitment companies, this end point may not work so well as it includes project start dates and on boarding processes that could be beyond your accountability.

Cost per hire

In today’s business climate, what company is not cost conscious? The cost per hire is simply the total cost of hiring a resource divided by the number of total hires. Here you simply want to show your employer the cost effectiveness of using your staffing services on it’s own merit or compared to your competitors.

Summary

While numbers can never articulate the value of a great recruiter and/or staffing company, it can help you demonstrate your value and competitive difference to the employers that use your service. These staffing metrics have a better chance of being seen at the executive level where they have little or no opportunity to see first hand the qualified candidates you provide that become the life blood of their organization. So by demonstrating that you provide quality candidates in a cost-effective way, you will be taking a step beyond lip service and a step ahead of your competitors.

Wealth Creation – Strategies of the World’s Richest People

The different mental attitudes regarding wealth creation strategies can be summarized as follows:

Whiners – This group consists of people whose attitude is to complain always. They take pleasure in their financial instability and relish the idea of having someone to listen to their grievances.

Nose-to-the-Grindstone people – Those who put forth a lot of energy to earn a decent living, toil even when beset by hardships in order to establish a secure life for themselves and their families Although many think that this is the best attitude, going through the drudgery all your life just to be a little bit comfortable is not sufficient. What do you think?

Winners – This group is comprised of the achievers and smart workers-they use money to their advantage, not slave for the money. These people also want an easy life and will go to great lengths to attain it. There is no retirement security to speak of today. The recent global money failure has sown chaos on IRAs, 401Ks and investment accounts. However it is not too late to start adopting the wealth accumulating plans of the rich. Actually, it is the best time for the “little guy” to finally turn the tables and start establishing real prosperity.

There are countless prospects in today’s economy and, with a positive outlook you can easily join that third group of winners! Begin with reading the “Crash Proof Prosperity” Newsletter. Its wealth creation program teaches exactly where to put money to make it grow like never before, even during this global financial breakdown.

Guidelines for Creating a Financial Plan

Designing a financial plan for you and your family is essential for upgrading your financial situation. Follow these guidelines when creating a sensible budget that will help you reach your financial objectives.

1. Find out how you are currently spending your money. Remember to monitor your expenses for a few weeks to a month. Organize your expenses and determine those that you can reduce. Be positive in the process. You will find out that you can lower most of your expenses and still maintain your lifestyle.

2. Beware of the ATM leaks. Limit your bank withdrawals to once a week. Remember to write down for which you spent the money all the time. The quick cash and high service fees, when summed up, can be a substantial amount that can balloon your budget.

3. Decide what truly is necessary and what might be simply a luxury. This could be difficult. You have to list down your priorities and decide which makes more sense to you: the full cable TV package or an extra $100 invested into a small business venture.

4. Don’t beat yourself up at all during this process. This is very important. Do not be too hard on yourself but learn from your mistake(s). You now have a budget to guide you. All you need is to stick to that budget and gain control of your finances.

5. Practice gratitude. Always give thanks for everything you have. This gives you a feeling of being truly wealthy. Release your feelings of lack and replace those with the feeling of plenty. Gratitude is the starting point to experience abundance.

The Three Essential Strategies of Partner and Channel Stewardship

Channel stewardship is the most effective way of realizing success in channel-dependent businesses, especially if amalgamated with other management solutions. Nowadays, majority of hi-tech companies are keen on investing substantial amounts of money to promote and sell products and services via partner portals and channels. However, such a multi-channel strategy is difficult to keep track of, hence the vital role of channel stewards in the distribution chain.

A steward is usually the dominant company in the channel value chain and has the responsibility of participating proactively in the design and execution of a company’s go-to-market strategy. They extend the intra-enterprise framework which allows the various partners and end consumers to conduct business easier and more efficiently. This move increases brand equity, market share and profitability. The role of stewards rests on critical elements like coordination and influence; the different roles in the channel distribution network; excellent response to end consumer demands and needs; and return of investment and margins to all channel partners. But what are the specific strategies that stewards employ to guarantee effective channel management?

Channel stewardship makes use of three strategies which are Partner Portals, eMarketplace and Volume Channel.

• Storefront or eBusiness Partner Portal – This strategy grants companies the ability to create portals that are especially dedicated, customized or personalized for the members of the channel and their customers. These portals enable partners by offering self-service tools that can be utilized to browse catalogs, research product information and details, configure solutions, view change orders, track shipments and receive pay invoices. Additionally, they offer a certain set of product catalog and pricing information that are based on the needs of partners and customers. It is deeply integrated into the channel procurement system. Usually, larger customers and affiliates prefer this approach.

• eMarketplace – The reality is that it is expensive and practically unmanageable to propose partner portals for each every channel partner. This makes it critically important to bring down the number of product segments through standardization of platforms and functional modularization. These would then be offered through an eMarketplace, which is most suitable for organizations that are ahead in their value chains. Usually beneficial to mid-sized companies that serve small and medium businesses, this strategy is a single platform for order fulfillment and it provides flexible means for partners to enable brokering to bundle products with various accessories, services and the like.

• Volume Channel – This approach focuses on the efficiency of operations in the distribution of product knowledge and the seamless process of quote orders and returns. To ensure the successful execution of the model, it is important to bear in mind the key elements which are lower complexity and range of offered products, high partner and customer self-service and close monitoring of Key Performance Indicators and Distributors, and ODM/CM Service level Agreements. This is most useful during scenarios where the complexity of products is low.

The real challenge, however, is choosing the appropriate strategy or approach. This calls for the need to conduct a thorough assessment of individual businesses before making a decision. The choice should be grounded on a framework that is dependent on factors like relative size and dominance of partners and customers, existing business relationships and product complexity.

9 Business Turnaround Strategies For the Small Business Owner

Many times when businesses fail, they go out not with a bang, but a whimper. They die a slow death. Many small business owners feel the overwhelm of shrinking revenues and the enveloping advance of competitors, but still refrain from making any dramatic changes until it is too late to achieve a business turnaround.

Whether you run a small manufacturing company, professional service firm, or a local retail establishment, there are at least 9 business turnaround strategies you can implement to achieve a successful reversal of your business fortunes.

1. Institute regular strategy sessions

The first time you notice your profit margins shrinking and your clients leaving you for your competitors should be a time when you consider reinventing who your company serves, what it does and how it delivers value.

2. Business model innovation

While this may be obvious for manufacturers, even very small local businesses face strategic business risk from large scale movements and trends taking place outside their industry, or among their customers, or within society as a whole. Business model innovation means that you consider changing who you serve, your position in the value chain, your differentiating value proposition, or all three (among other factors).

3. Invest heavily in customer communication

I am always shocked by just how rarely the average small business communicates with its customer base. So many entrepreneurs and CEOs simply assume that the customers “Do not want to hear from us that much”. My retort to that is always, “How do you know?”

One of the most dangerous habits you can pick up as a business owner is that of turning assumptions into facts without investigation or experimentation. I have seen this one habit kill more businesses than any external conditions or competitors.

Your customers hold the most valuable business intelligence money can buy. Aggressively seeking their feedback and opinions should be your first point of attack as soon as you suspect any structural weakness in your business or your business model.

4. Conduct an audit of marketing assets

Many of the supposed weaknesses and expenses of a business just might be marketing assets hidden in plain sight. For example, a list of former customers who have not bought a thing in the last two years could easily be reactivated with a targeted and honest direct mail campaign. Instead, I often see business owners whose attitude to past clients is, “You are dead to me”.

5. Establish a strategic alliance

The ideal strategic alliance partner has a business whose product or services complement your own. One of the fastest and most effective business turnaround strategies is to “force feed” your lead generation system with a series of strategic alliances. Such strategic alliances allow you to gain endorsed referrals to targeted prospects and to gain additional revenues without increasing your overhead or burdening your operational model.

6. Create a new profit center

One of the difficulties many small businesses (particularly local retail or service establishments) face is the inability to scale. For example, an assisted living facility that has only 10 beds is somewhat limited in how it can increase it revenues if all ten beds are filled and it still has financial difficulties. However, there is often expertise that can be packaged into consulting opportunities, or licensed to other establishments.

One of the simplest ways to turn product or service-based expertise into an additional income stream is through the creation of a closely related information-based business or profit center that piggy backs on the intellectual capital locked up in the business. Such profit centers usually have much higher margins and lower operational overhead than your existing business.

7. Innovate your pricing

Changing how you price your product is often a great way to build new momentum in your business. The history of IBM shows that one of the key changes made by Thomas J. Watson when he became general manager of CTR (the struggling company that would later be renamed IBM) was to convert the pricing scheme of their early machines from expensive outright purchases into more affordable long-term leases and maintenance plans.

Simple price innovations such as offering 3 tiers of price packages rather than a “take it or leave it” price, often results in greater sales conversions for many firms.

8. Factoring and asset-based financing

Sometimes, the unavoidable challenge in achieving a business turnaround is in getting better cash flow out of the assets in the business. Factoring is a type of financial transaction in which a business receives a lump sum for selling its accounts receivable to a third party.

Factoring is just one of many asset-based financing strategies that could fuel a positive reversal of fortunes in a troubled small business. Another option is to receive structured working capital by obtaining loans secured by other business assets such as inventory, machinery, and real estate.

9. Develop a unique selling proposition

Many small businesses get by for a long time on their tactical marketing efforts and only begin to appreciate the seriousness of true business differentiation when such marketing efforts begin to lose steam. A unique selling proposition or USP may be the single most powerful weapon for small business marketing success.

Having a clear reason why your marketplace should do business with you instead of your competitors or substitutes instantly makes all your advertising and marketing efforts more effective. It also gives every customer and referral partner a very powerful referral script on your behalf. If your small business is already engaged in a heavy amount of marketing and advertising, developing an effective unique selling proposition may be the most potent weapon you have for turning your business around.

You do not have to implement all 9 business turnaround strategies immediately. Pick one that seems most appropriate for relieving your profitability and performance bottlenecks, and then get to work. Over time, if you test and implement these strategies, you will find your business on the path to explosive long-term profit and revenue growth.

5 Useful App Monetization Strategies

A high-quality app can take a lot of time and effort to code. In order to get a return on this time investment it makes sense to look at the different strategies to monetize the app. There are several different ways to drive revenue and the preferred choice is likely to relate to the type of app.

Here are a few of the best options to monetize your app:

In-app purchases

In-app purchasing is a common strategy to monetize your app and gives a convenient solution to offer a wide range of services or goods, as well as installing a paywall that unlocks new features or content within the app. This type of monetizing method should be made seamless and enjoyable in order to increase sales.

Subscriptions

The ability to use subscriptions can depend on the type of app. When subscriptions are a viable option, it is a useful way to create a reliable and consistent revenue stream. This method is most effective when able to keep adding the fresh content. Most users are unlikely to subscribe to an app if the content isn’t kept fresh and updated on a daily basis. The short update cycle is a great way to get repeat customers who are likely to visit your app at regular intervals.

Ads

For the apps where subscriptions or in-app purchasing isn’t a practical option, it may be worth adding the well placed ads. A major issue with using ads is to avoid impacting the customer’s all-round experience. The ads shouldn’t disrupt the basic use of the app. Most of the modern ad networks offer targeted ads which can significantly help to improve the potential income. The irrelevant ads can lead to a poor user experience and can even make the customer turn off.

Sponsorship

One strategy that can be highly effective is sponsorship. This type of monetizing approach takes more effort compared to using ads because it is necessary to put in the time and effort to find a relevant sponsor. Sponsorship can be a very rewarding option and increases customer engagement and gives more control of the ads.

White-labeling

A revenue model that is worth considering is the white-label route. The process of thinking up ideas and building the apps is quite expensive and time-consuming. In order to benefit from this process, an app creator can package and white-label the app so that it can be sold on to other businesses. Any business that buys the code can add their branding and start selling it to their customers.

The Right Strategies on How to Build a List

Even at these times, a lot of internet entrepreneurs do not seem to have any idea on how to build a list. The popular internet marketing quote “The money is on the list.” gets thrown a lot these days. However, so many marketers are ignoring the value and the advice being provided by the quote. So we will say this one more time; your online business will be a lot bigger and you will reap much more profits if you learn how to set up, build and grow a mailing list. It can double or even triple the profitability of your business. In fact, a lot of online entrepreneurs earn their income mostly from selling to their lists. This says a lot about the power of list building as a marketing tool.

Enumerated below are some of the best methods on how to build a list. These are strategies that are not too hard to follow and implement. That said, there are no reasons why you shouldn’t be able to put them into action.

1. Offer incentives. This is to entice people to give up their contact details. Give them a reason or reasons why they should sign up with your mailing list. The most popular form of an incentive-based offer is a freebie. The process works this way – a person will receive a freebie from you provided that he or she opts into your list. This freebie can be in the form of a product or a service. It could be an ebook, a report, a coupon, software, a resource, a tool, etc..

2. Target a specific niche. The idea of a “niche” applies very well in email marketing. You can’t just go and ask everyone to subscribe to you. You have to make sure as well that those who will subscribe to you have genuine interest in your products or services. It’s always quality over quantity. A list of 1000 is not necessarily better than a list of 100.

3. Make it as easy as possible for people to opt-in to your list. Just ask for a few details like the visitor’s first name and email address. Do not make the mistake of asking for too much information.

4. Drive targeted traffic to your mailing list subscription form. This is in relation to number 2. Focus on attracting traffic that will surely be interested in the products and services that you are selling.

If you follow these tips on how to build a list, it will be a lot easier and faster for you to increase the number of subscribers to your mailing list. Most online users today have email addresses as these are necessary to gain access to a lot of online services like social networking sites. That said, list building is as relevant as ever. You will be missing out on a lot of business opportunities if you are not building your own list. The great thing about the process is that it can be automated. You just have to write and create the content for it.

Efficient Invoicing Strategies for Freelancers and Web Designers to Get Payment on Time

When it comes to managing the finances of a business, it is certainly not a very exciting task. It can prove to be quite cumbersome and boring. Moreover, if one is not from accounting background, managing finances will seem like a herculean task. And the fact is that most of the designers do not prefer to take care of finances even if it is an integral part of a business.

In order to run a designing company successfully, mere designing skills are not sufficient. You need capital to run your business successfully. And for that you need to send an invoice to your clients so that they can send you your fee. Mentioned below are some great freelancing tips for freelancers and designers who are about to start their own company.

First and foremost, you need to find a powerful and a robust invoicing solution. Although there are plethora of online invoicing apps available. These online invoicing apps are designed keeping in mind the requirements of freelancers. Some of these apps are available for free, while others come with a price tag. The paid invoicing apps are available in different price range. The price of an app depends on the features provided by it. The more features an app has to offer, the higher will be the price.

Other than generating the invoices, an online invoicing app also helps a lot in saving a good amount of time and allows you to manage an archive of invoices in an efficient manner. An effective professional invoicing application helps you in searching previous bills, figuring out received funds. It also makes other such tasks a lot easier. Therefore, you should select an invoicing application carefully based on your basic requirements. Some apps are available with just one time fee, while others are available with a monthly subscription fee.

Secondly, you need to keep your clients well informed. Whatever policies you have set for your business, for instance- payment terms, hourly rates, pending amounts etc should be conveyed to the clients very clearly. If a client finds something irrelevant in the invoice, they may want to clarify it and this will result in a delay in your payment. Therefore, it is imperative that when you send your invoice, you should make sure that the client is aware of everything that you have mentioned in the invoice.

Thirdly, you should define all your policies well. Good clients always pay on time. But sometimes due to certain reasons there could be a delay in the payment. Here is what you should do if a client does not pay on time.

1.Determine how many days you want to give to clients for late payments.

2. Decide the amount of late fee that would be levied.

Once you set up the policies, you should also be flexible enough to accommodate some exceptions. For instance- if a client has a genuine reason for the delay in the payment, you should waive the late fee.

Fourthly, you should include your contact details in the invoice. Your contact details should be there stated clearly. Also, you can include some basic information about your business. You can include information like you name, company name, address, contact number and the email id. Including your contact details makes sure that the process gets accelerated and the client knows whom to contact if the need arises.

You should also include client’s information in the invoice. This is very important. It helps in establishing the fact that you are expecting payment from them. And if there is a non payment issue, you can always use the invoice as an evidence.

Another important thing to be mentioned is the due date of the invoice. State clearly by when the client should make the payment. If you do not mention the due date, you will not be able to implement your late fee policies. After designing the policies for non payment, you can include them as a note in the invoice.

Lastly, and importantly, you must mention the mode of payment which you accept. This will help clients in knowing how to transfer your fee to you. Also mention the details of the recipient. If you miss out on any important information, it may delay your payment.

Save Your Small Business – 10 Crucial Strategies to Survive Hard Times Or Close Down & Move On

If there were ever a timely business book, “Save Your Small Business: 10 Crucial Strategies To Survive Hard Times or Close Down & Move On” by Ralph Warner and Bethany K. Laurence is certainly it. Promoted as a road map to small business survival, Warner and Laurence provide simple, no-nonsense, steps that can make a huge difference in running, saving, or if needed closing, your small business. Running a small business has always been hard, but currently it can be brutally agonizing, if not downright scary. This guide may just provide you with the information to make today’s bad economy, or bad economies in the future, opportunities so that in good times your business will be poised to thrive.

The book starts out saying it will be your small business companion, and recommends you create a business survival plan, prepare a current profit-and-loss statement and cash flow analysis, and establish an advisory board. It the delves into chapters that will provide the tools to help you decide whether it makes sense to continue, hibernate, close, or sell your business and offers some strategies you can implement to get your business back on track.

Chapter One: Can You Save Your Business? This chapter discusses topics such as planning for short and long term, selling your business, putting your business in hibernation, and saving your business. It also looks at some special considerations for retailers, services, construction, restaurants, wholesalers and importers, and franchises.

Chapter Two: Don’t Ignore Bad News. Why you can’t wait, cutting costs, changing direction, quitting and selling are addressed. There are also strategies on determining how much to cut expenses and acing slowly to reverse cutbacks.

Chapter Three: Control Your Cash Flow. This area can be one of the most important, especially for the small business. Topics include: Keeping paying your bills on time, how to create more cash, and what not to do, such as using merchant cash advances, maxing out credit cards, and borrowing against your house.

Chapter Four: Minimize Liability for Your Debts. Are you personally liable for business debts? Liability for jointly owned debt. What can creditors do if you don’t pay? Prioritizing debt payments, including payroll, taxes, utilities, and many more.

Chapter Five: Concentrate on What’s Really Profitable. Face it, the goal of a business is to make a profit. This chapter looks at getting a quick profits plan on paper, making money in a service business, and making money in retail or manufacturing. It is a short chapter, but if it gets you thinking about making a profit, it has done its job.

Chapter Six: Innovate on a Shoestring. Invention, Copying, Serendipity, and Making Innovation a Continuous Process are addressed in this chapter. This chapter may inspire you to brainstorm the next wonder gadget that every household must have. Depending on your business, this may be what you need.

Chapter Seven: Identify Your Customers. Before you can create an effective marketing plan, you need to know who your likely customers are. This chapter discusses aiming at the bull’s eye and filling in your target. Topics include current customers, need, price, access, and experience.

Chapter Eight: Don’t Waste Money on Ineffective Marketing. If we only knew which of our marketing efforts were producing the best results. This chapter helps you determine things about your marketing such as: Marketing the right products or services to the right people, not spending big dollars on advertising, asking long-term customers for support, encouraging customers to recommend your business, using paid listing effectively, marketing on your own website, and holding a “trying to stay in business” sale.

Chapter Nine: Handle Layoffs Fairly – And Keep Your Best People. Laying people off is often one of a business owners most dreaded tasks. This chapter provides guidance in this area by looking at: Making a wise layoff plan, the logistics of a layoff, and keeping the great people you hire. Some very good advice for this unfortunate part of business.

Chapter Ten: Don’t Work Too Much. What? If your business is floundering, you must work more, right? This chapter tackles the subjects of the importance of a sane schedule and how to work less and make more. Priorities and delegation are the keys the authors discuss.

Chapter Eleven: Work With Your Best Competitors. The four areas this chapter covers include: Treating competitors with respect, getting business from competitors, working for competitors, and working with competitors.

Chapter Twelve: How to Close Down Your Business. Most people don’t ever want this to happen, but the reality is that it does. This chapter offers some good strategies if you decide it is time to close the business and do something else. Topics include things like creating a closing team, looking at contractual obligations, dealing with landlords, collecting bills and selling off inventory, notifying and paying employees, liquidating assets, notifying creditors and customers, paying your debts, paying taxes, and dissolving your business entity. This is not a pleasant topic, but unfortunately an important one if you find yourself having to go this direction. The book provides guidance in the process.

Chapter Thirteen: Dealing With Debt: Bankruptcy and Its Alternatives. Introductory chapter on these topics with some good advice, but you will need more resources if you choose to go down the bankruptcy path, or better yet, seek counsel from a qualified professional.

Appendix A provides guidance on preparing a profit and loss forecast and a cash flow analysis. There are more complete references on these out there for sure, but this short bare bone basics on them will get you started and at least help you determine where you are at.

“Save Your Small Business” is a good guide for the struggling small business owner, and also provides information for the small business owner who doesn’t want to fall into hard times. Educating oneself regarding business is crucial for small business success. This is one more Nolo title that will help small business owners hopefully survive, but also liquidate and close with less pain if that is the course that must be taken.

Business Banking Sales Strategies – How to Choose and Attract More of Your Best Customers

Think about fly fishing for a moment (bear with me – I do have a business point here): A fly fisher’s success is based on alignment of three elements: 1) the fish they want to catch, 2) the fly they use and 3) the cast, or the way they deliver the fly to the fish. The better the fishers define these three elements, the more success they’re likely to have.

You face a similar challenge. Your success is tied to your ability to choose and attract more of your best customers. Like the fisher, you must choose the fish (target customers), select the fly (the benefits they want), and develop your cast (your sales system). Then, you must communicate these to your salespeople. Why? Because, you’re not fishing alone. Unless you’re careful, your salespeople will be tempted to sell to anyone with whom they can connect, pleading for larger territories, price concessions, better terms and giveaways that drive down your profits.

Step #1 – The Fish: Define your most desirable customers.

Your ideal customers are your most profitable, lowest risk, lowest cost to serve (relative to prices they pay), most reliable, most predictable, and most loyal customers. When you define your ideal customer, you’re saying “Here’s who we’re set up to serve best” and “Here’s who we’re not set up to serve well.”

How do you define your ideal customer? First, assess profitability and growth of your current customers (divided by location, industry, growth rate or other criteria that make sense to you). Then, look for the common characteristics of the most profitable customers:

Demographics – This is who they are in terms of age, gender, location, family characteristics, ethnic group and other indicators.

Psychographics – This refers to their decision-making:

What challenges are they facing? What problems are they seeking to solve?
How do they recognize it’s time to address the challenges? What are the circumstances?
What benefits or outcomes are they seeking when they buy?
What’s important to them about how they seek solutions or how the solutions are delivered?
Why do they buy from you rather than from competitors? (For example: Less time required, the experience of doing business with you, unique products or services, price?)
Why do you lose sales? At what point in your sales process do they typically stop?

As you define your ideal customer profile, avoid the trap of choosing the usual demographic markers of business type, age, income, and zip code (e.g. successful middle-aged dentists in zip code 02109) just because you can obtain the information easily or because they seem obvious. Push yourself and your team harder than that – ask how and why you’re choosing particular characteristics.

Look at the alternative direction as well: Do you know why your prospects don’t turn into clients? At what point in your sales process do people drop out? At what point in connecting with a business banker or walking around your branch do most prospects go away? At what point in your discovery and proposal process do you tend to lose people? Rely on your hunches and develop specific, quantitative data to test your hunches and provide a basis for comparison over time.

Step #2 – The Fly: Develop and tell a compelling value story.

Like a fly fisherman choosing a fly based on the type of fish, time of day, time of year and specific characteristics of the stream, choose your value story to entice your ideal prospects. Your best prospects, hearing the story for the first time, should see themselves revealed in your story and hear the benefits they want so clearly that they are called to bank with you.

To achieve this effect, you must craft the story carefully and say it consistently, even down to the same words, so you attract the prospects you want and so you can tell whether the story is working or not. There are many possible ways to construct the “why should I bank with you?” compelling value story. Here’s one example:

Script template: MyBank is in the business of giving target prospect group a specific benefit #1. And what I mean by that is, almost all the target prospect group members we’ve ever met find themselves experiencing problem or pain experienced by target prospect group members and not having benefit #1 or a related benefit. Have you ever wished that you could have that but you simply don’t know how to do it? Well, that’s what we do at MyBank; we give you the opportunity to have benefit #1 or related benefit when you want it.

Example: MyBank is in the business of giving small business owners the freedom and ability to check on their businesses from any place in the world, at any time. And what I mean by that is, almost all small business owners we’ve ever met worry about how they cannot just monitor but do something about customer receipts being deposited promptly, paying their vendors at the right times, and ensuring that there’s enough cash in the bank when they’re on vacation (if they ever take one) or tied up in a customer job somewhere for a few days. Have you ever wished that you could do that but you simply don’t know how to do it? Well, that’s what we do at MyBank; we give you the ability to see and manage what’s going on in your business when you need to be away from the office for a few days.

Of course, this story may or may not appeal to you or your ideal customers. You need to develop and test your own stories. The question is: Do you have a story? Does each member of your staff know how to tell the story in the same way? And do you have ways to test the story to see whether there might be other ways to tell it that would work better or faster?

Step #3 – The Cast: Define your sales system.

The last step in our fly-fishing story is the cast – how the fisher offers the fly to the fish. Serious fly fishers practice their casting techniques for hours, seeking to deliver the fly to exactly the right spot at exactly the right moment, with a motion that looks to the fish exactly like the real fly or bug they want for breakfast. You and your sales team must practice, too-polishing and refining your casting motion until it becomes a reliable, dependable and predictable method of drawing your fish to the surface and prompting them to bite down.

This means translating your knowledge about your ideal customers into steps, tools and activities that communicate to the prospective customers that “we’re the ones for you” and then testing them until you’re sure your approach works consistently. The successful practices become your sales system for catching your ideal customers.

Your purpose in defining the sales system is not to drive your salespeople crazy, although it may. It is to increase your revenue and profitability by consistently and predictably attracting more of your best prospects and retaining more of your best customers. If you find that asking certain questions leads to better results than other questions, or other sequences of questions, the questions and the sequence become part of your system. Likewise, if certain displays or a certain conversation while you’re ringing up the sale produce better results, they become part of your system.

Remember: No detail is too small provided you can test it and your tests show that the detail makes a difference in terms of attracting and selling to your ideal customer.

How Should a Mobile Car Wash Price Car Lot Washing Contracts – Price Per Car Strategies

Okay so, you run a mobile car washing business and you want to increase your revenue generation by adding some car dealership lot washing contracts. That makes sense because the car dealerships have lots of cars, and they must be cleaned to sell; no one wants to buy a dirty car right? Sure, so your next question is what price point can you charge and still make money. Not long ago, I was asked about this by an already successful car washing entrepreneur;

“I noticed on one of your posts [articles] you suggested $.85 for twice a week. Wow, can it be done for that without have the contract for detailing as well?”

He was referring of course to the synergy gained by detailing for auto dealerships and also maintaining the washing contracts as a bundled service, which is the favored strategy for mobile auto detailers and mobile car washing companies. But what if you only had the lot washing contract and not the detailing contract; does it still make any sense?

Well, yes, in fact, we had many accounts which were only wash accounts at between.65 and $.85 per car, where we did not have the detailing contract yet, for the auto dealership. For instance at the Sacramento Auto Mall, all the car lots are set on the street that looks like a giant circle, and we would have the crews going different directions on that street, and we would never quit. By the time we got done with one side of the street, it was time to start over, they just watched every day all day long.

Some of the other dealerships wanted us to be off of the lot by 10 AM so they could sell cars, which makes it tough in the winter because of the ice formation when you put water on the cars in many areas.

The detailing contracts for auto dealerships are very good when the economy is good, but you must understand that auto dealerships are very slow to pay and you don’t want to become a bank where you are doing services for them and they are paying you for three months. That just costs you a lot of cash flow and all that labor until you get your money.

Remember in a service business “cash flow” is king, everything else is just talk. You’re better off to go find something else to wash rather than letting some company string you out on payments and receivables. And remember that God made dirt on the first day, and that gets all over everything so you should be able to find something to wash other than just car lots.

It appears the mobile car washing entrepreneur agrees and is thinking here too. We used to consider car lots as busy work, keeping our crews busy and thus making money, but it was hardly our best profit center. Please consider all this.