Many start-ups, speaking both from experience and observation, are often solely focused on getting themselves up and running in terms of revenue generation.  Start-ups are rightly looking at marketing, customer attraction and conversion, cash-flow, possible investment, business plans and hiring the necessary people to make it all happen.

This is all good stuff and absolutely should be done.

However, what many start-ups fail to do at the beginning is put the necessary processes in place to manage themselves and make sure they are optimally operating from day 1. For effective operations management, this is must-do!

Processes take time to implement – time often deemed to be better spent elsewhere.

But this can lead to problems down the road.

For example, you have a generated a sales and marketing strategy. But how are you going to measure its success or otherwise? How are you going to capture the leads, follow-them up next week, next month or next year? How are you going to determine what channels are working for you and just as importantly those that are not?

This is important. Consider how much time and money you might be wasting in a marketing channel if you don’t measure it? Perhaps the cheapest marketing technique is bringing in the majority of the customers. Why carry on marketing other ways when there is no tangible commercial upside to doing so.

Another example could be the measurement on how you are delivering your projects or services. How are you going to track why some things are going well and other things not so much? If you can’t, it will cost you time and money – no doubt.

The list is long as to what you should be generating reasonable processes around from the off-set.  You almost certainly won’t have them all in place from the off-set. But you should have some. Consider the key ones.

For us it’s;

1. Sales and marketing measurements across the multiple channels we will be selling through.
2. Effective project delivery. We’re obviously going to use MyProjectTracker to help us with this – that what it’s for.
3. Support - how are we going to look after our customers? Service support hours? Who is going to be responsible?
4. Financial management reporting – we have it now so we can measure daily on how we’re doing.

We feel that this will get us going, but know we are not there yet and will continue to work on the processes to constantly improve our business.

How do you measure your business? Let us know, we’d love to hear from you.

Photo: db photographs

Market research is a vital tool in understanding the overall placement of your business in that market. Market research covers everything from whether there is actually a market for your product, how your customers would perceive the product,how they make their purchasing decisions and what your competition is doing.

In other words, market research gives you a full picture of the battleground your business is either in or about to enter.

As new business owners, we found it a real struggle to get our heads around how to conduct market research.  We had visions of agencies, marketing consultants, the whole nine yards.

We also had zero budget and really didn’t know where to start at all including what questions to ask!

Market Research On A Shoestring

Eoin and I sat down and reviewed what we could do on market research with our limited funds.

Firstly, we had to define our market i.e. who were we selling to? This may sound obvious, but it actually was trickier than we thought it was going to be to get it right.

The next step was to identify what we needed to know a.k.a. does this business idea have any merit?

• Was there are market?
• What was that market willing to pay?
• What were the barriers to entry?
• What were the competition doing?
• How do our potential customers make their purchasing decisions?
• What did our potential customers think about managing their business on line?
• …..

We then identified who we knew in relevant businesses and setup some 1:1 sessions with them to ask their opinions and guidance. The approach was casual and non-directive to understand their take on the market area, their issues etc. This led to gaining really useful information and it fed directly into both the product design and the marketing material that we will be using.

We also realised that Twitter and Google could give us vast amounts of market research if we looked in the right places. Twitter you ask? Yes, what are people saying about you market – just put in key word searches and it’s amazing what you’ll find out. People are talking about your subject all the time (or the competition).

We created an on-line survey and pushed it out to everyone we knew who would have contacts in our potential market. We asked them to push it out further and while we started with 50 people, 136 had filled it in within a week. Encouragement to fill in the survey was supported by a prize – amazing how much of a difference this made to getting it done quickly.

And that was it. We were amazed at the information we received back – very little was redundant and it cost us about 200 Euro’s in the odd lunch, on-line survey and the prize.

Market research should be a continuous process. It doesn’t have to be hugely expensive, but it will define the direction you take in your business.

Do you have any other ways of conducting market research in a cost effective way?

Photo : Worldislandinfo.com

Marketing and sales, the key functions of any business to generate the revenues to keep you in operation. But when is the right time to start marketing and sales activity when you are a start-up business?

This question needs a bit of thought. When you are ready is the right answer, but what on earth does that actually mean?

Are those who shout their intentions from the roof-tops and let the world know that they are coming before they actually do correct?

Or is it more appropriate to stay quiet working away diligently in a “black box” only targeting a selected audience to achieve your purpose.

Marketing and Sales : Start early to raise awareness?

Conscious of the fact that marketing and sales are different functions, for the purpose of this article, I am going to discuss the two under the umbrella of “awareness”. For the experts in either – I apologise in advance for any misrepresentation.

I had an interesting chat with a colleague today about his previous life in a major start-up in the late 1980′s/early 1990′s. When they started out, the company had thirty people working for it all of whom were told to say absolutely nothing to anyone about what they are doing.

There was no marketing. Sales meetings with potential targeted clients were undertaken without fuss. This tactic was continued until the company floated in the stock exchange 10 years later and they are now making revenues of about $500million/quarter.

Essentially they operated black box and managed to grow without shouting their names from the roof tops when they were in start-up mode. They built a strong business by creating a very definite set of rules on their approach and sticking to their guns.

This contrasts strongly with the shout it from the roof-tops (e.g.  social media marketing) approach. This tactic is about raising the product/service awareness to as wide an audience as possible. Many newer businesses, ourselves included, have raised awareness even before commercial launch as a way of generating interest that will (hopefully) be converted into sales post launch.

So which is the right way to go?

For us, the decision to start our marketing and sales in advance was made for two reasons;

Firstly, to start generating an engagement with possible clients so that we were not starting blind at commercial launch.  Secondly because we are an open company and are happy to share our experiences as we progress with people who might be interested in such things. Openness is good currency in my view.

This does not necessarily make the decision we made the “right one” though. We are open for criticisms, potentially showing our hand to competitors etc. We are happy we made the right call for ourselves, but this does not make it right for you and your business.

What are your thoughts on when the right time to start marketing and sales is?

Photo : Suneko