Growing Small Businesses

Lesson 3: Getting new business

Get new business tomorrow

Sometimes something happens, things don't work out, a big order didn't come through or some extra costs have surfaced. To meet your targets, which means to be able to run your business as planned, paying salaries, buying materials, meeting your commitments as planned, you need more business right away, now. You obviously can't start looking for new target markets, analyze them, position yourself and test your concepts to meet this particular business need. You have to be able to short circuit the process and get orders in fast.

There's only on place to get new orders now - that's from your existing customers. These are people who have already ordered from you, know you, are happy with you and will do business with you again. What you have to do is find those who are close to needing what you offer again and give a little push. That's your best source of new orders quickly.

If you know your customers and keep track of them, you'll know what they ordered, when and you'll have some idea of their business needs. Even if you're not consistent in tracking this as you should, you'll have this information about some of your customers. Basically you're going through the same who needs it, who is most likely to buy etc. analysis but you're doing it for your existing customers so they are already filtered and you already have all this information about them. So, instead of having to spend time finding information and analyzing it, it's just a question of choosing those existing customers who may need to place another order soon.

Once you have a list of such customers, you have to make it attractive to place that order now instead of later. Since you know what they need and how they use your products, you have to develop a strategy to make your product or service more attractive right now.

Often, this simply involves giving a discount. You see this all the time. "For a limited time only, 10% discount if you buy this before the end of the week." That's certainly a possibility but it costs you money. If you know your customers well, you must know of other things which they value and which don't cost you anything or not as much.

How about throwing in some feature which normally costs extra - this is always good because the customer sees the price you normally charge as the value but it only costs you what it normally costs which is less. A 10% discount is a 10% value to the customer and it costs you 10% as well. The extra feature gives more value to the customer than it costs you to provide.

Another strategy is to add extra service for a limited time. Perhaps including delivery is an option which is not too costly but which the customers will value. Perhaps offering a quick delivery time will get their attention - that will also help your cash flow in this kind of situation.

The bottom line is that, if you need orders quickly, your existing and past customers are your best bet. You can usually shake some orders loose quickly if you offer a little bit extra and the best items to offer are extra features which cost you less than the value the customer will place on them. This strategy will always help you out of an unexpected hole while you gain time to compensate for the unexpected event which has caused this.

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