There’s a very high chance that right now, even as you read this article, that your
business is underutilising valuable resources that can be leveraged to produce millions of naira – most businesses would plead guilty to this if I were to produce the evidence. I always love to remind my clients that their business (like most businesses) sit atop between 20 – 50 high impact “leverageable” points that can be activated to increase income flow into their businesses. Unfortunately, they do not even know about this, let alone understand how to discover and activate these business hot-spots. Consequently, you could see a lot of
Nigerian business sweating it out to turn in annual sales of say 1 million in a year, when truly, if resources were maximised, their businesses could produce 10 to 20 million Naira in a year, with the potential of growing by at least 20 – 30% year on year. Don’t be one of those kinds of businesses that live on the banks of the River Niger, yet wash their hands with spittle.
Let’s continue and complete our journey today, by sharing four (4) other extra valuable resources your business is most likely underutilizing.
- Sales Presentation or Advert Copy: When you make a sales presentation or put out advert copy, it costs exactly the same; resources, energy and time, irrespective of whether it pulls 3 clients or 3000 clients. If your advert copy or sales presentation can pull 3000 clients at X costs, why design or execute it haphazardly to produce only 3 clients at same X costs. Does that look or sound like underutilisation of resources? You bet.
Most
advert copy or sales presentations I’ve seen, carry one or more of the faults listed here (and others I cannot list for space and time limitations). They are nebulous, selfish, not compelling enough, not differentiated enough, not targeted well enough, not providing prospects with enough information to power a decision, not leading or guiding them to the right choices and so forth. If you fail to do the right things that make your sales presentation stand out, or your brochures and advert copy generate enquiries and sales, you just threw XYZ amount of naira down the drain.
You’re way smarter than that. Learn and apply tricks and tactics (I’ll share in subsequent articles) that would double or triple the performance of your advert copy, sales presentation, letters, brochures, and telephone conversations. Your business will thank you for it.
- Digital Platforms: By this, I mean both your website, blog, social media pages, newsletters and so forth. It bemuses me when I surf the web and still manage to see outdated websites and underutilised social media pages. These digital platforms are static and give “dry” and boring information and news about the company, and they are not maximised as a marketing tool. Your website, blogs, social media pages and newsletters should be harnessed to position you as an authority in your industry, and help you win the trust, admiration and hence patronage, referrals and positive recommendations from prospects and clients. If you aren’t yet doing that, that’s sad for business, because your business possibly might be ten times its current size if you’d just share the kind of information your prospects and clients are looking for.
- Upselling and Cross Selling: You successfully made that sale because the prospect or client trusted you to provide him with value, through a certain product for a certain amount. He’s a lot more times likely to visit your business tomorrow for a repurchase than if he’d never bought anything from you. This trust cost you a lot to earn, in terms of resource deployment and spend, and considering the fact that most products or services need one, two or more complementary or supplementary product to guarantee the best experience, why not sell them that extra product? This could put a great deal of revenue in your accounts, as well as protect your clients from those who are likely to sell him inferior products. This would be a win-win situation for you both and when introduced right, has been known to push up business revenues sometimes as high as 30%. There are myriad of ways to execute this creatively and successfully. Hopefully, I’ll get to share in subsequent articles, devoting a lot more time to specific topics.
- Other Peoples Resources: For the most part of this article, I’ve shared internal resources that are underutilised, but who actually said that all the resources deployed to grow your business must be internal to your business? If you have not learned how to make use of other people’s resources, to increase your revenues and operate more efficiently, you’re letting some of the best things in business pass you by.
Through well thought out strategies and tactics, you can learn to deploy other people’s time, money, clients, marketing budget, distribution channels, employees, skills and ideas to grow your businesses. And mark you this list can run endlessly, but I’m limiting it to these chiefly because I have a limit I don’t exceed when I write web articles. However, I’ll share with you one notable example from our immediate environment.
How many of us knew of Lumos Global about a year ago? Not much. But of course you knew MTN Nigeria, and within the space of a few months, Lumos Solar Systems sit in the houses of so many Nigerians who never knew them or cared to know about them less than a year ago.
Lumos and MTN Nigeria entered into a strategic alliance, that allowed the former concentrate on churning out products (what they do best) while allowing MTN deploy its superior marketing resources, technology, data systems, and reputation to drive the sales of those solar panels. You can only guess how much time, energy and resources they would have deployed (and wasted) if they (Lumos Global) had to achieve all that strictly with resources internal to their business.
And you don’t have to be huge, or the producer of some high-tech gadget to do this. This tool of alliances, collaborations, strategic partnerships and joint ventures are available to all businesses, even the akara seller in the streets. All that is needed are resources you have that the other party needs, resources you need that the other person has, and the willingness to enter into a mutually beneficial symbiotic highly profitable business relationship.
CONCLUSION: You can live by the River Niger and still wash your hands with spittle. Your business can hold the greatest potentials for growth and still struggle to pay salaries and complaining about how hard the economy is. What you know and apply about resource maximization is what makes the ultimate difference between your business and a competitor with same or even more resources. Use the little you have and stretch it productively to the nth degree.
If you picked up something valuable from this article, please be kind enough to share. So doing, we’ll build and strengthen our businesses and the Nigerian economy. Thank you.
If you learned something valuable from the
first part of this article, I’m super excited that you did. I hope you shared your lessons with friends, and more importantly, act upon it, to add “the numbers” to your business revenues.
