When you’re talking about overall business effectiveness, the first thing you have to figure out is where the bottleneck is within your business (side note – it’s really challenging to find a good picture to represent a bottleneck).

Of course the bottleneck is the constriction / constraint in terms of your growth potential.  As an example, a lot of businesses have the issue of getting enough leads generated or getting interest in buying.  They have plenty of capacity in all other aspects of the business, so in this case, the bottleneck of the business is marketing.

Of course using that example, it wouldn’t make any sense to invest time, money or resources into anything but better marketing…at least until you uncover the next bottleneck. 

I thought it would be worthwhile to dig up a post I did a while back that has a pretty good model to talk through this idea – I call it the 8 Pillars Model and it’s a good way to think through your business.   What Pillars are holding you back?

Can you identify the primary bottleneck in your business success right now?  When’s the last time you tried to identify where things were getting hung up?  I’d love to hear your thoughts – share them in the comments below.

Shawn Kinkade  Kansas City Business Coach

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• What Pillars are holding you back?
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Does your marketing suck?  Wouldn’t you like to strap on your mind control helmet and make your target market sit up and listen to all the great things you could do for them?

There are times when marketing feels like black magic…or maybe rocket science, but the reality is there are proven and well understood principles of marketing that, if followed, will get the right people raising their hands and asking to learn more about your product or service.

It’s not a silver bullet – these principles are fairly easy to understand, but they can be difficult to actually put into practice.  The good news is that you don’t have to be perfect off the bat – most of your competitors aren’t very good at marketing either (just look around at a lot of the marketing targeting you these days).  With a little bit of knowledge and effort, you’ve got a great opportunity to stand out and take control of your marketplace!

What are these tried and true principles?  Let’s take a look:

1. Have several marketing strategies active at all times

2. Focus your marketing message very tightly

3. Have a consistent message across all mediums

4. Have a very clear next step

You might have a great product and a really enticing marketing campaign, but if you don’t clearly lay out what you want your target audience to do, nothing will happen.  Do you want them to call you?  Go to your website?  Send you an email?  Visit your location?  Whatever it is, make it easy and make it very, very clear (painfully clear).  Are you frustrated that you’re not getting calls?  Maybe it’s because you don’t have a clear call to action!

5. Track where your opportunities are coming from

Marketing can be frustrating and expensive…especially when you don’t know what’s working and what’s not working.  If you have an advertisement that’s not driving any sales, you need to stop spending money on it – which you can only do if you know it’s not driving any sales!  Conversely, if you found a winner, it might make sense to double down and invest more.  There are lots of ways to track things, especially with technology options, but you have to make it a priority and plan it out ahead of time.

6. Make sure your message is Dramatically Different from your competitors

The path of least resistance when it comes to advertising is to look around and copy what seems to be effective from your competitors.  Unfortunately that just means you look like everyone else and there’s no reason to pay attention to your message!  If possible, develop a Dramatic Difference when it comes to what you offer.  If you can’t reach a dramatic difference, then do whatever you can to stand out.

7. Focus on your existing customers first

That doesn’t mean not marketing to prospective customers, but you should have a weighted mix of activities that include upselling and cross selling to your existing customers..

8. Stay in touch with past, current and potential customers

You must have a list of all your past and current customers and you should have a database of all your prospective customers who are in your pipeline.  And with those lists, you need to actively stay in touch with them on a regular basis.  That could be a newsletter, maybe a card in the mail or a regular ‘special’ offer you make…anything that keeps you top of mind when they’re ready to buy. 

9. Give your buyers a Real Reason to Believe in you

The world is way too noisy these days and your prospective customers aren’t going to believe big claims of how you can help them…unless you give them some proof.  You could start with Social Proof – testimonials from your raving fans will get people to believe.  You could also offer a meaningful guarantee that shows the confidence you have in your product or service – make it a no risk or at least low risk proposition and they’re likely to believe it’s real and give you a shot to help them.

10. Make sure you can be found online

These days, if I can’t easily find you online, then you may as well not exist.  Even if your business isn’t going to sell anything online, you need to be found online for the sake of credibility.  To most people you don’t have a real business if they can’t find you on Google.  A professional, clean website is the starting point, but you should also have some presence on Social Media and you should understand how local search works (i.e. Google Places, Yahoo local, etc.).

Are you controlling your marketing?  Score yourself on how many of these 10 that you’re doing well with.  If you’re not doing well with at least 5 of these, it’s likely your marketing sucks!  Now what would you like to do about it?  If you’d like a 3rd party perspective on how to get better from a trusted, licensed professional business coach – contact me for a free consultation.

Did I miss anything?  What marketing principles are you struggling with?  I’d love to hear your thoughts, share them in the comments below.

Shawn Kinkade  Kansas City Business Coach

Similar Posts:

• Is your business at a dead end?
• 8 reasons why your marketing doesn’t work
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Well I stumbled across the perfect primer on the book and the topic – it’s a short video speech from Daniel Pink on the core concepts and it’s illustrated with an animated technique that’s really engaging and adds a lot to the presentation.

Here’s the link if you can’t see the video for some reason:  RSA Animate – Drive

Let me know what you think about it – share your thoughts in the comments below.

Shawn Kinkade  Kansas City Business Coach

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picture by NCinDC 

I’m a big fan of models or metaphors as a way to discuss complicated ideas.  Anytime you can give someone a visual representation for a complex idea you’re a lot more likely to get your point across.

One model that I stole ran across recently is called the 8 Pillars of a Profitable Enterprise.  As a business coach, I’m always trying to figure out ways to focus (and get my clients to focus) on what the real constraints to their business are.  “We don’t have enough customers.” might be a true statement and could be a problem, but as a business owner you don’t have control over your customers.  You have control over your marketing message, how you deliver your product, how you handle your customers during their transactions – all of which could lead to a result of not having enough customers.

Enter the 8 Pillars model.

What do you think is holding you back?

By having a comprehensive, but straightforward model as the starting point for the discussion on what’s holding you back, we should be able to isolate some root causes that are constraining your business.

The 8 Pillars aren’t really 8 Pillars in the drawing – it’s 3 foundation components and 5 Pillars of growth.  However a problem with any of the 8 will drive to a bottleneck and a constraint to profitability…in other words, you are only as profitable as your weakest link allows you to be.

Let’s take a quick look at the different components:

Foundation Components

These go across all aspects of your business and a weakness here can really cripple the entire enterprise.  However an extremely strong foundation can make the growth pillars much stronger than they might be on their own and possibly make up for other weaknesses.

Leadership

Leadership is about creating and communicating a compelling vision for your company and getting everyone rowing the boat in the same direction.  Without strong leadership, you will have poor performance best case and serious in-fighting and backsliding in the worst case.  However strong leadership can enable you to pull off some pretty amazing results.

People

Getting the right people into the right jobs is the single biggest driver to long term success.  If you have the right people, then you can figure out and fix a lot of other problems.  However with the wrong people – the ones that don’t really want to be there, aren’t really capable of delivering or just don’t understand what you’re all about, you’ll be lucky to have even moderate success in the long run (and you’ll hate every minute of it…).

Systems

Most business owners appreciate the need for systems – a good system will allow you to scale your business, incrementally improve your results by using process improvements and create a valuable enterprise that can be sold at much higher multiples than other similar businesses (because it’s repeatable).  Having said that, it takes a lot of discipline and focus to step away from the day to day fire drill and document and implement your systems.

Pillars of Growth

The remaining 5 pillars will directly impact profitability – if there is an issue with any one of them, it will constrain the overall output even if everything else is humming along.

Strategy

Without a clear and successful strategy, you run the risk of leaving the outcome to chance or if it’s a poor strategy, then you will fail.  Creating a product that no one wants, trying to sell a quality product to the wrong people – both are examples of bad strategies that will cost you.

Marketing

You could have the best product in the world, great delivery, superior salesman to close the deals, but if you don’t make people aware of what you have to offer and entice them to contact you, then you are going to limit your revenue and profitability.

Sales

Similar to marketing, you could have the best product or service ever, but if you can’t get people to buy it, then you’re not going to be making much money.

Money

You’ve got money coming in (hopefully), you’ve got money going out and if you’re not careful you’ll end up with a negative balance on that equation, which can shut you down faster than almost anything else can.  If you don’t have the cash to pay your suppliers or your employees, you’re not going to be in business very long.

Delivery

Delivery really encompasses getting the product or service to the customer as well as keeping the customer satisfied before, during and after the transaction.  Poor delivery or customer service may not impact profitability right away, but it will almost guarantee that you won’t get repeat sales or any positive word of mouth – and in the age of the Internet, bad news and good news travels very quickly.

Overall Evaluation – what’s your constraint?

Using this model as a way to evaluate where you are, should help you dig down to the root cause of your biggest constraints.  You may be doing very well overall, but if you can figure out that Sales conversion is your biggest constraint (plenty of people asking for the product, plenty of capacity to deliver it) then it may make a lot of sense to spring for some Sales training.

So what do you think is constraining your business?  I’d love to hear your thoughts – share them in the comments below.

Shawn Kinkade  Kansas City Business CoachSimilar Posts:

• Where’s the bottleneck in your business?
• 10 Ways to Take Control of your Marketing
• Another look at Drive – cool presentation!