Business Growth Specialists

Marks out of 10

Posted: Wednesday January 13, 2010 by Paul

Marks out of 10

The organisation of most SME businesses can be broken down into 3 main areas:

* Operations (product or service delivery)

* Admin (Accounting, HR, IT – back office)

* Sales & Marketing

If you were to give your business Marks out of 10 for these three areas what mark would you give?

In my experience, after talking to hundreds of businesses over the last few years show that the averages work out something like this:

* Operations – 8 or 9 / 10

* Admin – 5 or 6 / 10

* Sales & Marketing – 2 or 3 / 10

It always amazes me that even where businesses that have a good to excellent product/service always fall short on how they feel they perform inthe Sales and Marketing arena, the typical response is we rely on ‘Word of Mouth” and “Referral” and may attend a networking group and then that’s the limit, they just sit back and wait for the business to roll in, which is fine if you are always at maximum, but what happens when the current work dries up?

I was recently speaking to a business that had just gone into administration. 18 months ago they were very successful, employing over 80 people, very profitable and had a good order book – They operated in the automotive industry, making specific parts for motor vehicles. When orders were cancelled, they were suddenly in the situation that they needed to adapt their range and look to sell into different markets, but they had no sales and marketing infrastructure to deliver and get new business – result they couldn’t adapt quickly enough to get new orders and they ran out of cash !!!!

What about you?

Sales and Marketing is the backbone of your business, you need to be continually working to ensure that you are flexible and can adapt to changing market conditions –

The keyword for 2010 is Flexibility and focus on your Sales and Marketing systems and processes get them into the GREEN and pass the test.