Summary: Want to grow your business-to-business small business without chasing after new clients? Expand with new value-added services that complement your existing offering. Find out how.If you have a business-to-business small business, some of your clients inevitably will go out of business, get bought out, undergo management shake-ups, or just get seduced by a new vendor. You have to grow your business just to stay in business. But how?• Undertake costly and time-consuming marketing and networking projects to get new clients to make up for the inevitable attrition.• Ask your existing clients to refer new clients. This is always a good idea, but it's not the fastest or most reliable way to get new business. You could wait months to see results.• Don't get new clients at all. Instead, expand your offerings to your existing clients.Choosing Your New B2B Small Business Offering: What to Look forExpanding your B2B offering might sound like a bit of a headache and that is a possibility. You have to select your expanded offering carefully. Here's what to look for:Complements existing offeringIn case you're tempted to branch out too far, keep these factors in mind:• Market. If your expanded offering complements your existing offering, your existing clients will provide a ready market.• Credibility. "Jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none:" it's a cliché, but people instinctively believe it. Which would you trust more: a shoemaker who also sells wristwatches or a shoemaker who also sells socks?• Skills. You will inevitably need new skills for your new offering. This includes the softer skills of selling and servicing the offering. The fewer skills you have to acquire, the smoother your rollout will be.Modest investment to startThe only guaranteed way of minimizing your risk is to minimize your investment. Remember: investment doesn't just mean money, but also your time and energy. Choose an expanded offering that won't be all-consuming.Strong existing demandFace it: your small business already has its hands full with its existing business. You can't afford to break ground on something the world doesn't know about yet. Look for an unfulfilled demand on the part of your existing client base.Hypothetical Case Study: B2B Service ExpansionLisa is a virtual assistant who has expanded from data entry to helping her clients organize their internal records. But offshore companies are taking away record-keeping clients just as they did with data entry. Getting new record-keeping clients would be an uphill battle against offshoring.What does Lisa do?1. Lisa gets into a few long telephone calls with her favorite clients. One client mentions his secretary is tired of handling payroll. Another says he is fed up with being put on hold with his current big-name payroll processing company.2. Lisa researches payroll processing outsourcing. She finds it's a business where offshore companies have not made great inroads. Domestic businesses have not glutted the market, either. Traditionally, the technology needed to run a payroll process business was so expensive that only a few large firms could compete. The new software that allows any small business to offer payroll processing services has only been on the market a short time. Meanwhile, the cost of startup is only the cost of the software, plus a portion of her sales. Best of all, the only training she needs is to read up on a few payroll manuals, and do a test run with one or two of her most supportive clients.3. Lisa gets a few of her clients on the phone and asks them point-blank if they would be interested in outsourcing their payroll processing to her. They sound interested.4. Lisa finds a reputable payroll processing software company founded by someone with extensive experience in the field. She calls the company up and confirms that they have not sold a franchise in her area yet.5. Within six months, Lisa has taken over the payroll processing of about one-fifth of her existing clients. Though she has lost two large clients to offshore virtual assistant services, her business income has grown by fifteen percent, since she has gotten more work without having to invest in marketing.Of course, Lisa's success took hard work. But she was able to maximize her effort by choosing an offering she could expand her business into easily. Payroll processing is one example of a value-added service that many B2B small businesses can transition into smoothly. But whatever new offering you go with, just make sure to choose your new offering carefully.
From Joel Walsh www.isnare.com/?aid=6905&ca=Business
Grow Your B2B Small Business Without Marketing
B2B Direct Mail Lead Generation Success Needs Planning, Testing, Measuring.
Is Direct Mail Useless for DMers?Is direct mail useless at helping direct mail businesses generate leads?That’s the question I was asked last week by a reader of Alan Sharpe’s B2B Direct Mail Tactics newsletter. Here is her unusual challenge, and my response.“My biggest challenge in generating leads from direct mail is to convince our marketing people that direct mail should be used. This is a completely ironic situation given that we are a DIRECT MAIL HOUSE. Yes, that’s right. I’ve been told that ‘direct mail is not good for our business.’“Apparently, direct mail was tried once long ago and had a bad response rate. Our other lead generation methods include sales outreach activities (prospecting, networking, etc.) and community involvement - charities, boards, councils, etc. Our word of mouth reputation is excellent - we've been in business for 18 years, our turnaround time is excellent, our customer service people are top notch, our team really knows their stuff . . . . However, it seems to me that a larger outreach should be done as well . . . am I barking up the wrong tree here?”Myth #1: Direct mail doesn’t work for usThe only way to convince management to use direct mail over the long term to generate sales leads is to prove that direct mail either outperforms other methods or increases the effectiveness of other methods. You can only do this through testing and measuring results.After all, the telephone, not the letter, is the number one tactic to generate leads according to the Direct Marketing Association's 2005 Response Rate Report.Your firm sounds like it is content to do business in your city only. That’s why they rely on “networking, community involvement - charities, boards, councils, etc.” These methods of meeting prospective clients are not sustainable nationally or even regionally. They are too expensive.Unless your management wants to grow the business outside of your city, or grow the business in an aggressive way in your city, you may have a hard time convincing them to try DM. This is especially true if your city is small, since your prospect pool is so limited.Myth #2: We tried it once and it didn’t workYou say, “Apparently, direct mail was tried once long ago and had a bad response rate.” Business-to-business lead generation using direct mail is a program, not a campaign. It consists of a plan, a year-long series of mailings, and a way of testing methods and measuring results. I would suggest that if you have not tried direct mail consistently for at least a couple of years, testing different packages against each other, testing DM against your other lead generation methods, and measuring your results to see which method is most cost-effective, you have abandoned direct mail prematurely.Myth #3: Direct mail delivers poor response ratesYou say, “Apparently, direct mail was tried once long ago and had a bad response rate.” Direct mail response rates are misleading if you read them incorrectly. Your response rate only tells you part of what you need to know. It tells you the percentage of people on your list who responded and nothing more.Your response rate doesn’t tell you how much you had to spend to generate one lead. Or how much you had to spend to make one sale. Your direct mail response rate does not tell you if the sales people who followed up on the leads closed any sales. Or if you broke even. Or if you made a profit.So don’t be fooled by a low response rate. Unless you measure these other things (cost per lead, cost per sale, break even, return on investment) and compare your results with your face-to-face prospecting, community involvement and other methods, you will always be relying on feelings and not facts. One of the things that I like about B2B direct mail lead generation is that it is empirical. The numbers never lie. You can bank on it.Recommendations1. Show your boss a compelling business case for testing direct mail lead generation at your firm. Calculate cost per lead, cost per sale, break even and ROI. Show your boss the numbers2. Start with a list of prospects that have been unresponsive to your other methods, or people that you cannot reach cost-effectively any other way3. Think niche. Target a narrow group of prospects and go after their business with a year-long campaign, reaching them more times and in more ways than your salespeople ever could in a yearI wish you every success!
From Alan Sharpe /www.isnare.com/?aid=18712&ca=Marketing