What’s Important to Chamber Members
by Mike Lake, co-owner of Redlake Advertising
We’re living in historically significant times–events that will be remembered well into the future. How are these events affecting your business? Well, the Chamber has been trying to get a grasp on that very question, and to get the answer, we went to our members.If you are a Chamber member, you received an email a couple weeks ago letting you know that we are creating a live event in which we will address topics important to Chamber members. What are those topics? Well, we sent you a survey asking for your opinion. If you didn’t take it, you can still do so by going to: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=qhxeduL3qrYxl0RuuDIr6w_3d_3dLet me give you a sense of the responses by your fellow members. 57% of the respondents were companies with from 1-5 employees, 15% of respondents being 6-10 and 28% were companies with over 50 employees. The survey was divided up into 6 categories: Sales, Marketing, Operations, Finance, Technology and Staffing. For those of you who have not yet taken the survey, most of the questions asked the respondents to answer using one of six choices: “We’re doing great,” “We’re doing okay,” “Not sure,” “We need some help,” “We need A LOT of help” and “The question doesn’t apply.”
Staffing was the one area in which most respondents said they were doing GREAT in one particular area–turnover. Nowhere else in the survey did the majority of people say they were doing GREAT. Possibly because so many were small companies without large staffs. The one area people did say they need help was in training. Those of you in the training business, take note.
On the whole, people said they were doing well in technology. In fact this category had the highest number of “We’re doing great” and the lowest number of “We need a LOT of help.” The only exception was the category of having an effective web site. So if you don’t love your web site, you’re not alone.
Regarding finance, almost half the people said they were doing okay in all areas of finance. This doesn’t mean they are enthused with the money they are making. It means they have satisfactory controls and measurements in place. Interestingly, there were a fair amount of people who claimed that they didn’t know (”not sure”) about some of these areas, which for finance is not good. For those of you in the accounting business, you’ve got 1 out of 5 people out there unsure of their financial metrics.
An area in operations that people said they need help was in the integration of finance, sales, marketing and HR. They also admitted needing help developing monthly, quarterly and yearly goals. Also, measurement and testing success in various areas of their business was suffering. It seems that operational control is lacking.
Now to the areas that people said they need the most help: Sales and marketing. People are less satisfied with their sales efforts than anything else. Their biggest need is in generating leads, then keeping a year-round consistent sales effort, then maintaining an effective sales database. Sales has the greatest number of “We need a LOT of help.”
Marketing had the second highest “We need a LOT of help.” One quarter of the people said they don’t have a marketing plan. Most people don’t think they are using the web as well as they should and a similar number don’t believe they are spending their advertising dollars effectively. Going back to the operational issue of measuring and testing, it’s not surprising that most people don’t have a grasp on their marketing effectiveness. It’s a very difficult aspect of a business to accurately measure.
Given the difficult economic times in which we are now living, sales and marketing is one crucial area of your business to get right. Redlake will be partnering shortly with the Chamber to hold the event born from this survey. Based upon the survey results, it will be on sales and marketing. In the mean time, here are a couple of suggestions:
Get back to the basics of selling and marketing your product or service. Ask yourself and your sales staff: How many new people are you talking to each week? What means are you employing to reach out to new prospects? When was the last time you communicated to your database? (You don’t have one? Get one now and start filling it!) When was the last time you reached out to people who inquired about your product in the past but either said “No” or dropped out of contact? How do you know if your advertising is working? Can you name three things you are doing to utilize the internet to gain market share? (And just having a site doesn’t count!) And, when was the last time you asked your customers why they buy from you?
Fortunes have been made in bad economic times. You can make yours now, but it requires you to be doing things well in HR, technology, finance, operations, and especially in sales and marketing. Take the Chamber survey and see how you honestly rate yourself. Looking wide-eyed in the mirror is sometimes hard, but always enlightening.
Michael Lake