27 Nov Why you need to stop everything you’re doing
Ever feel like you’re working really hard but just not getting the results you want?
Finding yourself working more and more hours to try and stay on top of things?
Or maybe you keep flitting around trying different Marketing approaches until you find a way to keep those customers coming to you.
These are all all warning signs that you need to stop everything and take stock in your business – RIGHT NOW!
By taking stock, I mean the process of feedback.
What is feedback?
Definition – “process in which the effect or output of an action is ‘returned’ (fed-back) to modify the next action”
Feedback in this sense often refers to systems, but it also applies to businesses as a whole. For example, Amazon use the feedback they get every time you visit their store to modify the next action of what they recommend to you. They are continually building up more and more knowledge about you and your likes and interests to adapt what they offer to you.
This is feedback in action.
Okay, I know you’re not running a business the size of Amazon (yet!), but the principles can still be applied to your business. You need to go and figure out where you already have feedback, where you need to go and get some more feedback, and then how you can use this to modify your business.
How to find feedback in your business
You’ve probably got feedback right under your nose, you’re just not calling it that.
Sales figures, customer comments, supplier comments, social media interaction, website analytics etc.. (By the way, if you have a website and don’t have any analytics to tell you stats for your website, I’d recommend you add Google Analytics pretty quickly)
I bet you’ve got stacks of information available already that you’re not using.
Once you’ve identified what you’ve already got, see if there are any obvious gaps. Do you need to go and get some more customer feedback? Do you need to see what your competitors are doing?
What’s it telling you?
Now to figure out the story your feedback is telling you.
Do you have really popular products / services that sell well but takes up lots of your time? Maybe you need to increase the price.
Do you have products or services that don’t sell very well? Maybe it’s time to drop these.
Is there a particular Marketing activity that gets most of your customers? Time to focus on this and drop the ones that aren’t working.
Are people not spending very long on a website page? Time to review what’s on there and figure out what you need to change.
Is there a particular type of customer who’s most profitable to you? What can you do to get more of them?
Your feedback may be telling you something completely different to these examples. The point is to listen to it and figure out what you need to change in your business so that you are not working harder and longer hours to make it work.
Getting feedback in place and using the results from it to improve your offerings is part of working smarter, not harder.
Make it business as usual
Once you’ve done it once, make the time to listen to your feedback on a regular basis and use the information to constantly tweak and refine your business. It can be the difference between making your business a success (as you define it), or your business dragging you down.
If this has been useful to you, you can also get my weekly Rock Your Biz tips, helping Solo Entrepreneurs to be more productive and profitable, here.
Alison Bradford
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