Does your business suffer from an unfocused strategy?

In thinking about how to focus my work in 2019, I asked around with my clients and partners to see what subject was top of line when it came to growing their business this year.

Two ideas came through over and over, and they support each other: revenue and strategy.

As I dug further, the primary driver of revenue issues was marketing challenges driven by an unfocused strategy.

How do you fix that?

In my work, I’ve come back to a three step process that consistently enables you to bring your strategy back into focus.

Here it is:

Begin by understanding the value you want to deliver to your market:

For too many businesses they begin by thinking about their market or their pricing or what tasks people might pay them to do.

All of these are the wrong answer.

Why?

Because all of them take the control of your strategy out of your hands and likely put you in the position to be considered a commodity.

The way to have power over your market and to start out from a point of control in your strategy and your marketing is by focusing on the value you want to deliver for your clients.

In other words, how will your work have an impact on your clients?

Take me for example, when I work with people, my work delivers improved revenue and profitability, faster closing rates, and more effective marketing.

Your mileage may vary!

But, seriously, lead with the value. Specifically, how that value will create impact for your clients.

Spend your time focusing on your buyers:

Over the last few years, we’ve heard more and more statistics that point to the idea that buying is done by committees.

I don’t buy that.

What I do buy is that your buyer is going to want feedback and buy-in from more people than ever before, but you still have to make a deal with that one specific buyer.

Through this lens, you have to win the support and buy-in of other people, but their power is only the ability to say, “no.”

You have to focus most of your energies on the person that can say, “yes.”

Because the demands and the accountability of the person with the power of “yes” is going to be greater.

They may value the input of the team, but they also likely have other demands that are beyond the scope of other people’s work like:

• Revenue responsibility
• Profit & Loss accountability
• Stock pressure
• Investor pressure

This is why not matter who you have to meet in the process of making a sale, marketing your product or services, or delivering your value, keep in mind the person that is the ultimate buyer.

You have to keep them happy, engaged, and feeling like your value is going to be able to make their lives better.

Are you focused on the right modes of contacting your market?

My friend, Stu Heineke, wrote a great book about 2.5 years ago, called How to Get a Meeting With Anyone.

The hypothesis of his book is that you can meet anyone, if you have the right ways of making contact.

Stu’s method of marketing is called “Contact Marketing” and he gives examples of many different ways that he and his colleagues have connected with buyers.

I bring this up because in focusing your strategy, you have got to have a wider set of marketing tools at your disposal.

For many people, their marketing efforts begin with whatever new buzzy marketing tool is available at the time. Meaning that too many marketing efforts begin by trying to squeeze their message into a medium that their target buyers will never see.

The better approach is to spend time focusing on the people that will really understand your value, need it, and be willing to pay for it, and finding the medium that will enable you to get your message in front of those people.

This might mean that you spend more time writing or speaking at conferences and in trade publications.

It might mean that you need to rethink your use of direct mail or email and how you focus those efforts.

The key always being that you need to make sure that you spend your time and energy focusing on making sure your message gets into the hands, eyes, and brain of your buyers.

While this is a pretty simple system, I’ve found that by using it whenever I find myself going astray, it helps me to rebound, refocus, and retarget my strategy and my efforts.

I’m sure that if you are struggling with an unfocused strategy, you will find the same.