How to Increase Your Company’s Revenue or Gross Income – Part 5

We more often than not start a project, promotional campaign, etc., without seeking to know what our target audience thinks, needs, or wants.

Some of our entrepreneurs don’t even care to do a market and demographic study and analysis, a vital and fundamental element of marketing, promotion, and product development.

This vital and fundamental element is Survey.

Definition: survey means “to find out what is wanted or needed” by your market, demographics, or publics (types of audience).

Obviously, if we don’t know what our prospective customers or clients, staff, executives, regulators, etc., need or want from us, we will only produce and attempt to deliver things that don’t meet the needs and wants, and thus have intractable problems with our business.

Let’s ask a question: “Have you ever surveyed (asked) yourself for what you may need or want from your business?” So, how do you figure out what you must do with your business to obtain what you need or want from it? Have you ever surveyed your staff (if you have any), your suppliers, your friends and family, and your immediate community, for what they might need or want from your business? Again, how in heaven do you figure out what these publics might need or want from your business? It is the understanding of what our publics need or want that will determine what we produce, promote, sell, and deliver. It is almost always not what we think.

Surveying doesn’t have to be complex and bogus. And, it doesn’t have to be carried out outside your business either.

External to the Business Survey

1. In doing a survey, a very simple, possibly 3-question survey form could be prepared. The questions must be simple, with ‘Yes’, ‘Maybe’, and ‘No’, options. Don’t bother with complicated narrative-respond or multi-options questionnaires. Leave that to marketing survey companies or experts.

2. When you are satisfied with the questionnaire, do the survey yourself, first. Check your responses to see if the questions asked deliver valuable data or ideas that can be used in your promotion or whatever other activity you might intend. Make corrections to question/s you think is/are inadequate, or inapplicable, or unnecessary. Then, answer the questionnaire again.

3. When satisfied, get the questionnaire to your associates: staff, friends, etc. to answer. Check their responses, and again look out for valuable data or information. Do additional corrections to the questions where you think proper.

4. When you are certain the questionnaire will give you the needed data, get the survey form or questionnaire online or printed, and distribute it to as many of your contacts and beyond as you think you can safely manage.

5. Upon receipt of the responses, collect, collate, tabulate, and score the responses. You might say, ‘Yes’ = 5 (where ‘Yes’ is a positive response); ‘Maybe’ = 3 (where the response is neutral); and ‘No’ = 1 (where ‘No’ is negative). Calculate the score for each of ‘Yes’, ‘Maybe’, and ‘No’. And, you will know, with greater certainty, whether whatever you ask will be positively accepted by your audience or not.

Internal to the Business Survey

Unlike the External to the Business Survey method, virtually every business lacked the understanding and use of this more vital survey method; the Internal to the Business Survey. What does this mean and entail?

Internal to the Business Survey is a survey of “the mind of the business” – its files. This is asking your business to deliver valuable information which are embedded in letters, invoices, emails, etc. received from customers or clients, and prospects. You will be astounded by the quantity and quality of valuable information contained in the communications received into your business, information that lies in the gut of your computer, the bosoms of your physical files, and the memory banks of your key staff.

To access this well of gems:

1. Get all your files assembled

2. Search for specific data,

3. Tabulate, and score just as described in the External to the Business Survey.

4. Draw up a simple set of questions to be asked of every document, letter, invoice, etc.

5. Seek to know, for instance,
a. “Who buys from you”,
b. “When do they buy from you”,
c. “Who sold it to them”;
d. “Where they come from”,
e. “What do they buy”, etc. if dealing with sales-related surveys. You can craft other questions targeting other activities or projects you might want to get into.

Conclusion

When you have processed and determined the values of the responses from both forms of surveys described above, work out which of your products or services your surveys indicated might be needed or wanted by the respondents.

Then, get promoting your products or services using the frameworks given in series in parts 1, 2, and 3 of this email series.

Let us continue to strive to thrive!

Babatunde Odutola
LeadEtics® Consults