Your 2018 Business Resolutions – Revisited, Part I - Blog: CRM Solutions & Industry News | AspenTech CRM - Screen_Shot_2018-07-16_at_10

Your 2018 Business Resolutions – Revisited, Part I

If you’re like 92% of the population, you abandoned your resolutions – business and personal – before January even ended. But hopefully, your business “resolutions” are actually embedded in your 2018 plan. We’re well into the year – the end of first half is right around the corner – and it’s time to take a look at what you laid out as your goals. Are you on track – or do you need a boost to bring your first half 2018 in line with your full year plan?

In this two-part series, we’ll share 10 ideas to get you started on reviewing where you are, where you’re going, and where you want to be. First, let’s review where you are right now and what immediate steps you can take to make improvements.

5 Mid-Year Action Items for Improvement

  1. First – did you make a plan for 2018? Many people don’t. But without a plan, you have no goals to meet, and no way to measure your progress. Yes, we’re almost halfway through the year, but it’s never too late to make plan. Rather than being a time-waster, a plan can save you time and money by giving you a context against which to evaluate the relevance of your actions, not to mention help you stay on target.
  2. How are you tracking to last year? Are you ahead, behind, or about the same? Get a baseline so you know where you’re starting.
  3. What’s working for you this year? Whatever is paying off is worth the investment of more resources, time and money. What promotions are getting your client’s attention? What is your top-selling service or product? How can you get your clients to buy more?  
  4. Review your client list and fire some of them. This may seem radical when you feel like every dollar of revenue is important, but high-maintenance, low-margin clients suck time and resources from more profitable clients. Make a list of your clients and then give each of them a grade. D’s and below need to be expelled – and then create a client-specific strategy to turn your C’s into B’s, and B’s into A’s. A key benefit of this strategy is the discipline of evaluating each client’s potential value to your company.
  5. Get rid of the “Lookie-Loos”. Fill your funnel with prospects that will actually buy from you. Have you been working on prospects that no longer return your calls or e-mails? Remove them from your hot list and put them back into your marketing funnel. Then, only spend time calling on prospects where you know: a) the pain you solve for them, b) their budget, and c) who can make the buying decision. Separating “Lookie-Loos” from the real buyers will increase your sales productivity.

Next week we’ll take a look at five more ideas that can propel you into a more successful and profitable future. Your CRM is a critical component for gathering and acting on all the information listed above. If you can’t perform all five of the above tasks with your CRM, then it’s not meeting your needs the perhaps we should talk. If one of your business resolutions was to evaluate new CRM systems, that’s another reason for us to talk. Give us a call at AspenTech CRM (866) 880-4228 or by clicking here. We’ve helped hundreds of businesses just like yours – any time of the year. Call us now and let’s execute your plan.

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