Alexandra Levit's Water Cooler Wisdom

Conduct Market Research on a Budget

Business success today depends on understanding what market trends are most prominent, what your customers need and what types of competitive strategies are the most effective. After all, there's nothing worse than spending precious resources launching a new product or service that ultimately flops in the marketplace.

Fortunately, advancing technology makes it possible to conduct competitive market research more rapidly than in the past. Let's explore how to conduct a market analysis efficiently, as well as strategies that facilitate quick learning of key market trends.

Conducting a Customer Needs Analysis

The first step in mastering market trends is getting to know your customers. You should use any information and feedback collected to divide your customers into segments. Segments should share a common characteristic (such as age or location) and be large enough to warrant individual marketing attention.

Within each segment, it's helpful to develop buyer profiles. Picturing your customer as a human being, you'll describe:

• their demographics and background,
• motivations and challenges,
• what they spend their lives doing,
• how they communicate with the businesses they patronize and
• the messages that are most likely to appeal to them.

Your last customer needs analysis step will be connecting each target buyer's needs to a product or service. Call out your benefits, why the target buyer would or would not choose you over a competitor. If there are holes, consider refining your offerings to better address critical customer pain points.

For the rest of the article head over to the AMEX Business site.

Learning Resources to Help You Keep Up With Your Growing Business

Effective strategies for managing a growing business change all the time—the onus is on the owner to develop a mindset of continuous education. It's in your best interest to identify learning resources in a few key areas that are critical for growing your business.

Let's focus on debt consolidation, business loan attainment, supply chain  management and sales and marketing tracking because they all affect your ability to generate positive cash flow and ensure that your operations solidly support your growth objectives.

Debt Consolidation

When growing pains hit your business, you could unexpectedly find yourself in a mountain of debt.

Rather than letting the situation get out of control, you might consider debt consolidation, which involves taking out a new loan to pay off the debt and associated interest across your accounts. Debt consolidation loans are typically installment-based, meaning you pay them off monthly over a set time period.

Provided you procure a loan with a lower interest rate than that of your other balances, debt consolidation may make sense for you. Learning resources that teach the ins and outs of debt consolidation include a local credit union, CreditKarma, Debt.org and NerdWallet.

Business Loan Attainment

Once upon a time, getting a business loan meant walking into your local bank branch and convincing the lender to take a chance on you. Fortunately, there are more online options than ever before, but you must know what to look for.

 

Your growing business can benefit from a variety of financing solutions with low interest rates. Some common solutions include term loans, in which a lender provides a lump sum that you may back over a specified time period of one to five years; and business lines of credit, in which you borrow a maximum credit limit and pay interest rates on only the capital borrowed from the credit line.

And unlike the loans of yesteryear, you don't have to wait very long. Most online business loans get you the money you need within a few days. If your business needs a capital infusion to keep up with industry changes, check out learning resources like the Small Business Administration and Fundera to identify the loan that best addresses your business requirements and unique financial situation.

For the rest of the piece, check out the AMEX Business site.

Time-Saving Ways to Stay Up to Date on Market Trends

Business success today depends on understanding, in real time, what your customers need and what types of competitive strategies are the most effective. After all, there’s nothing worse than spending precious resources launching a new product or service that ultimately flops in the marketplace.

Fortunately, advancing technology makes it possible to conduct competitive market research more rapidly than in the past. Let’s explore how to conduct a market analysis efficiently, as well as strategies that facilitate quick learning of key market trends.

How to Conduct a Customer Needs Analysis

The first step is getting to know your customers, which we’ll discuss in more detail in the next section. You should use the information and feedback collected to divide your customers into segments. Segments should share a common characteristic (such as age or location) and be large enough to warrant individual marketing attention.

Within each segment, it’s helpful to develop buyer profiles. Thanks to the below information on how to conduct market research, you’ll hopefully have a complete understanding of your target buyer’s needs. Picturing her as a flesh and blood human, you’ll describe her demographics and background, her motivations and challenges, what she spends her life doing, how she communicates with businesses she patronizes and the messages that are most likely to appeal to her.

Your last customer needs analysis step? Connect each target buyer’s needs to a product or service. Call out your benefits, why the target buyer would or would not choose you over a competitor. If there are holes, consider refining your offerings to better address critical customer pain points.

How to Conduct Market Research without Spending Months or Millions

You don’t need to spend a fortune with a prestigious market research firm to gain valuable customer insights. There are a number of low cost, time-efficient ways of examining market trends – many of which are online. One go-to strategy is crowdsourcing. You can use social media or online surveys emailed to your database to collect feedback about what’s working (or not) for your existing customers. Be sure to ask the tough questions, encourage honesty, and reward customers for their participation via coupons, discounts, or gift cards.

In some cases and especially if you are developing a new product to service, you might want to access the larger market. Online services like TYLM (Tap Your Larger Market) and Gutcheck allow you to use targeting criteria like gender and income to ask a series of open and closed questions to millions of pre-qualified individuals. In addition to completed surveys, these tools can capture customer emotions via one-on-one video responses and can analyze and summarize the results so you don’t have to spend time sifting through raw data.

You might also deduce market trends through the use of text analysis software. These tools help business owners gain insights from structured and unstructured text data using natural language processing (or a program’s ability to process human speech patterns). Leveraging data from a variety of sources including public reviews, emails sent to your organization, surveys, and phone transcripts, text analysis software can pull out key language patterns that get to the bottom of customer sentiment. As an example, Thematic gathers customer feedback from your existing data sources and, by distilling common themes, analyzes your best route to keeping customers. Similarly, Chattermill takes unstructured input and translates it into clear actions meant to improve customer experience. And best of all, many steps can be automated!

Of course, your market trends analysis won’t be complete without competitor monitoring. If you’re not sure how to find competitors of a company, searching them out via Google and comparing and contrasting the features and benefits listed on their websites is an excellent place to start. A number of paid tools also help with competitor monitoring, including SEMRush, which provides data about your current online performance as well as that of your competitors and helps you accurately assess the search terms leading to your company and competitors. A second option is SpyFu, which allows you to search for any competitor and download their keywords.

While conducting a customer needs analysis and market trends research doesn’t have to take over your life, it may still be worthwhile to hire an intern or freelancer to employ these strategies on your behalf. While you should probably repeat your analyses annually, you will also get more proficient at minimizing time spent!

3 Innovative Business Trends for 2020

Remember when the year 2020 seemed incredibly far away? Sure enough, if we'd read about this year's new business trends in the late '90s, we might have thought they were pretty futuristic.

A few developments—including the artificially intelligent voice economy, democratized IT and enhanced social video—became reality in the last few years and form the basis of future business trends in 2020 and beyond. 

AI-Powered Voice Economy

Proactive voice response systems have long been a part of customer service. A proactive response from a machine prompts a human to ask a question. Then the machine answers and then asks a follow-up question.

For example, a customer might call a drugstore to order a prescription refill. The machine would offer the customer options; the customer could choose one, such as “Do I have a refill available?" and the machine could respond “Yes, there is one refill available. Can I fill the prescription for you?"

Phone-based customer service “robots" were once clunky and fussy, but the technology behind them is rapidly advancing. This progress is mostly due to improvements in natural language processing (NLP), or a machine's ability to process human speech patterns.

Artificially intelligent voice-based assistants like Alexa and Siri are taking off because if you think about it, it's much easier for humans to communicate with digital devices and software by voice than by typing onto a screen. Your assistant sits quietly in the background until you ask for its help, and thanks to NLP, it can respond to you far more accurately than in the past.

For the rest of the innovations, head over to the AMEX Business site.

Questions To Ask Before You Jump on the Tech Bandwagon

Rapidly advancing technology offers a terrific opportunity to take your business to the next level and infuse your company's culture with an innovative spirit.

Every year unveils new software and apps with the potential to simplify processes, streamline workflow, improve communication and increase employee and partner productivity and efficiency. However, just because a solution is new and shiny, doesn't mean that it's right for your organization and culture—at this point in time or ever.

As a business owner, you don't want to introduce too many programs that don't integrate with existing systems, don't map explicitly to your strategic and operational goals or don't make sense cost-wise. You also don't want to jump on the tech bandwagon so many times that you overwhelm your employees and run into user adoption problems.

Purchasing software for your business should include a comprehensive analysis of your needs, as assessed by your fellow leaders, partners and vendors. Establish a concrete objective, detail the projects or tasks the new solution will address and determine your end users. Then, talk with stakeholders to land on an execution plan, deciding whether you'll go with a single department pilot, a phased approach or a full-scale, simultaneous rollout.

Your final step involves asking any one of the following provider-related questions before buying software.

1. What functionality does the software provide?

Study the profile of the employee who will use the software. View experiential demos to ensure the technology aligns with how you run your business and how your stakeholders prefer to engage.

Make sure the software is scalable in case your company grows quickly, and that it has strong reporting and measurement capabilities to provide you with the data you need in a useful format.

2. What are the implementation specifics?

Speak to your prospective vendor about whether your existing IT infrastructure can support the new solution. Does the new software run on compatible platforms, and if not, how difficult will it be to integrate systems with minimal downtime?

For more recommendations, head over to the AMEX Business site. 

Keep Your Business Safe During a Natural Disaster

If it seems like natural disasters are increasing, it's not your imagination. And those disasters have a very real effect on company's bottom lines.

According to a 2018 report by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, direct economic losses due to climate-related disasters have increased 150 percent over the last 20 years. During the period of 1998-2017, disaster-hit countries reported direct economic losses of $2,908 billion. The United States was hit hardest at $945 billion. As you might expect, floods and storms are the two most frequently occurring disasters.

Given these numbers, every business owner today may want to consider proactively developing disaster strategies to protect human and material assets and maintain a healthy amount of working capital should trouble strike. 

Let's examine four solutions for natural disasters you might employ to keep your business safe and increase your peace of mind.

1. Practice strong working capital management.

Working capital is the difference between a company's current assets like cash, unpaid bills and inventories of raw materials and finished goods, and its current liabilities such as payroll and taxes. Business owners use working capital to measure operational efficiency and overall financial health. 

 

Just as smart business owners build working capital reserves during anticipated slow periods, you should develop a similar strategy to cope with natural disaster-related disruption. 

Ensuring that you have enough cash and liquid assets on hand to cover sudden expenses and/or loss of income can mean the difference between your business' survival and its demise.

2. Take a second look at your insurance.

Now is the time to review your insurance policies and assess how well (or not) you'd be covered in a natural disaster. 

Sometimes it isn't intuitive. Using the hurricane scenario as an example, your run-of-the-mill business policy might cover losses from broken glass that's the result of high winds and flooding that's the result of rain. But if you want to protect your location from flooding that comes from groundwater, you may require supplementary flood insurance. 

If you live in an area prone to hurricanes, you can expect to pay higher premiums, and some carriers may not insure you at all. For more detailed information on what's generally covered and where, review the Insurance Information Institute's website.

For the rest of the piece, head over to the AMEX Business site. 

Supply Chain Strategies for Smaller Businesses

Supply chain management refers to overseeing the processes that transform a raw material into a final product and ensuring that goods and services proceed smoothly from initial manufacturing to customer delivery. Effective supply chain management involves streamlining the flow in a way that maximizes the organization's bottom line and the end customer's value.

Experts believe the future of supply chain management will include increased automation, along with a focus on analytics, sustainability practices and complex supplier relationships. And women are leading the charge—according to a 2018 survey conducted by Gartner Research, there has been "sustained strong representation of women in the senior-most ranks of supply chain organizations relative to other functions. We also find more supply chain leaders spearheading their own initiatives to attract, retain and advance women."

To that end, I asked a few women supply chain leaders what they are doing to further their careers as well as the missions of their organizations.

Smart Analytics

Collecting data from a variety of sources and using it to derive relevant insights for the business can have an positive effect on supply chain performance.

Jill Keto, CMO of Easy Metrics, a cloud-based supply chain visibility provider, has moved up in her career by developing tools that help organizations optimize their largest controllable expense—labor. 

“Using big data in warehouse environments to track labor is a strategy that has paid huge dividends," Keto says. “My customers see improved team engagement, 40 percent productivity improvement and 15 percent labor cost reduction simply by using data to capture the labor costs of every action.

“In a tight job market where labor demand is outpacing supply," she continues, "and where customer requirements like same-day shipping and small orders are the norm, distribution operators are running into challenges that didn't exist before."

Keto leverages the interplay of the Internet of Things, machine learning and big data to bring a degree of calm to the chaos.

Sustainability Focus

Before founding her company virtue + vice, which advises fashion brands on impact sourcing and sustainable supply chain management, entrepreneur Melanie DiSalvo worked in supply chain management, product development and production for major fashion brands. 

DiSalvo's intimate experience with the fashion supply chain and global market trends, particularly strategic regional sourcing and operations, provided the know-how to launch her own company.

“My in-depth understanding of how each level of the supply chain works has gotten me ahead," she says. “My time spent living and working overseas in factories and mills was invaluable because it taught me exactly what's possible and what isn't, and shapes how I solve problems for my customers every day. 

"Because I know what goes into making each component of a clothing item, I can come up with environmentally sustainable workarounds that most people would never think to try," she adds.

For more insights, check out the full piece on the AMEX Business site.

These Business Process Improvements Saved My Company

My business success depends on working efficiently with other companies and individuals. Still, in the past, I structured my business processes as if I were a lone wolf. Every time I developed a process that didn't take others into account and was effective for me alone, I risked catastrophe. Fortunately, as a business process improvement writer, I've been exposed to a bevy of tools that I've adapted for the size and scope of my business and used to future-proof my operations. 

I hope these innovations are as helpful for you as they've been for me!

Low Code App Development

Mobile apps are all the rage, but it never occurred to me that I could build one. Instead, I spent hours pouring over existing solutions that I could never quite customize the right way. 

Low or no-code application development involves leveraging a software solution to create an app that solves a specific business problem without prior coding or programming knowledge. 

I built my first app for financial reporting in less than two weeks. It's designed precisely for the way I work with my accountant, and greatly streamlines our interactions!

Workflow and Collaboration Tools

I work on multiple virtual teams, all with different workflows. Although I'm an organized person, using too many collaboration tools (or worse, no tools at all) was confusing and led to small tasks slipping into the ether. 

Today, I employ a tool that allows me to manage several teams and projects at once and do so according to individual needs. By updating and visually displaying tasks, communication and project goals in real time, I maintain a space shuttle view of my own master workflow and make it easy for team members to work with me no matter where in the world we are.

For more strategies, head over to the AMEX Business site.

Managing Your Business for Profitability

A slow and steady growth strategy wins the race—or does it?

Some new businesses take time to gain momentum and ultimately become profitable, while others go from zero to successful much more quickly.

As someone whose business was in the former category, I set out to learn the secrets of owners who experienced rapid business growth. What did they do, and could their growth strategy be replicated?

Address Customer Complaints

We've all heard that a major factor in a new business' success is whether that business fills a niche or meets an untapped customer need. But if you want to employ an effective growth strategy, you might want to take that idea a step further and provide relief to customers who are vocally expressing anger with a current state of affairs.

Erica Douglass, CEO of the Austin, Texas-based electronics repair shop 1Up Repairs, did just that.

“We noticed that mobile phone manufacturers were making it difficult to get products fixed or working optimally," Douglass says. “Our customers were waiting in lines longer than the DMV to get a cracked screen repaired. If a phone port broke, they'd have to mail the product in and pay upwards of $100. Their batteries would wear out and they'd be forced to buy new phones.

"We addressed an ongoing customer frustration by providing fast and easy repairs to items that most consider essential to their daily lives," she continues, "and in doing so went from a single shop to six in a few years."

Build a Memorable Brand

Will Robins, CEO of men's grooming venture Manscaped, didn't want his new company to be just another provider of razors or body lotion. As he conducted market research, he learned there was a serious deficit in safe, easy-to-use products to groom below the belt.

“That was our plug," says Robins. “Our new brand, Manscaped, offers men not just fancy electric trimmers and razors, but also ones that feature nick prevention—safety guards that prevent customers from getting into a hairy situation. Manscaped became associated with comfort, assurance and the removal of dread for guys ranging from tweens to 50 year olds."

Robins' growth strategy included fully expressing the brand, but in doing so, he and his team did more than develop a cool logo and tagline.

“Through our digital presence and content, especially our humorous videos, we created a unique voice that makes our audience laugh and in the process wins them over to trying the products."

The Manscaped brand caught so much attention that it was featured—and funded—on the ABC television series Shark Tank.

For more where this came from, head on over to the AMEX Business site.

When Efficiency Strategies Backfire

Most business owners are after the holy grail of work efficiency. How can we do more with less? How can technology help us take a clunky business process and streamline it? How can flexible scheduling help our productivity instead of damaging it?

These are valid questions, but in our enthusiastic pursuit of answers, we are sometimes overzealous in implementing strategies we think will lead to greater work efficiency.

Let's explore a few!

Automating When You Shouldn't

Many leaders make the mistake of believing that because it's possible to automate something it means that you should.

Rather than indiscriminately automating huge numbers of processes so that you can save on labor costs and increase work efficiency, carefully consider each instance of automation.

Also consider how artificial intelligence and human workers can work together to achieve the best result. In most cases, you will need to have at least a few humans involved to provide oversight and ethical or moral guidance. (We futurists call this “human in the loop.")

Introducing Too Much Software

Admiring shiny new software and other business technologies that promise better work efficiency is normal. But if we bog our employees down with too many programs and apps that don't integrate with one another or are redundant in their functionality, we actually risk a productivity down slide. They could end up spending more time figuring out how to use systems than performing their actual jobs.

When considering a new tool, think through the value it will bring to your existing infrastructure and do a limited pilot to determine employee adoption and usage.

Estimating Numbers Instead of Documenting Them

Most business owners were more fastidious in the days when we worked with manual accounting processes every day. Now, in the name of work efficiency, we estimate numbers like revenue and expenses and don't look at the real amounts as frequently. We often underestimate expenses, which can lead to thinking our business is more profitable than it is.

Fortunately, many business credit cards include expense management tools that keep all business expenses in one place, reliably track and report on all the money funneling out of your business and simplify reconciliation. By tracking expenses on a daily basis, owners can instantly see if sales and spending patterns don't line up, or if expenses in a certain category are running amuck.

For the rest of the article, visit the AMEX Business site.