Missing Opportunities
Every
business objective can be reached using various resources, with many different
processes, with various man-hours and other costs within significantly
different time spans. It is a matter of choices that will be made by each company’s
decision making processes mechanisms with the specific set of corporate
criteria defined in the company strategy. In Start-ups and small businesses
were all that are not well-defined it is much easier to take a decision that
will not be optimized to the best interest of the company. This happens because
small business owners and managers do not have the required knowledge (on
finance, management, marketing, sales etc.) and can be misled by prejudices and
other influencing factors.
It is
almost impossible for the average start-up company to calculate every risk and
evaluate all available options for every individual business activity using the
available budget to the max. This happens because the affecting aspects are
still unknown because in a new business there are no previous data to compare
and evaluate what worked and what did not work.
To find the
missing pieces of the puzzle previous recorded knowledge of others that have
done the same things need to be studied and case specific elements are to be
explored. A way out of this deadlock is
to get an expert on-board to seek for the missing answers through primary and
secondary research. Primary research explores scientific publications, books
and industry data while carefully designed secondary research can provide
insights on what your customers think and how they will react on different
scenarios.
One of the
most typical start-up’s mistakes is not to design detailed marketing and sales
plans that would have detailed costing budget allocated on each activity. Marketing
is practically the way a company will reach out to prospect clients to build a
trustful and meaningful bidirectional relationship. The sales efforts that will
follow are based on that awareness and the trust developed through the set of
marketing activities that include branding, content creation, printed and
electronic materials, promotion, communication and service. Unplanned marketing
and sales made by untrained staff can cause much more harm to the business than
investing on outsourcing to professionals.
