The Market is Always Right

Well folks, here it is. We've been tweaking and tuning for the last couple of months to get it right, but finally I am very proud to launch the first part of the Backwards Business programme, designed to help companies and entrepreneurs go to market with a way, better chance of success than normal. So far results from the 1st group of customers show -

1. 20% achieving exceptional results way ahead of their business plans
2. 31% seeing significant improvements on their previous performance
3. 19% are seeing improvement and expect further improvement as they apply more of Backwards Business.

The market is always right overview from timsandford

As always its best view in full screen. If you have any questions on the programme or how to access it let me know and I'll be happy to help.

By Tim Sandford

Entrepreneurs and Markets - An Investigation

We are publishing this report a couple of weeks in advance of the formal launch of the Market is Always Right, the first and in some ways the most important module of the Backwards Business programme.

Here's the thing - with all the really high quality business support and advice available on the web, in print and through all sorts of other organisations, why are so many new businesses still failing to make the sales revenues they need to survive and then grow.

The link below takes you to the summary report that covers a piece of research we carried out last year with 100 companies in the UK to find out why. What we discovered may well surprise you and prompted us to introduce some additional material into the Market is Always Right module to help new businesses

Entrepreneurs and Markets - An investigation from timsandford

This is a report so it is definitely best view in full screen mode by clicking in the 4 arrows on the right hand side of the grey bar.

As always if you have any questions or want to talk through any of the findings, please feel free to get in touch.

Failure is Good!

Last week my blog entries focused on market research and asking whether or not it is something you should consider before sinking your savings into a business.

I hope it provoked some positive thinking.

Today I would like to round off the brief series with a statement. Failure is good!

Just ask anyone who has ever succeeded. Thomas Edison even made a career of it and famously stated, Results? Why, man, I have gotten lots of results! If I find 10,000 ways something won't work, I haven't failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is often a step forward....

Testing your business ideas on the market is exactly the same as inventing the light bulb and the more disruptive your business idea is the more you need to make sure you really understand the market dynamics and sentiments. If you don’t, be prepared for an expensive failure as opposed to a good one.

The ten questions approach I outlined last week is proven to work and help businesses quickly and relatively easily find out whether their idea is good, bad or most likely -  'Could be good, but needs some refining and tuning to fit what the market wants.'  You can do this many, many times quickly and easily. By listening to the market and working with it, the market will come with you. It is in the interests of the market to do so.

The best part about it is simply that it only really costs time and done right helps you discard the parts of your idea that won’t work in the market and really focus in on those that do – why not make sure to stack the odds in your favour, no one else will?

There will be a couple of case studies about this when the book and updated site launch at the beginning of next month, but the bottom is this, when we have done this in the past on more than one occasion, it has led to companies winning some very big contracts right at the point when they launch. 

10 questions that are guaranteed help your business succeed.

In yesterday's blog we asked you whether or not you thought it was a good idea to really get under the skin of your market in order to give your business the very best chances of success?

We have already had plenty of folk come back and agree, but a lot have said they also are not sure how to do it or how to get hold of the right people to ask them questions - all of which is perfectly normal.

Here's the good news. If you learn some very basic rules about approaching potential buyers and asking for their help and input, you will be very happily surprised at how much people are prepared to help. Think of it this way, you are asking them to help you make a better product or service for them, so why wouldn't they?

I won't try to cover the rules in this blog because it would take ages and they are all covered elsewhere on our site or in the book. 

However what I do want to cover in this entry is the information you want to get and the questions you want answered. There are only 10, not more and very rarely less. You want answers to all of them, because when you start to combine the information you get from different questions, it pretty much gives you all the information you need to know whether or not you have a business idea that will work. The questions are listed below.

1. How many buyers are there in the market?
2. When is the market, is it mature, established and growing, new or not emerged yet?
3. Who are the buyers - (in B2B this means companies and individual roles in the companies)
4. Why will they buy your product?
5. How often will they buy your product?
6. How much will they pay for your product?
7. What do they expect your product to do for them?
8. What is the outcome they are looking for from your product?
9. What is your competition?
10. Where and how will they buy?

To explain the colour coding before I go on. Question one in red is a desktop research question that you do at the start and the end because the number of buyers you think there are before you start will be different when you finish. 

The questions highlighted in blue are the most important. These are the questions that tell what the market's motivation to buy is and what it is they really want to buy from you. (This is not about your product, but what your product does for your customer - the real reason they buy)

If the answers to these ten questions when you ask a reasonable sample of your market are all positive then you probably have a business. If they are not you may have to change and adapt your idea, but you know what, at that point in time, you probably know more about what the market wants than anyone else.

I hope this helps, because I know from lots and lots of experience that if you do not do this, you risk your savings in a very big way. 

There is one more blog in this brief series that I'll post on Monday. In the meantime have a great weekend everyone.

Its Your Money, Why Burn it?

I was editing one of the final chapters of the Market is Always Right this morning to get it ready for publishing and felt very inspired to ask a question in this week’s blog.

Right now more than 70% of new businesses don’t survive to their 3^rd anniversary.

We know from endless publications and pieces of research that in the main businesses simply run out of money because they can’t make the sales they need in order to survive. We also know that there is only one reason that companies don’t make sales – they are trying to sell something their market does not want to buy.

I find this surprising because when you consider starting a business, you pour in your passion, ambition, belief and your money to make it work. It takes over your life as you focus on your ambitions and your goals. All of this is brilliant and incredibly important, so why do so many fail to make the sales they need?

So here is the big question. While your ambitions and ideas are all great and I hope you achieve them all, what about the market’s needs?

Would it surprise you to know that in our experience and that of others a lot more than half of new businesses have nowhere near the level of market knowledge they need to maximize their chances of success?

This is quite surprising in some ways, because market research is incredibly inexpensive and you can do it yourself before you invest money in setting up the business and spending your savings on a business that is not fully developed and according to the stats, is therefore likely to fail – which is pretty much like burning your money you don’t need to.

This is not a negative post, in fact I hope you take it as a hint that there are some simple, low cost and very effective things you can do that will save you a lot of wasted money, time and stress simply by doing more to get to know your market as early as possible.

Tomorrow, I’ll continue this theme with some ideas you might want to consider when researching your market.

The Programme and how it works

A brief little slide presentation that shows you what we do and the kind of projects we have been involved in before now. Hope it helps

This is best viewed in full screen mode, which means clicking on the four arrows at the right hand side of the grey bar at the bottom of the slide show

Backwards Business overview from timsandford

By Tim Sandford

Part 3 - The answer is in the question

In the last entry we asked questions, which we hope got you thinking about prioritizing the 3 steps to revenue.

Today in the last of this brief series of blog articles, we’ll answer the main question, which we hope helps you see how prioritizing right can make a huge difference to the level of success you enjoy.

The main question we asked was, ‘If you had a product that was exactly what the market wanted and the market knew all about it, do you think it would be relatively easy to sell?’

We asked the question in a very particular way, because in many ways the answer is in the question.

If you want a product that is as close to an exact fit to the market’s requirement so that it sells well, then it stands to reason that the more you focus on your market, what it wants, why and what it will means to customers in terms of benefits.

Assuming that you can take that information and develop the right product. It should by definition be easier to build awareness and achieve sales because you are more likely to be addressing a market that is ready for the product, understands it, wants it and will pay for it.

The diagram above shows the kind level of prioritization we see in companies the really succeed in their markets.

This is almost the exact opposite of the normal level of prioritization that followers of the Entrepreneurial Way would follow, but the point of the Backwards Business way of doing it is simply down to these two points:

• Your job as entrepreneurs and business owners is to make enough sales to ensure that your businesses make profit. You can only do that if you have a product the market wants to buy.
• Most companies and especially start ups work within tight budgets and do not have the resources available to go through a series of expensive Launch-Learn-Develop cycles before they find success

To give you just a simple example, we worked through this with a company we’ve been involved with for a while now and it enabled the company to launch its product and win a major international client at launch.

By Tim Sandford

3 Steps part 2

Yesterday we started to cover the 3 steps to revenue and why they are important.

Today we are just going to ask a couple of questions. If you had a product that was exactly what the market wanted and the market knew all about it, do you think it would be relatively easy to sell?

If the answer is yes, which we think it is too, then think through what it does for your priorities in the 3 steps.

When we work with customers, especially those in the early stages of business they are naturally in a rush to get to market following the Entrepreneurial Way, but what if that was exactly the wrong thing to do.

What if the Entrepreneurial Way actually got in the way of success because you were trying to sell the wrong product all because you had not fully understood your market?

Or what if you were selling the right thing with the wrong message, which incidentally can be nearly as damaging to sales performance as selling the wrong product?

The thing about all those Launch, Learn, Develop cycles as the Entrepreneurial Way diagram above shows is the cost. They cost time. They cost money. They can also cost reputation, which means that by the time you do have the right product, you might struggle to re-engage the market.

 So the real main point of today’s blog is this. What if everything you have ever learned or were taught about how to get your products to market successfully was back to front?

Tomorrow’s last blog in this little series will answer the questions we’ve asked today and share some examples of how to do it Backwards and get better results.

By Tim Sandford