Find Your Ideal Customer

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If you have never written a description of your ideal customer, now is the time. Every business has a message. Knowing who you are trying to reach with your message is critical for business success. Are they male or female? Married or single? What age bracket? Education? Income? What are their interests? Hobbies? Do they have children? What ages are their children? How much do they spend each month for your products or services?
Often business owners think everyone is a potential customer. Even if you own something as basic as a grocery store, there will still be some demographic profiles that are better consumers than others. Senior citizens tend to eat out a great deal more than young
families with small children. These considerations can make the difference between success and failure when determining where to position a new outlet, or what kind of marketing material you intend to use.
Identifying your consumer appears on the surface to be common sense, but many businesses miss it. Information needs to be objectively gathered and reviewed in a mixed setting where potential consumers get to voice their issues.
Gathering this information is critical for your business strategy. The better profile you can draw for your ideal customer, the more pointed your message can be to reach them. Armed with the knowledge of your ideal customer, you can:
- Decide if a given business model will be successful in a given area.
- Develop a targeted marketing program to reach your ideal customer.
- Create a focused social media strategy.
There are four major categories you need to identify for your ideal customer.
- Geographic
- Demographic
- Psychographic
- Behavioral
The most common error made by business owners is the assumption that they are their ideal customer. They then develop marketing and outreach campaigns that target people like themselves. But entrepreneurs are a small exclusive segment of society and are seldom form a significant portion of a shop or service provider's customer base.
The best way to identify your ideal customer is to survey your existing customers and rank by volume of business. If you are opening a startup business, then seek existing data from similar businesses. One of the key advantages of a franchise is that the franchisor has significant information on customer demographics. Franchisor assistance in location selection, design and targeted marketing programs are a key reason franchises have a 400% better success rate than non-franchised startups. In the absence of a franchise, a reliable marketing or small business consultant can provide you with a questionnaire to help you identify your ideal customer.
Armed with the knowledge of your ideal customer, you can now choose an ideal location. A trendy coffee shop may want to be located near a college. A quiet business bar may want to be located near a downtown business district. A fast food restaurant should seek neighborhoods with young growing families. A good real estate broker familiar with local demographics can assist you in site selection.
The bottom line is identification of ideal customer is one task the small business owner should not endeavor to do alone. Objective data is critical and an objective opinion is essential.

Terrific Templates For Your Terrible Troubles

Project is derived from a Latin word called projectum. A project is undertaken to achieve a goal. It requires a strategy to be carried out. There are projects for different outcomes. Projects are not just to attain profits it could be a charitable project where you help people out and not have any stake in it. It could also involve big funds. People make projects to explain their strategy and about how they are going to handle their outcome of what they have planned. It involves a lot of research and management. A project manager makes big bucks if they are smart and efficient with their work.

Projects have to be managed by project managers and they are responsible for the whereabouts of the plan. Project managers have a lot of responsibility under them and need to be focused at all given times. It requires a lot of dedication and hard work. Project management is like taking care of a child you need to be careful at all times and not over look small mistakes. It is very important for the project managers to have their knowledge base up to date. New changes are made every day and it is very important to be aware of it.

If you ever plan to get into project management I would suggest you should just go ahead with it and not get discouraged. It is an upcoming field and very interesting as well. Project managers are making a good amount of money and them gaining more and more knowledge as they are on the job. It is a complete learning process and if you do have any passion for it then it will just clog you down. There are project management courses for skills and also for software development.

It is quite amazing to watch project managers work. They can sum up such complicated stuff in a jiffy. I had to help out a friend with the beginning of a new firm which he wanted to start. He was very passionate about his work. He wanted to be very precise and wanted his business well planned. There are ways to make work much more systematic. You can do that by using project management templates. These templates make work simpler. You could write documents faster with the help of project documents. They also provide guidelines and strategies which are very useful.

A number of managers have realized the importance of templates. They are not very expensive and easy to understand. A managers job includes the functions like planning, controlling, organizing and directing the employees of an organization, to carry on the functions his main role is decision making. For this purpose it becomes necessary for the manager to create projects. Templates are his key to success. They act like a catalyst and help the manager predefine his work. If you are considering on being a manager of a company you should definitely make use of these templates. They are going to help in a lot of ways.

Selecting Projects For Your Pipeline

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Harvey Levine, in his book Project Portfolio Management, discusses the processes that comprise PPM. On page 24, he provides some great insight into how projects should be selected for the pipeline. He explains that during the selection phase you should establish a structured process to:
- Guide the preparation of project proposals (business case) so that they can be evaluated.
- Evaluate project value and benefits.
- Appraise the risks that might modify these benefits.
- Align candidate projects with enterprise strategies.
- Determine the most favorable use of resources.
- Rank projects according to a set of selection criteria.
- Select projects for the portfolio.
By establishing a clear process for project selection, you have created a template that can be used for all future undertakings. The best way to establish this process is to create it using an online project and portfolio management tool. With PPM software, you have a central repository of information and quick access to all of the projects within your portfolio.
The software allows you to create a process template that outlines the steps needed to properly prepare a business case, evaluate value and benefits, and align the project with enterprise objectives. The criteria you establish in the beginning will make it easy for you to measure risk, rank projects, and determine the most favorable use of resources.
As you become more familiar with the concepts of PPM, it will become easier for you to follow the process for each new assignment. Simply plug the new project into the process template, follow the established guidelines, and select the projects that will provide the most business value for your organization. These projects then become a part of your portfolio and can be followed and measured based upon the criteria established above.

Factors to Turn Your Strategic Planning Into Execution

Business strategy implementation is the name of the game in small and large companies today. Due to a revolving door of management mantras and fads, and increasing "guru fatigue", there is increasing recognition that the ability to successfully execute new strategies and programs is the real key to competitive advantage in business in the 21st century - not strategy development.
The ability to implement business strategy successfully is dependent on proper alignment of strategy with internal and external business conditions. Here are 4 factors that business leaders must consider and connect to their road maps during the strategic planning process and beyond.
1. Customer Marketplace Realities
It's no longer enough to respond to the articulated needs of the marketplace. If you do not have a process for empathizing deeply with your target customer, profits will eventually migrate to the first competitor who is able to articulate the "silent priorities" of your marketplace and provide for them.
Sustained success today requires spending almost as much time in your customer's strategic space as you do in yours. If you're a business leader, assign a team that has continuing responsibility for delving deeply into the strategic challenges of your customer.
Another technique is to create an infrastructure of continuous customer interaction in which customers get used to sending you a stream of information about their business, their challenges, and even their plans.
2. Macroeconomic Realities and Trends
Macroeconomic trends have the important characteristic of being able to shift customer patterns and priorities. The ability to consistently spot these trends early and accurately analyze them is a mark of a great leadership team. Whether your organization is a small or big company, you must keep a close eye on macroeconomic conditions and draw up strategic and operating plans that acknowledge them, as well as contingency plans to execute if some of your fundamental assumptions prove to be wrong.
3. Competitor Positioning And Strategy
One of the most startling realities of today's globalized, digitized and rapidly evolving business environment is the ever-changing definition of who constitutes your competition. A local spa business that once had to contend with 3 other competitors in a small town today competes with dentists (dental spas), chiropractors, and maybe even allergists.
As a business strategist, you must develop "funnel vision" - the ability to monitor adjacent industries both for ideas and for the possibility that a competitor might be rising from there. You must also commit to regularly scanning value chain neighbors to identify strategic moves that could seriously affect the viability of your business model.
4. Internal Resources And Ability To Execute
Your business strategy implementation process will stumble if you do not have a very clear grasp of the capabilities of your business team and the resources your leaders have available to successfully execute strategy.

• Do your product lines and service offerings represent the past demand or the future priorities of your industry?
• Does your company have a culture of execution, accountability and adaptability?
• Is your organizational structure updated to the current needs of the marketplace?
• How does your sales force compare with those of the competition in terms of length of time in the industry and in profile?
• Is your organization structurally and culturally focused to be clearly understood by potential partner companies?
• Does your organization have a deep enough network of strategic alliances to respond nimbly to market changes?

Perform an audit of your business - your core competencies, your structure, culture, marketing and core processes. Examine your budget. Dig deep into the reality of your organization's position.
Successful Business Strategy Implementation Depends On Realism
Effective strategic implementation depends on your ability to incorporate these factors into your planning process. Do not permit yourself or other leaders in your organization to merely pay lip service to these areas and move on.
Much of what passes for business strategy development activities today are merely exercises in "educated visioning" (or even worse, "guessing"). Good strategy is more than just vision-crafting. Your process must look for facts, robustly question and debate assumptions and have a continuing element of follow through and feedback to account for an increasingly dynamic business environment.