Growing In The Absence of New Customers
Few talk about growth in this economy; rather, the focus is on survival. However, those who are agile and shrewd can not only survive, but thrive. Today's successful business strategy must encompass a concerted effort to sell to those who already know you, already trust you and to who you often have the most access – your current stable of clients.
For a vast majority of companies, the average cost to acquire a new customer is ever-increasing – even a modestly reduced marketing budget cannot offset the precipitous decline of incoming customers. Simply, there are not that many new customers to be had. Therefore, the best growth blueprints blend both traditional customer acquisition marketing with finding ways to improve sales to your existing customers.
The tried-and-true strategy of pounding the pavement to find new sources of revenue is not going away, but it must be augmented in order to prosper. A diverse strategy that includes a focus on enhancing, in both quality and scope, your current services and then marketing those improvements to your existing client base can prove to be very fruitful. The potential benefits include:
- A more robust, sustainable relationship with the customer. Often this can lead to operational efficiencies that can be symbiotic.
- Elevating your importance to a customer which helps streamline their operations and makes you significantly more important (and beholden) to them.
- Most importantly, in certain circumstances, making the right enhancements can achieve the Holy Grail of business process improvements: Improve both your margins and at the same time reduce your fees.
Reading this article and getting excited about the prospect is easy, but that initial enthusiasm can die quickly if it seems overwhelming operationally. It's not. Not when you know that StarPound, an open source company, has spent the last five years building a platform for integration of voice, data and business process modeling built on the philosophy of SOA (service oriented architecture). With this platform, improving your service offering on the web site, the communications side, the data side - it's all much easier than it once was. This platform is the realization of the buzzword "convergence" we've heard and written about for the last ten years. It's voice and data in one place, inexpensive and available to the smallest players but scalable for the largest players.
Technical authors often only talk ethereally, without the pragmatism required by IT implementers. So here's one of a million real world examples: In just a few days time a business analyst can create an inbound or outbound IVR (interactive voice response) that, based on user input, retrieves data from an external web service (REST or SOAP) and then conditionally updates a disparate web-serviceable database, connects the caller with an operator, sends an email or any other business process that you can imagine. It's multi-channel communications, it's disparate data, it's hosted, it's easy.
Regardless of whether you’re the size of a Big-5 or you have a day job and simply do technical consulting on the side, in this economy, you need to offer more services to your existing clientele. Data experts can now offer comm and web services, web experts can offer communications-enabled business processes and BPM experts can add the web, with data and with multi channel communications. All this can be done without a team of expensive consultants eating in to your margins or 100 hours in a training room eating in to your time, StarPound can make your service offering more robust and more inexpensive than you thought possible.