This time of year I find myself walking the fine line between prognosticating, giving a prediction based on facts, figures and general market movement and just plain guessing! Statistically it seems both methods have about the same degree of accuracy. You might wonder, why even bother.
Businesses of all sizes and structures need to plan. Unless you have some idea of where you are going and what might happen along the way – planning is impossible. So it is necessary for every business operator to look at their crystal ball and make note of what they see. Have orders been increasing in number? Have the value of each order also increased? Are you being asked for more quotes? Are new customers finding you? A "yes" answer to these questions will point your planing in one direction where as a "no" requires a different plan altogether. Unless you have unlimited resources it is essential to allocate your talent, money, and time to the most productive activities.
Now consider what is generally referred to self-fulfilling prophecy. It seems that in many cases what we predict for ourselves tends to influence the outcome. Our prophecy can gives us excuses for poor business performance. They can and do have the opposite effect as well. In the stock market it is not uncommon to find businesses being said to have been “overly optimistic” when performance comes up a little short. But without the optimistic predictions to shoot for, the results may have been even lower. With your own business, an honest evaluation of where you are, the strengths and weaknesses current potential based on quotes and other activities and your best guess of the near future, will provide you with enough information to form a prognosis.
The most important part of forward looking is to plan on reducing the negatives and build upon the positives – simple, right? Well, it can be if you commit your plan to a written document that you can regularly refer to. This simple act of writing your plan based on the predictions you make will solidify your activities and focus. For example, if you predict that clients connected to the automotive industry will do more business with you in the next year (based on what you have been seeing lately), then you plan might include more time and resources to find several more clients in that industry. Spell it out! Set a goal and keep track of your results. Thinking about it is a lot different than writing it down, challenging yourself and working to make it happen.
Your predictions will also influence your clients and the business they do with you. If you evaluate the marketplace you operate in including things like employment numbers, housing starts, wages, general market impression, retail sales and commercial development – you can help your client ride the crest of a wave of great predictions or protect their position within the market if the predictions are more conservative. Don't rely on the national news. You need to know what the local chamber of commerce has to say. If you have a sporting goods store in your community, ask the owner how his business is doing. Sporting goods are a discretionary spend that people only make if everything else is doing well. It is a great barometer of the health of your marketplace.
This is not hard to do and really doesn't take a lot of time to accomplish but the rewards can be strong. You don’t have to be the first or only one developing the information but rather you want to balance what others are predicting against the facts you have from local reporting sources and your own input from your recent business dealings. Then when you tell a customer that now is the time to do a marketing project with you and you can give them good reasons why – everyone will prosper.
If you are comfortable with technology, putting an online survey together for your clients and prospects is a great way to do some ambush marketing for your business. Introduce your positive outlook and then ask the opinion of your clients. If you presented a positive synopsis you will see a positive evaluation from your customers. Your questions will help you sell to the client. You might ask “do you expect your business to grow, shrink or stay about the same?”; “Will your business expand to new markets, become more selective or stay about the same?” and so on. Offer to provide a summary of your survey results and use that opportunity to discuss how you can help your customer plan to take full advantage of his marketplace. You can even offer a gift for taking the survey – I’m sure it will have your name and contact information clearly imprinted on it!
When you demonstrate this whole process of gathering information, digesting it and making predictions that will help you and your customer plan and grow, your customer will become an active participant in his own self-fulfilling prophecy. The good news is that it really isn’t that hard to make predictions – even about the future!
Gregg Emmer is chief marketing officer and vice president at Kaeser & Blair, Inc. He has more than 40 years experience in marketing and the promotional specialty advertising industry. His outside consultancy, providing marketing, public relations and business planning consulting to a wide range of other businesses, has been a useful knowledge base for K&B Dealers. Contact Gregg at gemmer@kaeser-blair.com.