Are You Targeting The Right Customer For Your Summer Promotion?

Now that’s the Million Dollar question, are you?

When you set out to run your summer promotion, did you perform your due diligence on which you were first going to target with this promotion, so that you can see if you have the right customer, for the right outcome?

When you run a general promotion like “Sizzling Summer Deals”, don’t think that everyone wants/needs it, especially if your message is not directed to any special wants/needs of the demographic that you are promoting.

Before you commit to any promotion, you need to first ask the question and get answers to: What want/need is this promotion going to fill for a specific client, how are you going to get the message of your product information to them, how are you going to track the success of the promotion to determine the R.O.I., what ways are you going to build into this promotion a sense of urgency to commit to the purchase and finally, have you built in enough top of mind awareness to your targeted prospect, so that you differentiate your promotion from that of your competitive set?

When you get some sense of the answers to these above questions, a more detailed and directed promotion can evolve, which will result in greater success and R.O.I. to your expenditure. If you can just break your one promotion into 3 different ways in which you are going to target different prospects, you can then start to determine which one of those three promotions where successfully taken by the prospect and by whom. Once you determine this, a greater emphasize can be placed on that promotion and the unsuccessful ones can be modified to once again track and find the “hook” that will make your “right customer”, produce the right outcome for your promotion.


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Keep IT Simple

Your businesses is what is “IT”, with all of the information and bombardment of calls, e-mails, faxes, twitters, IM’s, texts and people, a business owner can feel overloaded and get misdirected and forget to keep an eye on what really matters to their success, THE BOTTOM LINE!

What’s the solution?

On no more than a couple of 8½x11-inch pieces of paper, have a “snapshot” of the top five to ten critical statistical metrics that determine your business unit’s success available with comparisons for your daily morning review. If you do not have this report, you cannot be proactive in management. With a daily statistical data sheet, you have the ability to spot trends, and thus, small corrections in the operations or sales can be initiated to neutralize the adverse effect of any negative component.

When you have daily statistical sheets that are simple, to the point, and full of the “most critical” metrics that you need, you can guide your business unit daily, which will lead to greater achievements of the business unit’s budget and stretch goals. Focus on managing your business unit today, so that today will be tomorrow and tomorrow will be your everything.


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Your 2008-Year End Financial Statement’s, Statistical Review Checklist

Make sure that the following items below are contained in your statistical reports, including variances and percentage changes within those numbers, on the four major income statement components: top line (gross revenue); labor; controllable and non-controllable expenses, and bottom line (N.O.I. with Cash Flow), (all numbers are accumulated and may be partial quarters or years, but each are equal to one another in their respective time frames):

• Month to Date (MTD)
• Quarter to Date (QTD)
• Year to Date (YTD)
• Current Month (MTD) Year over last Year Month (Example: Oct. 08 to Oct. 07)
• Current Quarter (QTD) Year over last Year Quarter (Example: Q4 of 08 to Q4 of 07)
• Year (YTD) over last Year (Example: YTD-2008 to YTD-2007)
• Month over Month (Example: Oct. 08 to Sep. 08)
• Quarter over Quarter (Example: Q4 of 08 to Q3 of 08)
• MTD, QTD, and YTD to budget and stretch goals with remaining/declining balances to reach each of those goals
• Projected QTD and YTD numbers against budget and stretch goals
• Trailing three month average
• Trailing twelve month average
• Trailing eighteen month average
• Trailing three to five year average
• Annualized MTD and QTD numbers

Don’t forget, visually, graphs, charts, and color-coding all add to the accelerated ability to understand, pinpoint, and emphasize negative and positive trending within your statistical numbers. Another great tool is to set parameters around each line item, so an exception report can be generated and quickly identified when numbers exceed those boundaries.

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Got Milk?

Good, Now Understand That Your Business is More Perishable than a Glass of Milk.

For Business Owners, this is a must to understand if they are going to generate the maximum revenue potential on a daily basis. Every night that one single widget in a particular business goes unsold, that widget has lost that day’s revenue, forever. It can never regenerate revenue for that given day again, so it becomes non-recoverable potential (left on the table) revenue.

A glass of milk has a longer shelf life than an unsold widget. If you do not drink all of the milk that you purchased today, you can at least put that milk back in the refrigerator and have some of it for tomorrow. You can repeat those above steps for at least a couple of weeks, so that you have the opportunity to receive the greatest consumption relationship to the money spent, for the value of that product. Not so for an unsold widget or for whatever product or industry that you work in. Once that day is gone, you can never sell or use that moment again for revenue generation or operational efficiency gain. With that being said, it means that every business is more perishable than a glass of milk. The business unit that you are involved in must make sure that it has a greater sense of urgency regarding this principle and acknowledge its perishable nature.

Let's say that you have eight hours to make the most money on any given day. After just one hour of that day, you have lost the opportunity of making the maximum revenue generation by 12.5%. Start thinking about how perishable your product really is, even if it has a shelf life of one hundred years. Every day that you do not maximize your revenue potential or gain greater operational efficiency; is a day that is lost forever.

Is your business running? You better go catch it and make the most money with it; it is not a glass of milk!


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