#22: Research Exercise

Research is one of the most important aspects of building your business successfully. Finding out who your competition is and how your business competes with them on a professional level will enable you to plan strategies around them, so that you don’t lose customers and, inevitably, profit.

We started off by talking about what your product or service is. There will probably be some assumptions at this stage. Once you have done that you are in a position to go and talk to a few people, wearing your research hat, who are potentially going to be clients.

• You could take some soundings at this stage by asking potential clients what they think of your offering, how does it fit with other offerings, are there any gaps it does not address? Because you are in research mode people are more likely to talk to you and give you an honest view.

• Armed with that you can then start thinking about who you are competing with; people now put so much information on their websites in terms of who their clients are, what they offer, what makes them different, case studies, testimonials and so on; you can get a pretty good handle on what is being offered.

• If you test your assumptions with potential clients, and then benchmark your assumptions against your competition you may find that you can tweak what you offer to your advantage.

Following these three steps, you can then increase the likelihood that you will be launching with a better fit with what the client is looking for, rather than relying on your own assumptions as to what you think they want. It just increases the chances that you will be offering something they want to buy.

This is something worth taking note of.

With that I wish you all the best of luck for the upcoming New Year, and hope you continue to read my expert articles for more helpful tips, insights and plans for your start-up business. Remember, you can always get in touch with me anytime you feel you need a little extra help. It is Christmas after all!