How We Work With Clients
In order to build your business on a solid foundation, it is important to ask and answer the right questions. Our experienced team will help you through the steps of developing and implementing a well-thought-out, actionable business plan. Together we will conduct:
Market Analysis
Your business plan will take your idea for a product or a service and transform it into a commercially viable reality. The market analysis section of your plan will supply the evidence that there is a niche in the market on which your business can capitalize. We will provide you with the means to evaluate your industry, target market, and competition to enter the marketplace with a higher percentage of success.
Identify Your Target Market.
We will guide you through the process of identifying your target market by:
- Market Size: Defining the number of potential customers there are for your products and services.
- Demographics: Helping you identify what your ideal customer looks like. For example, what is the age range, gender, income, education, etc. of your ideal customer?
- Location: Identifying where your target customers can be found and describing and defining that specific location or region.
- Customer Behavior: Researching how your customers shop for and purchase products like yours.
- Trends: Evaluating shopping patterns or behaviors. How do your target customers shop or make purchasing decisions? What are the trends in your market?
Identify Your Competitors and How to Differentiate Yourself From Them.
Next we will help you conduct a competitive analysis of your market by evaluating:
- Direct competition: Businesses that are offering very similar products and services. Your potential customers are probably currently buying from these companies.
- Indirect competition: If your business will be providing a product or service that is not currently available in your market, how are customers solving this lack of product availability? Will your business be a better solution than the one they have devised?
- How you will be different: Chances are your business will be offering the same products and services as your competitors. How will you differentiate your business from them?
- Barriers to entry: At some point your business will face new competitors. How will you prevent them from taking market share from you?
Pricing and Forecast.
Pricing your product or service includes more than just covering the cost of producing and delivering it. Effective pricing strategy includes marketing, physical presentation of your location, customer journey, and more. It sends a clear message to your target customers.
We will help you analyze the data you gather as you complete the first two steps. From it we will create a roadmap that will guide you in building an effective pricing strategy.
Once you have defined your pricing strategy, we will help you forecast how much of the overall market share you expect your business to capture. This information will be key to developing your sales strategy.
Marketing Plan
Your marketing plan is a key component of your business plan. It describes how you will get your products and services in front of your potential customers. It serves as a roadmap that provides direction toward reaching your business objectives. We will guide you through each step of the process for developing an effective plan for reaching your target market.
Contribution Analysis
Understanding the financials of your business is critical to its success. A lack of understanding can cause even the most robust business plan to fail. A detailed contribution analysis of each product and service your business intends to offer will give you this understanding.
We will equip you to conduct an accurate contribution analysis. This will provide invaluable information for making meaningful decisions about minimum selling price, profit contribution, break even, and loss assessment of your products and services.
Sales Strategy
How will you sell the products and services your business will offer? Our experienced consultants will help you identify the key factors in developing your company’s sales strategy.
Established Business
If you’ve started a business and it’s doing all right, but you know your sales can be better. ILD Consulting can help you position your business for successful growth in the future. If you are just starting your business the process will be similar to the one outlined below.
Assess Where You’ve Been and Where You Are Now.
Planning for future sales growth begins with looking at the past. We will work with you to evaluate your previous year of business by asking questions like these:
- What type of sales initiatives did your business have last year? We’ll help you assess key indicators such as:
- How much did your team sell?
- Was your entire sales team effective?
- How much will result in repeat business?
- Which clients brought in the least profit? The most?
- Which clients had the shortest sales cycles?
- Has anything changed?
- How are you positioned to achieve the revenue targets you have identified?
- Where is the most logical place to look for growth?
- What exists to support the desired growth?
- What additional support will your team need to achieve the desired increases?
As we discuss with you the answers to these and other questions, you will gain insights into your past year’s sales performance. These insights are strategic for determining future direction.
Set A Clear Market Strategy.
Once you understand where you have been and what has been successful over the past year, we will begin working with you to plan where you want to go in the future.
To accomplish this, we will help you develop a clear market strategy. We will look at questions such as these:
- How much can you grow existing business?
- Can you leverage existing business to get referrals or increase customer traffic? If so, how?
- How much can you increase revenue inside your current market?
- Can you add new products and services? If so, how much will this increase revenue?
- Can you expand your current market? Is it cost effective to do so? What will your ROI be?
Implement the Plan.
Now it’s time to bring the answers to all these questions together into a comprehensive plan of action. We will work with your business to guide you through the process of developing and implementing your new marketing strategy.
