Let’s Look at the Five Steps YOU Need to Take to Shift Your Business into the 21ST Century – Part One
Note: This blog is part one of a two part blog article.*
Shifting into the 21st Century and the new era of business begins with understanding that the old business models of trading B2B – business to business and B2C business to the consumer are being replaced by a new model called B2P or business to people.
This shift also involves the movement from a single channel and often taking only one or a few products to market, to innovating and selling many products through the multi-channels made accessible by the digital revolution.
The Five Steps to Take to Shift Your Business are:
Step 1: Connect emotionally with your Who
Step 2: Understanding the market need.
Step 3: Engagement
Step 4: Brand Awareness
Step 5: Leveraging Awareness – remodelling through product and pricing innovation.
Step 1
Connecting Emotionally with your Who
Your Who is your client base and your partnerships. The client base is the easiest for you to access first because they are there with you and have supported you. They are also your advocates as you take your business out into the world. If you take your client base with you and connect with them emotionally, this gives you more strength.
If you go from an emotional standpoint, then you will connect with the client base quickly, at speed and with agility. But, be careful because if you go too fast into promoting your products and trying to sell to them, you will switch them off.
As Linzi Boyd Co-founder of BoB (Business of Brand) says, “When we talk about the Who and the emotional connection with the customer; you’re trying to get a reaction like, ‘Oh my God, you know me. How do you know me so well?’ You’ll never get that connection from an organisational structure or, a business; you have to go directly to the people.
What you’re looking for is to connect human to human. And if you do that you will get what we describe as market pull. That means the people will come to you because they will want to engage with you and have a conversation.”
So how do you connect emotionally? That can be through campaigning or through partners or a community. It can be through a webinar series. What is essential is keeping the engagement and the conversation running, so you can begin to understand the most important thing, which is market need.
It is not about asking your customers what is the market need as you have done before in a traditional sales process. You don’t ask them what problem we’re trying to solve as you would have in the past, but this is about creating an emotional connection with them while you begin to understand the market need. What is important is the speed; you need to move quickly.
Ask yourself this question: what if we go and shift education or health or some other industry or accounting, what’s the need of the market? And how do you supply the need to shift your business? If you understand that, from the standpoint of an emotional engagement, from the customer’s point of view, you can now start designing into volume rather than going directly to a single customer.
So look at the Who and the emotional connection. This is the most important thing you can do; look at it from a client perspective and a partnership perspective. Individual partners are like influencers whether they are part of a network, a known partner or somebody with a brand-new business in the market.
Step 2: Understanding the Market Need
A market need will start connecting people in a broader sense rather than individually. If you only ask, ‘What is the problem I’m trying to solve?’ You’re only looking at individual problems. If you’re looking at market need, you’re looking at the collective, which engages businesses end to end from silo to integrated.
Once you understand the market need, engagement is a crucial factor in this. For example, If you only run a webinar and you don’t connect it into a campaign or a community, you are providing information, but you’re not enabling engagement to take place. You may be giving great content and advice, but where can they go and speak with you afterwards? How do they come and join you and campaign together?
In the next blog, we will explain the remaining three steps. These are Engagement, Brand Awareness and Leveraging Awareness.
If you need help with understanding the market need, simply contact us now.
* Content in this blog is reproduced with permission from A New Era Webinar Series, created by the partners of Business of Brand (BoB) in response to the recession and the challenges businesses have been facing throughout most of 2020.
