Home Based Business Success

There’s a trend in sales and marketing that any business owner should be aware of. Failure to address this trend will result in lost sales, and repeat customers. The trend of which I speak is the increasing power of women as prime decision makers and consumers of once male dominated markets.

As a business owner, weather you exist primarily in the online or off line space, you absolutely must appeal to all your potential customers in order to maximize sales, profit, and efficiency. Yet many business owners, especially in formerly male dominated industries, completely or substantially ignore women in their marketing efforts.

This mistake can have devastating results to your bottom line. Think about this for a second. 80% of all checks signed in the U.S. are now signed by women. Women also purchase 80% of all consumer goods and own half of all U.S. businesses. They are the most rapidly growing segment of new business owners. That doesn’t sound like a market you’d want to turn your back on.

You may think because you sell auto accessories, consumer electronics or sporting goods you can ignore women as customers. Don’t; that would be a stupid and possibly fatal mistake for your business, because women actually buy, or are key decision makers in the majority of such purchases.

According to the Consumer Electronics Association, since 2003 women have bought more consumer electronics products than have men, so that worm turned a long time ago. In 2005 women purchased $65 billion wroth of consumer electronics, and influenced billions more. According to a survey in Sporting Goods Business, women influence 95% of all sporting goods purchases.

That means that if you have a home business that sells things, and there’s any chance that women are among your customers, you need to be making every effort to cater to their needs and wants, even if you feel that your business is more focused towards men.

How do you make sure your business is meeting the needs of your female customers? Women and men shop differently. They tend to process information differently than do men. When women are making purchasing decisions, they are more likely to ask questions until they feel they have a good grasp on a product, it’s features and benefits (you are selling features and benefits, aren’t you?). Men, on the other hand shop more like they drive. They won’t ask for nearly as much help as they may need to find what they’re really after.

Be sure you design your web site to give your women customers the answers they’re looking for. They’ll reward you by buying something from you. Women tend to be more brand loyal than men, a great thing for your business if you cater to their needs. Women have less tolerance for websites that are difficult to navigate and aren’t well designed and laid out than do men. If they can’t get their questions answered easily, they’ll shop at your competitor’s web site.

You should also tailor your product mix to be sure that your women customers can find what they may be looking for. Do a bit of research if you must, check with you vendors, offer surveys to your visitors and sift through your site logs to determine what products were the most popular to browse and buy.

If you sell aftermarket auto and truck parts, you may think that your business is the last place you’d find women shopping, but aghain, you’d be wrong. A woman is just as likely to be shopping for a Greddy turbo kit or a Dana 60 front axle with an ARB air locker as are men. Well maybe not quite as much, but you get the point.

In fact women buy quite a bit of aftermarket auto parts and accessories. According to the Specialty Equipment Manufacturers Association (SEMA), the industry association concerned with making sure every kid with a Honda also has a muffler the size of a coffee can, nice rims, and a pair of 12” subwoofers, women actually buy less hard core performance parts. What they do buy is alarm systems, floor mats, fog lights, window tinting, audio / video systems. 21% of women in a survey done by trade journal Aftermarket Business reported that they installed all their own aftermarket parts.

The point is that you not only have to meet the needs of your women customers if you’re selling weight loss products, cosmetics, and designer clothes. You have to make the same effort to meet their needs if you’re selling fishing supplies, basket ball shoes, aftermarket automotive accessories, and home theater gear. If you don’t, you’re leaving money on the table.

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As a small business owner, especially one who operates out of your home, you’ll have to wear many hats. Entrepreneurs have a tendency to do that, sometimes to their detriment. Part of the reason many people have a home based business is for the freedom and independence it provides. Some business owners feel that having employees opens a can of worms they’d rather not eat at this time, so they go it completely alone.

The difficulty with going it alone is that you end up trying to do everything for your business. The problem here is that you’re probably not the best person to be entrusted with every task necessary to make your operation function at peak efficiency. Blow to your ego though it may be, you’ve got to admit there are certain things in your business that other people can do better than you. Maybe advertising, writing copy, and graphic design aren’t your strengths. Perhaps it’s cold calling prospects that you abhor. The point is that we all have certain skill sets. By definition there things a set includes and those it does not.

You should focus on these things you are good at and leave the other tasks to those who can do it more effectively, efficiently, and possibly cheaper as well. That will free up more time to do those things that more positively impact your bottom line. For example, should you spend your time washing company vehicles or prospecting for new business? In most cases the washing of vehicles would be best left to someone who’s not as well compensated.

How about working on your website design vs. writing a sales letter? That would depend upon where your talents lie. If you are great at design but not the most convincing writer, outsource the sales letter to a proven copywriter. You may pay a bit more up front, but end up with a sales letter that has a better conversion ratio, and a nicer looking web site as well.

Analyze all business functions from an ROI perspective. Do you get a better ROI by performing those functions yourself, or outsourcing them? You may love to write, but not be especially fast or effective at doing so. In that case, you may outsource much of your website’s content creation to writers. That would also hold true if you have an article marketing campaign. Can you write effective, keyword rich articles that other site, e-zine and newsletter owners want to publish? Can you do this fairly rapidly? If the answer is ‘no’, then your time would probably be better spent working on sales, strategy, or other operational tasks instead of writing and submitting articles.

Another popular task that can be perfect for outsourcing is customer service. If you’re selling products online using a drop shipper, part of the attraction is that you need no staff for warehousing and fulfillment. You’ll still receive phone calls for a variety of customer service issues however. People will get the wrong order, a product will be defective, or they’ll simply have a question.

Developing a good, long term relationship with your customers is absolutely essential to the long term viability and growth of your business. As your business grows however, the volume of such calls may become overwhelming and detract from other essential business tasks. You have three choices; lose customers (not a good choice), hire someone to take the calls and handle the CS issues, or outsource all or part of your customer service to an individual or firm that specializes in such things. In many cases the best fit for a home based business is to outsource some or all of the customer service function to others, leaving you, as the business owner, free to handle other important tasks (or just play golf and go fishing with your kids).

Outsourcing has been in the news for the past few years, usually in connection with how many American jobs it costs large businesses. There is a whole other side to outsourcing, and it’s one you, as a home based business owner should investigate. You can outsource tasks to those in other countries, such as India, China, or Russia, and many business owners do just that. However, you don’t have to outsource work only to developing countries. You can also outsource to firms or individuals next door, or across town. It all depends on what provides the most benefit to your business in the long term.

Remember, you will lose a certain amount of control when you outsource, rather than performing those tasks yourself or hiring employees to do them. The question is weather or not that loss of control is justified from a business standpoint.

It all comes down to this; you only have so much time, and it should be spent doing those things at which you’re best, while leaving the other tasks to a third party. You will have a larger, more profitable business, and you’ll get to spend more time doing things outside of work.

 

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