Are You Making the Right Decisions for your Brand?

Running a business means your decision-making skills will be tested to the limit. Every day you face new challenges, and you have to decide how to use the resources you have available to face those challenges and make sure you’re getting the most out of them for your business. If you spend too many resources solving a problem that can never return that investment to your business – even over time and indirectly, you may have made a poor decision, and depending on the scope of the problem and how much you’ve spent it could be a fatally bad one.

It’s vital to bear in mind those long term, and indirect means of returning investment to a business. It’s all too common for businesses to fall into the trap of overinvesting in sales at the expense of other teams and departments because it’s easy to track the incoming revenue from a well-resourced sales team. They go out there and get you customers and clients who sign from you and buy your goods. Of course, you should be pouring money into them, right?

Well, yes, but not if it means under resourcing teams that are equally valuable but take a little extra work to quantify. If the clients signed by your sales teams are disappointed by your services and products then you’ll find that extra revenue whittled away by returns, refunds, and gestures of good will to satisfying unhappy customers. Investing in loss prevention, in customer service infrastructure and well-trained staff, and ensuring your actions are consistent with your brand messaging will all help to build public trust in your company, and mean more and more customers choose to come to you. It’s harder to track the value of potentially averted refunds, but research is the key here. If you’re tracking your company’s performance you’ll see over time refund and contact rates go down, the percentage of retained revenue going up, and you’ll know your investment has been worthwhile.

Another worthwhile use of resources is research. Research on consumer tastes and trends lets you get ahead of the curve, so you can provide what people want before they’ve even realised they want it. And brand tracker surveys measure the strength of your brand against others so you can see how your decisions are working out, if they’re improving your reputation, or undermining it, so you can fix the situation before things get to too serious, or double down on your successes!

 

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Alison

Finance Blogger at Payday Jester
I have a passion for all things finance and business so if I can help you in anyway then please get in touch and if you have any comments or feedback please leave a message.