More than 50% of businesses don’t survive more than 5 years. If you closely examine government figures you will see the evidence

The industry experts most obvious reason for failure is the failures just ran out of funds. This lack of detail is not helpful and so I decided to seek out people directly and indirectly associated with failed businesses to see if I could discover the details, establish any consistent reasons for failure and post them on the net in the hope that my findings would help others avoid a similar fate. I discovered eight common reasons for business death. Here are three of them:

No Vision, mission or strategy

“If you don’t know where you are going then how are you going to get there?” You must have a clear illustration of what you want to achieve and how life will be for your business if you achieve it. To achieve anything you must have a strategy. Strategy is very similar to a road map it shows you how to get to your destination. It’s a systematic series of actions. Strategy is only effective if it is translated into a business plan which can be used as a benchmark for business performance. A key tool for monitoring business perfomance is the sales forecast.

Lack of a system for marketing or sales

Marketing is about seeking out markets and testing strategies to position your offering in the minds of prospects and pulling them into your sales pipeline. Sales is about engaging the prospect and getting them to buy your product or service. Marketing is a process of measuring and refinement of the methods you employ to acquire prospects. selling is the process of getting leads, forecasting sales and closing business. In effectively managed businesses a good marketing and sales system is consistently underpinned by a effective sales forecasting software system. The tools in these systems help you to track and measure the events and outcomes in the sales and marketing processes. Outcomes arederived from reports created by the system which can then be used to compare what was planned with what actually happened. In summary what gets measured gets improved or discontinued. This is the key formula for success.

Lack a system to get sales from their existing customer base

There is a common phrase that 80 percent of your sales should come from twenty percent of your customers. Your focus is to achieve or surpass this number. Customers who have already made purchases from you are easier and cheaper to persuade to buy from you than prospects that have not. A combination of decent web based crm software and sales forecasting software will give you the knowledge of past activity and allow you to find opportunities in your existing customer base.