Most people think of the Pareto Principle as the 80:20 rule and for many things it is a great rule of thumb in your business and personal life.
For example, 80% of your sales come from 20% of your sales staff; 80% of your revenue comes from the top 20% of your customers.

Business management is not easy. There is a never-ending list of things to do when you own or manage a business so it can be difficult to see the wood for the trees when it comes to making your business successful.

In our experience, there are ten things that you can do to ensure that your business is successful.

The bad news is that the majority of businesses are not making the best use of all the marketing and sales channels that exist to help them. This means that they are not winning as much business as they should.

The good news is that it is not very difficult to put that right and the impact when you do so is to dramatically increase your sales. If you don’t think you have set things up correctly yet, the opportunities to boost your sales can be very exciting.

There is a clear link between business efficiency and the level of profit.

The majority of businesses strive valiantly to make progress but very few reach anywhere near their full potential. If your organisation is not firing on all cylinders you will win less business and be less efficient. Therefore profits will be much lower than they should be.

After 2 years of recession, a large number of small businesses identified obstacles to success:

The marketing opportunity to be had at the moment you find you have been unsuccessful in winning a bid

If you have put in a bid, particularly for something complex such as extensive professional services, you will have had a lot of contact with the potential customer.

In the first instance, it may have taken you a long time to find them and the process of bidding may also have been time consuming as you find out more about their requirements and the professional solution that you might have to solve their problems. It is also possible that you will have incurred considerable costs.

How do you put emotions aside, consider things from your customers point of view, and see what marketing advantage you can gain from it?