Prepare for the holidays!
Carlton Hoyt
November is already underway and if your company sells products or services to academic researchers then you should already be preparing to double down on your marketing efforts and start reaching out to potential new customers now. Many professors and graduate students will be extremely busy in early and mid December with their class responsibilities and will not want to pay attention to anything extraneous (including marketing materials), however important purchasing decisions, particularly larger purchasing decisions, for many university labs are made in early January – after the bustle of finals and the holidays but before classes start up again. Use this to your advantage.
If there is a target market that you want to enter, be sure to start marketing to them ASAP. Again, you do not want to wait until December to reach new customers. They will need to see your marketing message a few times (preferably via different avenues) before you will have enough brand or product recognition for most prospective customers to trust you and your product. You will probably want to have multiple “touches” between now and January to both establish yourself in their minds, get across your full marketing message, and present a compelling call-to-action. There is still enough time to touch
a new prospect four times without being overbearing, but you’ll need to start now.
Also, don’t forget that the holidays are a great excuse to have a special, a sale, or some other call-to-action. While these specials are rarely enough to drive a buy decision on their own (since scientists are very analytical and generally weigh need vs. cost and make a fairly objective decision on those metrics), they can still be attention grabbing and push people into making purchasing decisions now – and those purchasing decisions will be made with your product in mind.
Your small company should be formulating a short-term marketing plan on how to approach academics and increase sales from universities between the semesters. If you sell to universities and you do not have a marketing plan for the next two months, you will likely miss out on a key opportunity to take advantage of purchasing habits and fail to realize a lot of potential sales.
Change is Permanent
Carlton Hoyt
I was speaking with someone the other day about the general state of things (not just the industry or the economy but everything, really) when I remembered and used a phrase that was uttered to me some time ago – “change is permanent”. I didn’t mean it in a way that when something changes it is changed permanently, but rather that change in itself is permanent; change is continually happening. While I can’t remember who initially gave that phrase to me, I’m glad he or she did because I use it often and like to come back to it on occasion to step back and make sure that I am changing to adjust to the change happening around me.
It is an undeniably true statement – the state of anything is rarely constant, and even if it is there are things changing around it that will ultimately change it objectively and / or subjectively. Before we get too philosophical on the topic let me ask a simple question: when was the last time you took a minute to assess how change is happening around your organization? For example, how is your industry or sector changing? How are your customers changing? How are you ensuring a competitive strategic positioning in the future when you account for that change? While these are undeniably important questions, they are questions that we very often either neglect to address or do not address seriously. It’s very easy to get caught up in your own company’s day-to-day operations or in your own tasks and not address the future because it’s not a pressing need at this exact moment, but if you do you’ll get left behind by change; you won’t evolve.
Change is even more of a constant in such a rapidly evolving field as the life sciences. How are you directing your own evolution to prepare for future change? How are you managing change and ensuring that detecting and responding to change is built into your organization? If you haven’t recently, step back and think about the questions that I have raised. Try to do so when you’re away from your desk and have a clear head and can mentally zoom out from your insider perspective a bit. If you have a hard time coming up with answers or you know the answers and they aren’t good, then it may be time to figure out how to empower the evolution of your organization to address the future while you still have time.
Leveraging a Weak Dollar
Carlton Hoyt
[one_half]Small or start-up businesses are rarely sitting on stockpiles of cash reserves. Quite the opposite, cash is usually a bit tight, so if you are running a small life science company you probably want to take every opportunity you can to improve your cash position. What you may not have thought of is leveraging the weak US dollar to generate short-term revenues and grow your cash-on-hand.
The US Dollar Index, which tracks the dollar’s value against a basket of nine other currencies, is down over 11 points from its 52-week high of 88.71 in June. Put simply, that means that if your goods are priced in US dollars, they will be a lot cheaper to customers and distributors in other countries who use currencies that have comparatively appreciated. For example, the dollar is down about 15% vs. from it’s highs against the euro and the Japanese yen, and is down about 10% from the highs against the Brazilian Real and the British pound. Your dollar-denominated products are now 15% cheaper to customers in the Eurozone than they were just four months ago! That’s a substantial discount, and one that you can flaunt to your customers and distributors in these areas and others whose currencies have similarly appreciated against the dollar.
How do you take advantage of this? Simple! Send marketing messages specifically targeting customers in a particular region and bring up the favorable exchange rate. Call your distributors and encourage them to buy now since restocking on your products is now cheaper. Don’t drag your feet, either, since the dollar may begin to re-appreciate in the near future. If you are in need of short-term revenues or an improved cash position, highlight your newly cheap products to your international customers and distributors now![/one_half]
Don’t Get Left Behind
Carlton Hoyt
Taking a pragmatic view on the state of the economy, it’s fairly easy to see that the road to recovery will very likely be a long one. Governments are in huge amounts of debt, and the “great recession” has been especially hard on small businesses, yet we see the stock markets going back up; the Dow is almost to 11,100 as I write this. Why do things feel so bad but look so good for big businesses? A lot of it isn’t due to revenue growth – global demand is still anemic. A lot of it is due to cost cutting to improve bottom lines which have left many large companies with very positive balance sheets. Now, having likely seen the worst of the recession and being in a strong financial position, large companies are starting to reinvest in anticipation of future demand growth.
How does this effect you?
Well, if you are a small or start-up company, chances are you’re still hurting. You probably couldn’t easily cut personnel and costs as the large companies have. You also may not have the stockpile of cash to resume hiring in preparation for renewed demand or may not want to hire because of uncertainties about future revenues. Therein lies a problem. How will your company compete when the large companies are getting a head-start?
The answer: by not letting them. Easier said than done? Maybe not.
For a start-up or small company, even hiring one person can be a huge investment and a very significant increase in overhead, yet you will need the additional capabilities to ramp up your marketing, business development, and other efforts to position yourself for increasing future demand. This can be done by “virtually” increasing your human resources and capabilities through strategic outsourcing. By partnering with a skilled service provider, you can execute projects faster and / or sooner, prevent schedule overruns, and effectively increase your available competencies. It also often allows you to increase or decrease your effective workforce size at will.