Tag Archives: Strength

How Do You Build Market Awareness on a Small Budget? Seven Ideas

Situation: A small technology company has a handful of major customers. They are very good at what they do and want to expand and diversify their customer base. The challenge is that they don’t have the funds for large-scale marketing.  As an additional twist, for now they prefer to stay under the radar of their largest competitors.  How do you build market awareness on a small budget?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Start with the basics. Define your market niche and build from there.  Create a beachhead in this niche and generate strong testimonials from your current customers.  Segue to tradeshows and broader marketing opportunities as you build marketing strength.
  • You already have several marquis clients. Look for opportunities in other divisions within these client companies. The work that you have done for existing divisions makes you credible.
  • Network with your current clients to develop other opportunities. They won’t want to help their competitors; however, if you can improve what they receive from their other vendors they may provide introductions for you.
  • As a small company, focus on a single market where you have strength and credibility.  You don’t want to spread yourselves too thin.
  • Find a good customer and solve their problem well. Create an evangelist who will tell others about you.
  • Look for speaker opportunities at high visibility events within your market niche.
  • Consider webinars, these are inexpensive and if you promote them to decisions makers in your target niche you can quickly build credibility.

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How Do You Develop Leaders and Managers? Five Factors

A company has focused on developing future leaders and managers. They do this both to increase their managerial and leadership bench strength and to boost employee retention. What has worked for you in developing managers and leaders?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Trying to make a leader doesn’t work. Leadership is a trait, not a skill. Leaders can arise from anywhere within the organization. An effective CEO recognizes this and works with both the leaders and the managers, whatever their position.
  • The Gallup Organization found that exceptional managers and exceptional leaders are not often the same people. Usually, the best managers are people who excel at bringing out the best in their employees, but may not be either visionary or strategic thinkers. Leaders, on the other hand are those to whom others look to for guidance and direction. Good leaders know how to identify and delegate to good managers.
  • Identify and develop strengths within your people; don’t try to fix weaknesses.
    • Gallup found that talented people have identified and developed their strengths. Instead of fixing weaknesses they find ways to work around weaknesses so that they are not harmed by them.
  • Use informal mentoring. Assign mentors to employees, and include cross-departmental mentor assignment to extend skills development, as well as managerial and leadership development.
    • Ask mentors to report progress to the CEO on occasional basis.
  • As you develop your talent pipeline, track the number of employees added to the pipeline per year as a key company metric. As an additional metric, look at the number of individuals in your pipeline compared with the number that you believe you need to fill future needs.

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