Harvest stage

Preparing your marketing for business exit

In agriculture, if you want to harvest a bumper crop you need to understand the best plants for your soil type, prepare your land for sowing, then feed and maintain during growth.

It’s the same for marketing. Successful marketing is all about the prep!

The Mandala Marketing Principles ensure your business covers all the important aspects of marketing for today’s business environment; in the best way and in the right order.

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Mandala Marketing Principles explained

Armed with these principles, you’ll declutter your marketing and develop a clear and positive path ahead, shaping your business ready for exit in the next 2-5 years.

The five Ps of the Marketing Mandala are:

  • Personality

  • People Power

  • Performance

  • Personalise

  • Purpose

Personality: Be real

Knowing yourself is the ultimate superpower in business. Let’s get clear on your core values. 

  • This stage covers two areas: your individual personality and your core company values.

Your personality

You might be wondering how much your personality has to do with the success of your business. To be blunt, it’s hugely significant. Brevity’s experience with SME business leaders tells us that a whole lot of problems start with the business owner’s attitude and behaviour. So, if you’re serious about getting the return you want for your business, you’ll need to accept that some changes may be needed from you.

All you need to do is complete the DISC profile by answering (genuinely) a set of questions. It takes less than 20 minutes.

Those findings will be used to help improve your self awareness and approach to business. Business leaders who are more self aware, make better leaders, better communicators and better negotiators – all the positive traits you need when the time comes to sell your business.

Core company values

Phew, the spotlight is off you now! It’s time to identify and assess your core company values. The Brevity team will take charge and work with you and your team to develop a set of core values for your business.

Again, these values must genuine and authentic – who you really are, not what your think your company should represent to its customers. If you have values already, we’ll evaluate your original method and evaluate if they still fit your business.

At the end of the ‘Personality’ stage, you should have:

  • A better understanding of who you are as a business leader

  • Strategies in place to exploit your key personality assets to your best advantage

  • A plan for how you can improve challenging areas – which can help at work and in your personal life

  • 3 core values and statements in situ that deliver clarity to customers and employees about what’s important to your business

People Power: Attract your tribe

Discover how much better each day goes when likeminded people work together towards shared goals.

To be successful in business, you need to have good people around you that you can trust and rely on. One of the main reasons businesses limit their success is because the people they employ, or customers they choose to do business with, aren’t the right ‘fit’.

The core values and insights from your DISC profile (identified in the Personality stage) allow you to attract the right customers and staff – or ‘tribe’ as we like to call it at Brevity.

This principle involves the development of personas. You may also know these as avatars.

Persona profiles will be developed for:

  • your ideal customers
  • your ideal employees

In addition we’ll also be covering off customer journey, competitor research and candidate attraction.

By the end of the People Power stage, you’ll achieve:

  • A clear idea of how to – and how not to – communicate with your ideal customers and employees

  • Words and phrases that will attract the attention of your ideal audiences

  • Tools to help your sales teams sell more

  • Knowledge and insight that will allow HR teams to create better job advertisements and improve the candidate selection and interviewing processes

  • A better understanding of difference, advantage and threat of competitors.

  • Identify leaks and opportunities in your customer journey

Performance: Deliver your message with clarity and conviction

Only when insight evolves will you reach your target audience at the best moment, in the right way.

This is the largest section within our principles. It’s where you start to see tangible stuff being created and we can start to analyse and measure success.

Here we’ll be looking at:

Principles

We’ll develop your own unique methodology to differentiate you from your competition and bring clarity to your offering.

Asset gap analysis

What assets do you need to get support leads and opportunities down your sales and marketing funnel.

Funnel review

Ensuring that you have all the assets you need to move opportunities down your funnel.

Development of assets

Utilising all this valuable insights and intelligence, we’ll develop you asset toolkit.

Personalise: Build deeper connections with many

Harness the power of personalised communications that resonate.

The most impactful marketing campaigns are personalised but it’s not possible to achieve on a large scale without some automation. At Brevity, we work predominantly with SMEs who have a large customer base and need to reach lots of people – but in a personalised way.

At this stage of your journey, we wouldn’t recommend simply using any generic email marketing platforms to personalise. It’s too basic.

Our preferred SME system of choice is SharpSpring:

  • See what your sales team are up to
  • Who is bringing in the most business – and who is not?
  • How many opportunities are in your pipeline?
  • Who are your hot leads?
  • What customers or opportunities have or haven’t been contacted recently?
  • Nurture leads through automated targeted campaigns
  • Increase engagement from hyper-personalised communications
  • Automate sales and marketing activities to streamline your processes, maximising sales

When it comes to your business exit strategy, a CRM and Marketing automation system demonstrates to interested buyers how your business is doing.

Our team of experts support you using a business growth consultancy approach, developing your SharpSpring CRM platform to identify any leaks in your sales processes and streamline your customer journey.

Quality management reports can be printed off and data exported for analysis and presentations.

During the personalisation stage we’ll also start to profile building activities like award entries, event attendance, PR and media coverage and marketing campaigns.

 

 

Positivity: Feel the weight lift as you achieve a happy work-life balance

Learn how professional accomplishment goes hand in hand with personal wellbeing.

Life after leadership

One of the key issues that many business owners have is taking time out of their business. As your plan is to exit your business, there’s a high probability that after the sale you’ll have more time on your hands.

So, what do you have planned?

Surprisingly, many business leaders don’t know or aren’t sure. They have become so fixated on the worth of the business and the final sale payment that they’ve lost sight on how they are going to live their best life.

So, it’s important to start the transition to life after leadership before you completely depart.

  • Will you relish having time to spend with family and friends?

  • Dedicate more time on your hobbies and having new adventures?

  • Use your business expertise and life experience for the greater good perhaps though mentoring or volunteering?

  • Take a consultancy or NED role?

  • Want to start a new business?

  • Something else?

Until you experience time-out of your business you’re not going to know, so we encourage you, in these last years as the owner of your business, to take a day or two a week out of your business to experience life after leadership.

This transition can also be good for acquisition too. Business owners that can demonstrate their business success does not revolve around them personally can make their businesses more desirable to buyers.

Here, we can introduce you to our preferred experts including executive coaches, financial planners, business exit experts and company brokers.