Fewer than 50% of businesses survive beyond five years. Check government statistics if you don’t believe me

The analysts common reason for expiration is the unfortunate ones eventually ran out of money. This explanation is not helpful and so I decided to track down those directly and indirectly associated with failed businesses to see if I could determine the details, establish any common reasons for failure and post them on the web in the hope that my discoveries would help others avoid a similar fate. I uncovered eight common reasons for business death. Here are three of them:

No Vision, mission or strategy

“If you haven’t a clue where you are going then how are you going to get there?” You have to have a clear view of what you want to achieve and how circumstances will be for your business if you achieve it. To achieve anything you it is essential to have a strategy. Strategy is like a route map it tells you how to get to your destination. It’s a systematic plan of activities. 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 discovering markets and testing strategies to position your proposition in the minds of prospects and drawing them into your sales channel. 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 ways you employ to engage prospects. selling is the process of acquiring leads, forecasting sales and closing sales. In successful businesses a decent marketing and sales system is often underpinned by a well designed sales forecasting software system. Such a system gives you the ability to track and measure the events and outcomes in the sales and marketing processes. These insights arederived from reports generated by the system which can then be used to compare planned vs actual results. In summary what gets measured gets improved or discontinued. This is the essential formula for success.

Lack a system to get sales from their captive customer list

There is a well used saying that 80 percent of your sales should come from 20% of your customers. Your task is to achieve or exceed this figure. Customers who have already purchased from you are easier and more cost effective to persuade to buy from you than prospects that haven’t. A combination of decent web based crm software and sales forecasting software will give you the information of historical activity and allow you to find opportunities in your existing customer lists.