Do you keep your cupboard organized, or do you just keep putting things in it until they all fall out when you open it? Well! Until my wife insisted that I must be organized to inspire my girls to be more disciplined and organized, I used to prefer the second option.
However, when I started being more systematic, my girls followed me too. Soon my wife and I realized they had started getting more intelligent, punctual, and most importantly, getting a clear vision of what they want to do in life.
I was amazed at this that how one positive habit can change the whole life of a person. At the same time, I started introspecting myself that what I was doing in my 16 or early adulthood helped me become a global icon in a saturated market. Upon a long talk with myself, I concluded that seven business areas gave me exponential growth, which is ignored by other Indian entrepreneurs that keep them stuck at lacs a month and stop them from making crores in revenue.
Here I will list those eight mistakes so that you can avoid them now and achieve your financial goals sooner.
Not knowing their micro-niche
I can’t forget the day when my dad said either join our family business or leave. From that day till date, I am still working in the same industry, hospitality which is my micro-niche. And this single factor of my career helped me to become an industry leader.
A micro-niche is when you offer particular services to a specific audience segment.
I used internet marketing to grow my family business, and later I helped the hospitality industry leverage internet marketing to grow their business. From doing digital marketing for my business to doing it for others, I always focused on one industry.
It helped me to become the “Poster Boy Of Internet Marketing” in the hospitality space. Having a micro-niche helps you in two ways:
- Firstly, it allows you to focus on a particular audience segment and saves you from spending your resources on leads and prospects that are not qualified for your product and services.
- Secondly, it helps you emerge as an industry leader as you have more experience in that domain.
They’re in love with their business idea.
It is human nature that we think highly of ourselves and our vision. Following this, almost all new entrepreneurs fall in so much love with their business ideas that they even forget to evaluate whether it is practical or not.
Also, sometimes people start to see their business idea and their stake as one. They think it will hurt their reputation if their business idea fails.
They are in so much love with it that they start ignoring the market and their audience in order to manifest their idea into a reality.
There is no problem with innovation or having an idea and working upon it if you have done proper market research and you have the strategies to make it successful. However, if you actually want to do a business, it is vital that you must be flexible with your ideas.
They don’t do competitor’s analysis
New entrepreneurs start their startups without doing any research about their competitors. They don’t try to know what their competitors are doing.
Most of the entrepreneurs don’t do required research about their competitors because they don’t consider this critical. Knowing your competitors is the most vital part of setting up a new business.
You have to research their services, products, and marketing strategy to make your services and products far better than your competitors.
Competitor analysis helps you by:
- Giving insights into what works for your competitor and whatnot which in turn helps you to know what works for your audience and whatnot.
- It helps you to determine what your audience doesn’t like about your competitor and you can avoid that in your business.
- Competitor analysis allows you to evaluate the condition of your market. If your competitors are doing good business, it means there is enough audience share for the particular product and services.
- It gives you a better overall understanding of your ideal clients.
Paying More Attention To Your Product Than Your Customer
Most of the businessmen put too much attention on their product to make it more attractive.
Let’s assume that your product is the world’s best product and nobody will have competition with you in quality. But in giving all your attention to your product, you forgot about your customers or clients.
A great product or service is vital for business, but even the world’s best product can do nothing for a business if it is not customer-centric. Customers are automatically attracted to a business that is more inclined towards their needs.
On the other hand, they readily reject products or services if they think they are not for them. If nobody will buy our product then what’s the point?
To make people buy your product you have to make clients your priority. Make good relationships with clients for long-term healthy relations and deals.
Make sure that your customers know how important they are to you. We need to build trust. The best way to do that is to talk about your clients, addressing their pain points, and how do you provide the solution they need?
These things make your customers believe that they are your first priority and everybody loves to interact with businesses who care for them.
Not having a customer avatar
A customer avatar is a semi-fictional pictorial and textual representation of who is your ideal audience. This is one of the most ignored parts of business research however, it is one of the deciding factors of your business success.
A detailed business avatar reflects how well you know your customers and their pains. The most successful businesses start from the head of the ideal customer. It is vital to know what is going on in their heads.
A great product starts with a great customer avatar. When you are creating a product or giving any services, you are actually solving a problem for your ideal clients and in return getting paid.
However, you can only solve the problem when you know what causes that problem. What is their pain that they want to get rid of? What are their hopes and what are their desires?
And this is only possible when you know your customer avatar. In customer avatar, you create a detailed profile of what does the life of your ideal customer looks like. You jot down their fears, their desires, their hopes, and their pains.
Alongside this psychographics, you also note down their demographics.
They don’t sell actively
We have stepped into the digital world where e-commerce is already ruling retail, and now all conventional and non-conventional businesses are shifting online. Digital marketing has helped businesses to grow exponentially.
And it is helping businesses in all aspects from branding to audience building to sales. However, depending completely on ads and other online methods to generate revenue will drown your business.
All businessmen, no matter what they do or what is their status, have to sell their products or services themselves. It really doesn’t matter if your company comes into the fortune 500, or you are just starting out, sales are the bloodstream of every business and as a business owner, your first and foremost duty is to sell your product or services.
They always wait for the correct time to launch
Business owners always try to serve the best products to their customers. And in this process of making their product the best, they always postpone their product launch.
They don’t try to understand that there is nothing in this that we call perfect. There is always a minor mistake that can be corrected during different processes.
The most important thing is launching our products at our best as soon as we can. When we launch our product, people will give us feedback that can help us make our product better for customers.
Establishing our products at the right time will help us in making our position better on the market. And if we launch new products with the right time gap and make necessary changes to their already established products people will love our brand for its latest trends and variety.
They forgot about legal protection.
Avoiding legal protection is the most common mistake made by almost every new entrepreneur. In the excitement of the new business, they forgot that legal protection is the most crucial matter.
So you get the idea of a new startup in your bathroom; you share it with your friend, and he agrees. Both of you started thinking about where to start, how to start, how to hire employees. Still, in all this excitement, you forgot about legal protection like an employee agreement, a company’s terms and conditions, privacy policy, and everything legal and necessary for your business.
Don’t avoid these legal formalities because negligence can be the reason for a big future problem.
These are the eight most common mistakes that prevent Indian entrepreneurs from making crores. Once you create your customer avatar and do proper competitor analysis, you are already half done in the way of a successful business.
If you don’t know how to create a customer avatar or do competitor analysis or you feel that you can’t sell anything, join our IMOTW school where we provide thriving entrepreneurs with battle-tested strategies to excel in the digital world.
