Time to get aggressive

At times in the last six months it has been awfully quiet. Many business owners hunkered down, and surveys showed us that they have been focusing on their core customers and shoring up those relationships. They are also reviewing, retrenching and building their teams and cutting costs to become lean machines.

Now comes the fun part: Aggressive expansion. Business owners are telling me that they are acutely conscious that the next six months is a crucial time to be aggressively attacking the marketplace. And they need to start now and get their order books filled before the last quarter of 2009.

Today’s results from a St George survey of 1000 employing SMEs shows that 44% plan to increase their market share, with 9% having already begun to roll out this strategy and 32% planning to.

A quarter plan to increase staff levels in the current downturn.

Most interesting 57% are increasing new business development (18% already have been, 38% plan to be). And 55% increasing product and service offering (20% already have been, 35% plan to be) 55% increasing product and service offering (20% already have been, 35% plan to be).

For those companies that have not spent the last six months getting their house in order, they are in danger of being elbowed out of the way in the race to fill the order book before Christmas.

The good news for aggressive smart companies is that although conditions are still depressed, more activity is being planned.

If businesses want to chase market share, are planning to hire and develop new products and services, they must spend. Which means the dollars will start to flow more in this second half.

SMEs must make sure they know who will be spending money and how to target these opportunities. And their sales teams need to be reinvigorated and aggressively out there now chasing down every opportunity, because it will still take more time, more effort and more value to secure these deals. But at least they will be there!