Optimizing Business Models and Business Plans

Key elements of a successful business model include:

Focus on serving your target persona

Knowing exactly who your business will serve, your target persona, helps to streamline your business model with a powerful focus on meeting their needs. The more specific you can be in addressing your ideal persona’s characteristics and challenges, the better your business will be in providing solutions to meet their needs. That way, when people experience your business, they will know and feel that everything is ideally suited for them, and that experience can grow engagement for your business.

Determine your business flow

Now that you’ve chosen your target persona, and how your business will solve their problems and challenges, the next step is to determine how your business will meet those needs. This can be a key part of your business success, as sometimes a vital distinction in a business is not only in what it provides, but in how it provides the solution. For example, taxis and Uber both provide rides, but their business model, how they provide their services, can be quite different and result in different levels of business success. Determining your business flow, how you deliver the solution within your business model, helps you to detail the business processes and activities needed for your business model to work, and the resources required to do so.

Develop your business model into a flywheel

Changing your business model from a classic business or sales funnel into a flywheel can be centrally important to the success of your business growth. You have likely heard of a business or sales funnel, in which you focus on reaching out to a large number of people at the top of the funnel and a subset of those become your customers at the bottom of the funnel. The problem with a funnel is that, while you are focusing on the top, what you gain just falls out the bottom. That explains why many businesses focus on gaining new customers, without fully appreciating their current customers. Rather than a vertical funnel, the flywheel model is a cycle, with a key focus on optimizing your current customers’ experience and how that also contributes to your business growth.

Grow your lead generation

Leads are contacts who are likely to become your future customers. In addition to detailing how your business will serve your target persona and solve their challenges, you will want to indicate how your ideal target personas discover your business, also known as lead generation and demand generation. How will your future customers find you? Fortunately, knowing your target persona helps you identify where they are (online and offline) and how you can best engage with them. Mapping your customer’s journey can be a key piece of your business model’s success.