Jeanne Rossomme
Sales and Marketing

Sales and marketing expert Jeanne Rossomme is the founder of Roadmap Marketing and an established authority on small business growth.

Best Practices Tips

It pays to study the sources of your profits and cash because unprofitable customers who pay slowly, and low-margin products that sit on shelves too long, are a drain on cash flow. Unfortunately, SunTrust research shows that the majority of owners are not tracking their profits by market, customer or product line. Business owners who fail to study history risk repeating the mistakes of the past. On the other hand, owners who do their homework and identify the "pockets of profitability" in their businesses — the customers, products and markets that create the greatest positive cash flow — will be better prepared to replicate success and grow their profits in the future.

Actions to Take
There are several actions you can take to study the sources of your profit and cash flow:

Uncover the pockets of profitability in your business. Ask your accountant to set up your accounting software — like QuickBooks — to look at both the profitability associated with each market segment, customer, and product or service line. This allows you to run regular customer and product profitability reports that can help you focus your limited resources on the products, customers and markets that generate the most positive cash flow, instead of those that are costing you time and money.

Look at phasing out unprofitable products. You might also consider repricing, cutting back or even dropping your most unprofitable product lines or products that collect dust on shelves. Instead focus your energy on developing or sourcing higher-margin products and services that "turn over" faster.

Actively manage your unprofitable customers.  One of the quickest ways to free up time and money while still making a profit is to actively manage your most unprofitable customers. This can be done by raising price, changing terms, and renegotiating contracts to reflect your "true" economics. If they refuse these changes, then you have actually saved yourself valuable time, money and hassle.

Focus your marketing investment on profitable markets. A good way to make sure the cash you invest will generate more cash is to stop marketing to unprofitable markets. You can look at your profits by market segment by using a field in your accounting software called "customer type" that lets you group your customers into different markets.

Read the Uncover Your Pockets of Profitability article to get step-by-step instructions for setting up your accounting system to discover the "pockets of profitability."

Bio

Over the past 20 years, Jeanne has helped hundreds of small businesses grow profitably through cost-efficient, high impact marketing programs. She conducts regular seminars and workshops (in both English and Spanish) with small business owners through the Small Business Administration and other venues. Prior to founding her own business, RoadMap Marketing, Ms. Rossomme held a variety of key marketing positions at DuPont and General Electric. Ms. Rossomme holds a B.S. in Mathematics from the University of Texas at Austin and an M.B.SA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

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