People hate being sold to. This explains why salespeople understandably find selling to new customers so daunting. It doesn’t have to be if you follow a few guidelines: Be interesting: conversation Cold calling is (mostly) dead. The best way to find new customers is to meet them out in the real world. Just understand that…
“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” John Wanamaker nailed it back in the late 1800s when he summed up just about every small business owners’ feeling toward marketing their businesses at some point. Despite following all the rules – the recommended social media posting…
Creating systems for your business is perhaps one of the most important steps you can take to nudge your business toward profitability. As complicated as it sounds, developing systems is just another way of organizing your business operations. By defining the key functions you need to run your business, then developing processes and determining the…
Let’s face it. We need repeat sales to make this thing called business work. Even our best efforts fall short if we fail to get customers to buy the right products, at the right price, at the right time, not just once, but over and over again. But many of us settle for becoming a one hit…
Customers have high expectations. Gone are the days of transactional sales with faceless individuals who breeze in and out of your stores and on and off your websites. Today’s new normal is all about relationship. And one of the best ways to establish that relationship is through routine follow-up. What is follow-up? Follow-up is not…
When sitting down with decision makers, there is a tremendous amount of pressure on us, the business owner, to sell – to close the deal. So, we take out our gadgets and flip through our brochures, determined to convince them to end their search and sign on with us. And after all that time and…
Most conversations about “nurturing” today revolve around lead generation and lead scoring. Getting leads “sales ready” is one of the benefits of popular tools like marketing automation software, which aims to, through a series of consistent and meaningful touches (like emails and social media activity) move leads from the top of the marketing funnel, where they simply display interest in…
Today, I’m going to give you permission to do something that you’ve probably dreamt of, but never imagined you’d be able to do. There are very few guarantees in life, but if you take advantage of this opportunity, I promise you’ll thank me. Today, I give you permission to say, no. No to bothersome clients…
During the holiday season, many of us are looking forward to some downtime. As a small business owner, you may not have the luxury of taking extended time off during the year because you are your business. But, the long hours and sacrifice of time away from family and friends have taken a toll and we’re…
I’m a talker. That’s a surprise to some, but not to most. But my daughter, a thriving kindergartener, puts me to shame. As soon as she opens the car door, it starts. Talking 100 words per minute, I know who did what to whom, who spilled milk in the lunchroom, who got into trouble – I know…
Entrepreneurs are a different breed. Not everyone can, is willing, or should go out on a limb and risk so much. Being in business for oneself is hard work but the potential reward, in my opinion, is what draws us in. The ability to build something from ground up or to take over something that’s failing and make…