A large part of your job, as an entrepreneur, is doing a sound budget for the following year. Everybody has such a business process; it may vary from a very informal session to have a rough idea of what to do the year after to a long and careful book compilation.
Get clear on the problems you help solve and the people you solve them for. Tom Peters author of In Search of Excellent said “if your customers don’t have a problem, give them one”. People are more motivated to buy to avoid pain than gain something.
Know your product: This sounds like the most obvious thing in the world, but you’d be surprised how many sales people don’t really know what it is they are selling.
I have read a number of business books over the years as a B2B sales executive. A small few were inspiring… some read like I was doing everything wrong…
This is a pretty simple statement. Why would you wait to collect from a customer? Well some businesses bill out after the work has been done, what’s been sold etc. so they have to wait for the customer to send in the money back to them.
A question that surfaces in the sales training community every so often is whether or not traditional sales training has been rendered ineffective by changes in technology, economy, etc.
A discussion was recently started at SalesPractice.com titled, “How to shorten the sales cycle”. The original question asked what you could do that is in your control to shorten the Sales Cycle (Length of time from Initial Contact to Close).
Advertising budgets for small businesses is limited. We don’t have the large corporate budgets where they can just throw money left and right and pick a few different approaches.
Successfully marketing and selling to business requires a specialised set of skills and strategies.
Most service oriented businesses still offer free quotes for their customers. If you are one of these you might want to consider asking some pertinent questions prior to wasting your time and the customer’s time.
After speaking with 5 business owners today, all within the SMB market, it now seems apparent to me that a new pattern is starting to develop within the current recession of business owners increasingly …
A work colleague sent me a link to the video below which spells out in a funny way the demise of advertising as we know it.
Okay, you make a great product or provide a very unique service. You’re in love with it and so are your customers. It’s a wonderful product/service. I get it. Now get over it. Because your customers aren’t buying it. They’re buying things you aren’t even selling.
If you ever want to polarise opinion in a meeting of sales managers, just start talking about psychometric testing.
