How To Expand Your Business In One Hour

Doug — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 01:32:18 +0000

It’s safe to say that aggressive marketing and advertising is a key to a successful business for new ventures and entrepreneurs. This applies to online and offline business; it applies to online and offline marketing efforts, too. Getting word out that you are in business and getting your image in the mind of prospects as quickly as possible is vital to any degree of success. The problem is that it seems that once a business is established, the owners fail to continue these efforts, except for large corporations.

Local businesses do not have to advertise and market everywhere, just focus on where your customers are. Think of it like throwing logs into a fire, instead of starting a lot of fires all over the place. Once you are content with your business and think things are pretty much “run-of-the-mill” you should increase your efforts for marketing and advertising. That is the only way to exceed your goals and reach new heights. Having a core customer base and an effective referral marketing system in place is great, but seeking out new strangers, new prospects will grow your core customer base and get even more referrals.

Spend just 30 minutes writing down what interests your current customers have in common. It may be a sport, a hobby, a type of music, anything at all. Then spend another 30 minutes writing down any idea you have that will get you in front of prospective customers by taking advantage of these interests. Write down ANY and ALL ideas you have. Just get them on paper and analyze them later. This means that if your customers have a high level of interest in baseball, then you need to write down all the ideas you have for getting in front of them with your business utilizing that interest. This could be joining a fantasy baseball league and advertising on their blogs or websites; this could be networking at local baseball events or advertising at sports equipment and memorabilia stores. Any idea you have can get you in front of new customers is useful. Before you know it you have a whole new bag of tricks for expanding your business and making yourself rich!

How To Focus

Doug — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 05:20:18 +0000

Ah. That elusive creature of focus. There are many articles and books that are written to help us prioritize, be more effective, and focus. I think read and/or own most of them so believe me when I say you should invest in at least one or two by your favorite personal growth author or speaker. The reason I am adding this article to the sea of information on the topic is because what I’ve found is much of the advice does not work, and much of it does. Here you will find a few simple steps that will get you going on your own to being a more effective person at home, school, the office, and life in general. Take each step and fill in the “data” from your life immediately. Put some real thought in it and you will get immediate results so don’t just breeze through like any other article. Really press in and you have my personal word that your life will be different.

Identify those your talents, strengths, and the things you like doing most.
Identify the 10 most time consuming tasks you perform (daily, weekly, or monthly) that are not your strengths and/or not enjoyable.
Quantify the time difference between items 1 and 2. This is your potential.
Outsource the tasks in item 2. Check out virtual assistants online and you find very inexpensive ways to outsource these tasks to a third party.
Allocate your new time difference to the tasks that you identified in item 1 above that contribute the most to your personal and professional success.

By doing these 5 simple steps and revisiting them at least on a monthly basis you will increase your focus and take advantage of that infamous 80/20 rule. Fill your time and spend your energy doing the things that contribute most to your success. For example, for me that means cutting out time with bills and lawn work by outsourcing them to others so that it is automatic. That frees up time that I spend focusing on my wife and two children. Please email or call for personalized assistance or a more detailed coaching in order to increase your focus quickly, getting bigger results, faster.

Write Before You Speak

Doug — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 16:06:59 +0000

I was at my father’s house yesterday just spending time with the family and spending time with a friend that I hadn’t seen in over 2 years. He’s moved out of state and started a family elsewhere so not much time to get together anymore. While we were hanging out, though, we played a great party game called Buzzword. Essentially how you play is this: divide into two teams (we did guys versus girls), then one player from team 1 reads a card that has a Buzzword and 10 clues. The players read the card to his/her team so that they can try to guess the answer to each of the 10 clues. On one turn the guys’ Buzzword was “horse” so the answer to each clue had to include the word “horse” in it. We went through the clues fairly easily and had a good time but the best part was when my friend answered the question “Common knowledge…” with the answer of “horse knowledge.” Oh we had a blast laughing over that very easy mistake because of course the correct answer was close to that “horse sense”, which everyone has heard of. We didn’t let that go for the rest of the game. In a way it took away some of his credibility during the game, even though it was all just good fun.

I think this applies to us as well whenever we are cold calling a new prospect. We get caught up in the excitement that this person might be interested in buying from us. Or we just get all excited about digging in and making a lot of cold calls today to reach our goals. Either way, we end up just making it up as we go along. Too often salespeople tend to just go with the flow when it comes to presenting their business, products, or services when a little forethought and preparation can go a long way. Write down what you plan to say in advance. Spend time thinking about the potential objections that will come up during the call. Make sure you have a specific purpose or goal to achieve for every call you make. And most importantly don’t deviate from achieving that goal. If your goal is to get an appointment then get to the goal quickly and handle objections as they come up in order to get the appointment.

Taking just one or two hours to write down objections, product/service presentations, ways to present your price and close the sale are worth more time than any amount of cold calls you could have fumbled through instead. So take the time because if you don’t you will lose credibility almost immediately. If you do, you will have confidence and reach your goals faster than you think.

Referrals, Don’t Just Cross Your Fingers

Doug — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 12:02:41 +0000

Referrals are where it’s at today. They are new customers that call saying that so-and-so said, “You did a great job for my friend recently and I want the same” (product/service). Referrals are a great source of inexpensive growth that can come along at the right time, especially in today’s economy. Most companies know this but don’t know how to maximize it.

Let’s take a look at 3 main referral sources:

Satisfied customers tell the people they know.
Other business relationships or vendors refer their own customers.
Non-customers refer others based on advertisements (the word on the street).

These are great passive contributions to your business. Focused efforts to attract referral customers are lacking in businesses. However, there is no lack of effort to attract new customers, strangers if you will, in the form of radio, television, online, and print media. Referrals are less expensive, easier to reach, and lead to compound growth. In order to maximize this potential there must be active systems in place.

Ask customers for 5 people they know that would find a great use in doing business with you.
Give customers a little motivation or incentive to refer.
Give them a gift card to their favorite store, a gift basket, or a percentage of the business they sent you.
Write “Thank You” notes to them for every referral they send your way, even if they don’t buy.

It doesnt take much market research to realize that referrals are the most porfitable and reliable way to grow your business consistently. Start doing this with just 10% of the customers you are in front of and you will see a big change in the coming months. Do it with 100% and your business and life will change forever.