Archive for the ‘Sales & Networking’ Category

Anything worth doing is worth doing well, however anything worth doing well is worth doing poorly until you are able to do it well. In this case, I’m talking about sales calls, presentations and networking. If these are activities you’re not comfortable doing, chances are, your skills are not up to par, so you tend to avoid them. As a result, your revenue suffers. The longer you put these activities off, the longer you will not improve at them, and the more entrenched in your habits you’ll become. So get out there, no matter how bad you may be (and you’re probably nowhere near as bad as you think, in fact you may even be pretty good) and start practicing in the real world. You’ll start to see your skills improve and your revenue increase, which...

For many business owners, this week is a relatively slow period each year because a lot of people are taking time off for the holidays. However, those of us that are in business-to-business industries can gain an advantage because the prospects we’re trying to reach are also business owners. Many of whom are using the slow period to catch up on things. This means they’re in the office, most likely not tied up in meetings or on phone calls, and often without a gatekeeper in place, which makes it a great time for your sales calls to these tough-to-reach prospects.

It’s Friday morning and if you’re like many people, you may already thinking about what you’re going to do when you get off work. That’s fair since you’ve probably put in a lot of hard work this week and you deserve to spend some quality time relaxing. When it comes to business owners though, this is quite often the time for us to catch up on all the things we didn’t have the time to get to because our staff and clients need us for various reasons. What this means to you as a business owner is that you have a far greater chance of getting to those hard to reach prospects after hours on a Friday than at any other time during the week. Do yourself a favor and spend an extra hour or...

When business is slow, it can be easy to avoid making sales calls, after all, business is slow for your prospects too and many of them may not use much tact when they let you know this. The thing you may not realize is that despite their sometimes inhospitable nature, they really do want to buy something from you if it will help them in a way that’s important to them. All you have to do is reach them and then show them how your product or service can do just that. Here’s the beauty of the situation ? when business is slow you are more likely to be able to reach the decision maker because they may be working earlier or later than usual or their staff may be on vacation or laid off....

A common clich? you hear in business is, ?there is no better form of advertising then word of mouth.? Networking is unfortunately one of the most neglected aspects of professional development, an untapped mecca of free leads waiting to happen, and your potential clients are out there waiting to hear about you. Whose almighty word will potential clients initially trust; close friends, random strangers, or yours?? A conglomeration of all of these is important to any business; however, your presence is always needed to solidify the contact. Effective networking is a give and take responsibility.? You need to first build the relationship then work on maintaining it by providing leads and utilizing the new leads that come from your new contacts. Networking is not for business settings only; contacts are made at grocery stores, baseball...

We all should smile more often. Not only does it make those around us, such as our family, friends, employees, clients and prospects, happier, but it also makes us happier ourselves. Give it a shot, put on a genuine smile today and see if it’s not contagious. Have you ever noticed that some of the most successful people are also some of the happiest people? They aren’t happy because they’re successful; rather, they’re successful because they’re happy. Making a point to smile as often as possible is one of the easiest things you can do ensure your success.