Sales & Marketing

Entrepreneurs often rely upon their personal credit to start a new business. Sometimes that's a necessary step, although it's also extremely risky.

You can't, however, build a successful business entirely on personal credit. Instead, you need to establish and build a separate business credit profile. Think of it as taking the training wheels off your new business - it's a big step, but you'll go a lot faster and further in the long run.

Let's look at five steps you can take to start building your business credit profile today:

1. Get a DUNS Number. Dun & Bradstreet issues these numbers, which are the most widely used method of identifying businesses in the United States. Most corporate credit applications require a DUNS number - and it's up to you to get a number for your new business.

2. Consider a corporation or LLC. It's not impossible to get business credit as a sole proprietorship, but it's much more difficult to separate your personal and business credit.

3. Pay attention to the details. Prepare financial statements and a business plan, both of which are important to getting business credit. Also stay current with business licenses, permits, and other regulatory requirements - companies often check these details when they perform a corporate credit analysis.

4. Look for sources of "starter" credit. Some companies will grant credit without checking your personal credit history. But remember: This is only useful if the company reports your good payment history to the business credit bureaus, helping you to establish a solid credit profile.

5. Don't pay on time - pay early! Paying ahead of time can improve your business credit score even more than paying on time. It can also convince a business to extend credit or offer more liberal payment terms.

Once you start to build a business credit profile, don't forget to check your credit reports with all of the major reporting agencies. Errors and omissions could affect your credit risk score, so it's important to monitor your credit profile.

There's no shortage of websites that offer tips on collecting delinquent accounts. Many of them offer good advice - and sooner or later, you'll probably need it.

But here's my top suggestion for dealing with slow payments or no-payment situations: Keep them from happening in the first place!

As I mentioned in a previous post, regular customer credit checks are the single best way to identify potential credit risks before they affect your own business. But there are other simple, cost-effective ways to manage your collections and credit risk. All of them should be part of your credit risk-management arsenal:

1. Craft a clear, detailed credit policy. Walk your customers through the policy, one step at a time. Detail exactly what you expect in terms of payment terms, penalties, and collection options. Educate your employees, including your sales team, about your credit policies so that they can explain them to new clients.

2. Take your invoices seriously. Believe it or not, the quality of your invoices can have a major impact on how customers perceive your credit policies. Create professional-looking invoices that provide clear, concise information on the amount due, payment terms, and other important information.

3. Follow up on your invoices before they come due. Some small businesses avoid this because they consider it heavy-handed. But treat these follow-ups for what they are: a chance to deliver quality customer service and to build a solid rapport with your customers.

4. Keep accurate payment history records. You can and should perform regular customer credit checks with reporting agencies such as Dun & Bradstreet. But you also need to maintain impeccable records of your customers' payment histories and to check them regularly for unusual payment trends.

5. Know when to pull back on credit. If you wait until a customer is delinquent to change or withdraw their credit terms, you've already lost the game. If their credit profile shows a sudden rash of late payments to other vendors, or evidence of cash flow problems, you need to consider taking a more conservative stance with your own credit policies.

I know what you're thinking: Some of these suggestions may seem a bit cold or even cruel. And there definitely are exceptions to every business rule - including those governing your business credit decisions.

Just remember that business credit relationships always involve business risk. Making the wrong credit decision could leave your company holding the bag - and that's not fair to you or your employees.

Email is a powerful and effective marketing tool. It's incredibly affordable and extremely flexible. Used properly, it's unbeatable.

Used badly, it's a recipe for disaster. I see way too many small businesses that jump into it without understanding the most basic ground rules. And they pay the price.

So let's go back to school. Here are seven basic principles that should guide every email marketing campaign.

1. Get permission. This isn't optional. Spamming a customer will turn your business into a pariah. It can also get you sued if you violate the federal CAN-SPAM law. You can manage the permission process yourself, or you can work with reputable marketing partner.

2. Keep it clean. A "clean" list of email addresses will be targeted to your specific industry niche, product offering, or customer segment. The cleaner your list, the higher your response rates - and your ROI - will be.

3. Take your time. Many companies use "drip" email marketing campaigns to build successful, long-term customer relationships. These campaigns deliver value to the recipients (for example, a whitepaper or discount offer) while setting the stage for a series of additional communications.

4. Keep it simple. Some of your customers will respond to rich HTML or graphical email. Some dislike that approach - or they simply filter it out. Meet your customers halfway by allowing them to set their email preferences, or deliver plain-text email with links to rich-text versions.

5. Don't wear out your welcome. If a customer wants off your list, then of course you'll comply. But also consider removing a customer if they simply don't respond to your email over a specific number of messages or period of time. You're more likely to annoy them than you are to win them over with even more email.

6. Remember: Content is king! As I said in a previous post, quality content is the single most effective marketing tool most companies will ever use. Use email to deliver useful, interesting content - not a series of one-off, hard-sell sales pitches.

7. Experiment, experiment, experiment. Email is a wonderful place to try out new types of content, offerings, messages, and other options. This approach can be especially helpful if you're using a marketing automation tool that can capture and manage feedback from your email marketing experiments.

Earlier this week, I looked at the role that a Paydex score plays in the business credit-assessment process. It's a valuable tool and a great starting point for any credit risk analysis.

But it's not the only tool that you can - or should - use.

To understand why, let's take a closer look at what else goes into a complete business credit report. These are the types of things you'll learn from a source like a Dun & Bradstreet Business Information Report (BIR) - widely considered the industry standard for business credit risk-management.

• A summary that gives you an instant overview of a firm's line of business, sales, net worth, and general financial condition;
• Alerts dealing with ownership changes, bankruptcies, and other major business events;
• The Paydex Score, based on a company's payment history;
• Financial information including assets, sales, liabilities, and profits;
• Public filings such as lawsuits, liens, and judgments;
• A business history that provides insights into both the company as a whole and its key executives;
• An operations overview that covers things like what a business does, the number of employees, the location of key facilities, and known subsidiaries;
• A Payment Summary that breaks down a company's payments by industry, credit-limit histories, overdue payments, collection accounts, and a host of additional data.

In this context, a Paydex Score is a bit like a snapshot - while the additional data you'll find in a BIR is more like a three-dimensional look into a company's history, operations, and financial health.

Obviously, this kind of information is essential for making informed business credit decisions. Yet it's also a valuable tool for making other business decisions, including:

• Sales team planning;
• Marketing tactics;
• Evaluating product or marketing partnerships;
• Evaluating vendors and suppliers;
• Performing competitive research and analysis.

In other words, don't just look as business risk management as a credit question. The data you'll find in a report like a Dun & Bradstreet BIR allows you to manage risk across your organization. Just as important, it can alert you to new business opportunities long before your competitors get wind of them.

I don't have to tell most of you that mobile technology is growing at a staggering rate. But if I did, I would point out that smartphones now make up more than half of all U.S. phone sales.

I would tell you that two thirds of mobile users say they use their phones to find a business to make an in-store purchase.

I would note that nearly half of mobile shoppers have downloaded a retail app.

I would certainly tell you that two thirds of consumers plan to make a purchase via mobile this holiday season.

I would point out that the smartphone market is now larger than the PC market -- an extraordinary milestone.

And I would also remind you that these numbers are just the tip of the iceberg.

10 Ways to Leverage Mobile Marketing

So let's turn to the REALLY important topic here: How will your small business turn the mobile marketing revolution into hard, cold cash?

Here are 10 suggestions that will show you what's possible and what you should be doing to explore the possibilities within your own marketing campaign:

1. Build a mobile-friendly business website. This is no longer an option. If your business is online, it needs to have a mobile-friendly website - period.

2. Consider text-message marketing. Consumers are more than twice as likely to react to a text message as they are to email marketing. Just be sure to work with a reputable provider and avoid spamming.

3. Offer a mobile app. Yes, this can be expensive. But it's also a very effective way to reach customers, drive lead generation, and promote your brand.

4. Appeal to short attention spans. Mobile users are busy, and they're often multi-tasking. Craft your content to reach them with short, highly focused messages.

5. Integrate social marketing. Mobile users love to share information. Give them something to "like" about your content, and turn them into vital allies in your lead generation efforts.

6. Use QR codes. These codes are similar to barcodes; a user can scan them with a mobile device and learn more about your company, products, and services.

7. Extend special offers. Make your mobile users feel special with discounts, reward programs, or other perks designed especially for them.

8. Promote, promote, promote! Whether it's a mobile website or a dedicated app, you need to promote it just as you would any other marketing channel.

9. Respect users' privacy. Location-based services are a powerful marketing tool, but it's also easy to abuse them. Tread carefully and treat your mobile customers with respect.

10. Get ready for mobile commerce! So-called m-commerce systems are still in their infancy, but you need to understand the technology if you want to be ready to exploit it.

This is enough to get you started, but like I said, this is simply the tip of the iceberg. Just remember to integrate all of these techniques into your company's overall digital marketing strategy, look for ways to leverage multiple marketing channels, and ensure that your technology always serves your customers -- and not the other way around.

Is direct mail marketing dead?

It's a common question these days, and we all know why: Email, search, social media, and other forms of digital marketing are all the rage. They're cheaper than direct mail, they're faster, they deliver better feedback, and they ultimately deliver better ROI.

Right?

Actually, I don't think direct mail is dead yet. It might even be getting its second wind.

Direct Mail Still Gets Results

According to the Direct Marketing Association (DMA), 1.4 percent of U.S. households in 2010 responded to direct-mail pitches. That's down a bit from the 2005 numbers, but that number is still more than double a typical email marketing response rate, according to the DMA.

While those numbers don't directly address B2B direct mail marketing, I think it's safe to say they're comparable -- especially in terms of how they compare to email response rates.

We all know why those email response rates are so low. Bulk email is a saturated marketing channel, and the signal-to-noise ratio is unbelievably low, even for sophisticated online lead generation efforts.

Those numbers don't mean direct mail is a slam-dunk for every small business. They simply mean that direct mail can still have a place in your marketing mix - if you know how to identify, target, and build a trust relationship with the right prospects.

4 Ways to Marry Direct Mail and Digital Marketing

So direct mail definitely is not dead. But technology has transformed the way it works. Here are some specific trends you need to follow in order to use direct mail effectively.

1. On-demand printing. Throw away the cookie cutter: It's now possible to create small, highly customized batches of direct mail with content tailored for specific customer segments or for groups at different points in your marketing pipeline. You'll get higher response rates, and you'll get them at a very reasonable cost.

2. Integrated direct mail/digital marketing campaigns. You can use direct mail to drive prospects to custom website landing pages, social media pages, video demonstrations, whitepaper downloads, or any number of other destinations. This type of thoughtful, carefully-crafted content is essential to identifying qualified leads and setting up your sales team for success.

You can also experiment with new options, such as QR codes, to simplify the process of integrating direct mail marketing and digital campaigns.

3. End-to-end personalization. What do you get when you combine on-demand printing with so many different digital marketing choices? You get the opportunity to deliver a completely personalized marketing experience for every prospect. That's an opportunity that you couldn't buy at any price just a few years ago.

4. Analytics. Now more than ever before, the tools exist to measure the responses to your direct mail marketing campaigns. In fact, it's important that you NOT launch a direct mail campaign until you have a plan in place to track and measure your results.

Like I said, this doesn't mean direct mail is always appropriate for your small-business B2B marketing efforts. But it's important to experiment with direct mail, just as you experiment with social media, video, email, and other activities.

So direct mail isn't dead. And if you know how to use it right, it can give a healthy boost to your small business' bottom line.

I know that getting paid late is better than not getting paid at all. But for most small buisnesses, dealing with late payments is all too familiar -- and utterly miserable -- experience.

That's because slow payments leave a business in credit purgatory. Put your foot down too hard trying to collect, and you might sink a profitable business relationship. Yet if you decide not to rock the boat too much, you're volunteering to share somebody else's financial pain.

Fighting the Slow Payment Plague

What's worse is the fact that according to a recent National Federation of Independent Business survey, 40 percent of small businesses say their receivables are coming in at a slower pace. In many cases, clients are able to pay, but they want to hang onto their cash as long as possible in an uncertain economy.

You may not be able to eliminate slow payment problems, but you can certainly manage the risk. Here are four tips that are especially relevant to small businesses:

1. Start with an ounce of prevention. A customer credit check isn't useful just for avoiding deadbeats. It's also a great way to evaluate credit risk in terms of slow-paying customers. That's because customer credit data, when properly compiled and analyzed, can help to predict potential slow-payment scenarios well before they happen.

Bonus tip: Don't treat customer credit checks as a one-time affairs. It's important to conduct regular customer credit reviews, even with established customers, to catch potential problems.

2. Always get it in writing. Handshake or verbal agreements don't benefit anyone in the long run. Business circumstances can change, employees come and go, and "informal" agreements are difficult to enforce. That's why a written contract or letter of agreement is the single best risk management tool that any business - of any size - can have.

Bonus tip: Whatever else the agreement covers, make sure that it spells out - in plain English - payment dates and amounts.

3. Dangle a pre-payment discount carrot. Some businesses focus on late-payment penalties: late fees, interest charges, and the like. Others, however, have discovered that discounts for paying in advance are an even more effective way to avoid late payments.

Bonus tip: If a 10 percent pre-payment discount reduces late payment problems, then the discounts will pay for themselves - and then some.

4. Consider a credit-card backup requirement. Some businesses can ask customers to provide a credit card number when they sign a purchase agreement. If a payment is late, you can bill the customer's credit card instead - or simply arrange automatic credit card payments (possibly with a discount).

Bonus tip: This tactic has its limits, especially if you're dealing with a very large corporate customer. Apply it when and where you can, however, and it will play an important role in your collection and credit risk strategy.

Social media marketing can feel like a treadmill where your small business never quite finds its footing. Keep running long enough, and it's easy to lose sight of your true small business marketing goal: consistent, cost-effective lead generation.

Social Media Marketing and Lead Generation Done Right

Here's the good news: Social media, used correctly, is one of the most cost-effective lead generation tools your business can deploy. There's simply nothing else that can deliver this much ROI on a B2B marketing investment.

So what does it mean to use social media the "correct" way? Here are five specific examples:

1. Never quit experimenting. Some social media sites are gaining ground as B2B marketing platforms (YouTube, LinkedIn) while others are in decline (MySpace, StumbleUpon). Behind those broad trends, however, almost every small business marketer discovers a unique mix of social media platforms and content that delivers the best results.

Don't be afraid to try new things, and don't be afraid to fail - there's simply too much to gain here from experimenting and fine-tuning your online lead generation efforts. Tweak your business blog topics, and fine-tune your writing voice. Work with podcasts, video, and other types of social content. Even efforts that fail to generate leads can provide valuable feedback about what works and what doesn't.

2. Don't forget to deliver a call to action. The conventional wisdom holds that a call to action over social media will damage your credibility and hurt your relationship marketing activities. Yet there are limits to this attitude - after all, many of your prospects want to buy and are looking for information about your business.

A well-crafted call to action gives prospects the opportunity to get the information they need while still showing respect - and delivering value - for everybody else. Whether your call to action involves a website, e-book, whitepaper, registration/landing page, newsletter signup form, or some other response, you need to integrate it into every aspect of your social media marketing strategy.

3. Give prospects somewhere to go! It sounds simple, but you'd be amazed how many businesses overlook this step. If your individual social media marketing efforts are the spokes in a wheel, then think of your landing page or website as the hub. All roads lead here - so be sure you provide a compelling destination!

4. Robust social media analytics are a must! By "robust" I definitely don't mean analytics that deal only with a single social media tool. Those are useful, but they never give you a coherent view of your marketing strategy.

Instead, I'm talking about the growing crop of social CRM and social media management tools, as well as increasingly sophisticated marketing automation solutions with built-in social media analytics. These products, including those from major vendors like Salesforce.com, Sugar CRM, and Eloqua, provide the hard data you need to drive your social media marketing and lead generation efforts.

By Diane M. Hoffmann, ph.d.

For years now, I have been talking and writing about the fact that sales and marketing are not the same.  Some time ago, I came across an article somewhere on the Net about advertising and marketing not being the same.

So, now, I talk and write about sales, marketing and advertising not being the same. Well, we know they are not the same, but we often lump them together as one function of business. In a corporation, the three activities have evolved to be separate departmental functions. But in a small company, they usually are muddled within one functional boundary.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re in an ONline or OFFline business. How will you know to whom you are advertising without having done the marketing research first? How will you sell effectively if you don't know your target market?  Just placing an ad in the paper or on radio is throwing one message to a large audience that is not even looking for your product - usually 90 percent. The equivalent in Internet terms is putting up an untargeted web site – without knowing your niche.

In OFFline business, if you do a direct mail, it's better to do 100 mail-outs in a specific postal area that you or your sales team can follow-up personally within a week, rather than to send out 1,000 or 10,000 just anywhere that you cannot follow-up. Because the sales are always in the follow-ups!

In ONline business, you target specific niche -- people who are looking for x information or z product. Then you advertise or promote within that specific target market by means of keyword-specific PPC ads, web sites and web-pages.

“Marketing” is the activity of studying and researching the product/service markets, the competition (What do they do right and wrong?), the demographics, the prospective target market of your business and products, etc.  It is the crunching of these results into the tools that the sales people use to do effective selling.

"Sales" is the direct activity of selling -- telephone cold callings, face-to-face presentations, personal follow-up, talking or inter-acting with prospects, point-of-sales merchandising... ONline, it is the landing page -- the web copy that leads to the link that leads to the buying, or the e-zine or article copy that speaks to the prospect as if in person. It is the actual selling!

“Advertising” is the newspaper, magazine, postal medium, radio or TV copy that leads to the prospect taking action towards a purchase or sales process. In ONline business it is the Adwords, e-zines and articles that carry the copy communication to the prospect.

So, not only are the sales, marketing and advertising activities not the same, they are three specific and separate functions that work in this order: 1.Marketing, 2.Advertising and 3.Sales, each building up in their own essential ways to the goal of the business which is to sell what it's in business to provide to customers. Remember no Sales, no Business!

Diane M. Hoffmann is president of Hoffmann-Rondeau Communications, which offers ONline and OFFline business services and resources. She is the founder and creator of http://www.build-your-internet-business-now.com and author of several books, e-books and articles, including "Contextual Communication, Organization and Training." Diane has recently shifted her primary focus to helping entrepreneurs start and grow their own Online or OFFline business. Copyright(c)2011 Diane M. Hoffmann. You may reprint this article without any changes, making sure to include this bio

By John Leavy

Nurturing your prospects will double or triple your conversion rate. Just consider: The average click-through rate for pay-per- click ads is 1 to 3 percent. The average click-through from an e-mail campaign is between 1 and 5 percent depending upon the industry. Most of the people arriving at a website are not ready to buy. These are people that are showing an interest in your product or service but not purchasing or signing up. You can expect to harvest between 3 and 5 percent of those that click-through. If 10,000 people click on your Google ad and 2 percent or 20 people click-through to your offer, only 2 percent, or four people will actually purchase your service or product. Four out of 10,000 is only a .0004 percent conversion rate. To get the conversion rate up, you should entice more of the audience of 10,000 that click through to purchase your product or service. Remember, there is not an unlimited supply of prospects interested in purchasing any product or service.

Lead Nurturing

So how do you entice and persuade more people to click-through and make a purchase? According to Forrester Research, companies that excel at lead nurturing are able to generate 50 percent more sales-ready leads at 33 percent lower cost- per-lead. Lead nurturing is a process by which unqualified leads are tracked and developed into sales-ready opportunities.

The marketing tactics used to turn these unqualified leads into sales-ready opportunities could be webinars, podcasts, whitepapers and other education-based materials, blogging, free trials, newsletters, or e-mail campaigns.

Thought leadership means you have to have something of value to say. Focus implies that each piece of collateral, whether an e-mail, blog post, or news article, needs to be centered around one specific pain point and include the remedy, benefit, and a strong call to action.

The subject line or story header needs to grab the reader’s attention in five to eight seconds. Don’t clutter the e-mail with extraneous links and other offers. Don’t get off subject when writing the blog post or article. Stay on message.

Natural progression means don’t rush the sale. Design an e-mail nurturing campaign or series of blog posts to take the prospect through a logical educational process. The nurturing campaign should be designed to cause prospects to move down the sales funnel at their own pace. The campaign should also be designed to cause the prospect to make a stronger commitment. For instance, at first the prospect gives her e-mail address. Later on during the nurturing campaign the prospect is asked for her company name, phone number, and a few pieces of information that will help qualify her as a potential buyer.

Measurement is the key to any successful inbound marketing campaign. Measurements give you the opportunity to fine-tune the calls to action, the offers, and the content, which in turn increases the click-through and conversion rates.

Keep in mind the difference between spam and nurturing. Spamming is when someone just compiles a list of names and e-mail addresses (who knows from where) and thinks there’s some benefit to jamming his message down the recipient’s throat. Nurturing a list of names means that those people have, in some way, touched the company in the past. Perhaps they took a free trial, signed up to receive a newsletter, or downloaded content (a case study or whitepaper) off the company’s website.

Nurturing campaigns need to be timely and consistent. Run the campaign over weeks, not months.

Running an E-Mail Nurturing Campaign

As an example, say you run a 17-day nurturing campaign while people are using a free trial of your software product. You’ll send out eight e-mails focusing on pain points, remedies, and benefits and how they relate to your product. The 17 days could look like this:

• E-mail 1. Sent out upon subscribing to the free trial. Confirms they have signed up.
  
• E-mail 2. Sent out on Day 1. Welcomes them to the free trial process.
  
• E-mail 3. Sent out on Day 3. Focus on a pain point/the remedy/the benefit.
  
• E-mail 4. Sent out on Day 7. Focus on a pain point/the remedy/the benefit.
  
• E-mail 5. Sent out on Day 11. Focus on a pain point/the remedy/the benefit.
  
• E-mail 6. Sent out on Day 13. Focus on a pain point/the remedy/the benefit.
  
• E-mail 7. Sent out on Day 15. Lets people know their free trial is expiring.
  
• E-mail 8. Sent out on Day 17. Tells people about a special offer if they decide to purchase the product.
  

In this instance, you write your blog posts ahead of time and schedule the posts to be published as your nurturing campaign unfolds. The posts concentrate on pain points, remedies, and benefits. This nurturing campaign runs for 20 days. People that have subscribed to your RSS Feed will automatically be notified each time a new post is published. A campaign might be:

• Day 1. You write a post that gives prospects the 10,000-foot view of your online service.
  
• Day 5. You write a post about a pain point, remedy, and benefit.
  
• Day 9. You write a post about a pain point, remedy, and benefit.
  
• Day 12. You write a post about a pain point, remedy, and benefit.
  
• Day 17. You write a post about a pain point, remedy, and benefit.
  
• Day 20. You sweeten the pot by offering the first month of service free to those that sign up within the next 24 hours.
  

It’s easy to see now that nurturing takes time, patience, and consistency. The returns will be greater than starting over with a new batch of prospects. Remember to treat these prospects as perhaps interested but not ready to make a purchasing decision.

John D. Leavy is the founder of InPlainSite Marketing, a leader in developing and delivering digital marketing strategies. John consults and presents to Fortune 100 and 500 companies. He is the author of Outcome-Based Marketing: New Rules for Marketing on the Web and a regular contributor to leading publications and nationally known speaker.

By Hernan Vera

Organizations are always looking for ways to improve sales force effectiveness and be able to measure it in meaningful ways. Fortunately, there is sales force automation and customer relationship management technology that can be implemented and configured without costly in-house programming or IT support. The technology can be very effective in streamlining processes and providing the metrics needed to better forecast sales and manage the sales team.

As organizations start the journey of changing their sales processes, the tendency is to look at all the challenges they face and tackle them all at once — which is only natural. You’re investing in a new technology that can fix all the problems, so why not just get them all done in one sweep so you can move on and focus back on sales.

However, the result of that approach is a major disruption in sales activity as the sales team focuses on learning new software and many new processes all at once. They are required to turn their energy away from selling so they can figure out how to manage all the change and try to understand how it will affect their lives and livelihoods.

The revolutionary approach is almost always doomed to failure because it tries to accomplish too much too fast with no meaningful metrics in place to measure change. The journey ends almost before it begins and the new technology, which has enabled all the change, becomes yet another problem to be solved.

A journey of small steps

The better approach to sales force effectiveness is to think of it as a long term journey with a series of small steps that lead to the ultimate goal. Sales management needs a long-term vision of where the organization ultimately needs to be and then define the core processes to be changed and the order in which they need to get done. Trying to do too much at once causes friction within the sales team and contaminates the good changes that might be successfully implemented.

But don’t confuse a series of small steps with sales process methodology, which defines every step a sales person is required to complete in a precise order along the sales cycle with the sales person checking off each step completed before moving on to the next. Process methodology is doomed from the start because it over-manages the sales force and is perceived as compliance tool that does not help them be more effective in their jobs. Change needs to enable the sales team, not constrain it.

As with any journey, sales force effectiveness starts with a single step. Pick one or two core processes to change at a high level, put meaningful metrics in place, coach the sales team on what the changes will be and why it will help them and the organization, then work on that for a few months. When it becomes a natural part of everyone’s normal process and the sales team recognizes the value of it, you can move on the next set of changes. It’s a quick win that inspires the team as opposed to a string of failures that demoralizes them.

For example, start by having the sales team forecast revenue from all accounts for the next month. It’s a meaningful metric that will take a salesperson very little time to generate. Coach them on exactly what you’re looking for and then measure for three months. If everyone is doing a good job, then take the next step and delve into more detail (e.g. forecast revenue at the product level), measure for a couple months, succeed and move to the next step.

The only meaningful metric

Measuring success is key to demonstrating that change is being implemented. There are many metrics that an organization can use, but the most meaningful metric for sales force effectiveness is your win ratio (or close ratio). And, the only way to measure win ratio is on revenue, not deal count. 

I’ve seen that many companies try and measure win ratio by excluding deals where the client did not make a decision to change providers. If you deliver a proposal to a client, only two things can happen: you win or lose the business. The reasons are nice to know, but at the end of the day it’s revenue that impacts the company. Revenue is also important because that’s how salespeople are compensated. Revenue — profitable revenue — is the key metric for measuring success and it is what drives the organization. Revenue without the level of profit your firm deserves is a going-out-of-business strategy.

Managing change a step at a time

It is difficult to get organizations— especially complex ones — to change. Sales automation and CRM tools can help, however the key is to focus on the long term goals, implement change gradually, coach the sales team every step of the way, and develop metrics that truly measure results. Sales force effectiveness is a journey of small victories that ultimately leads to significant change.

Vera is Vice President, Marketing & Sales Operations for Pitney Bowes Management Services. He has a proven track record of winning substantial new business and expanding existing client bases. He has a strong understanding of multiple verticals including: marketing, sales, management, operations, business processes, finance, e-commerce and technology.

By James Werner

Eat your vegetables, go to the gym…and talk regularly to the prospective customers whom you like the least.

That last bit of advice is not so common – but it remains one of the key strategies of over-achieving sales people.

Our natural inclination is to be drawn to those things that are pleasurable, and to avoid those things that cause us discomfort.  The same principle holds true in sales. 

Chatty people who enjoy our sense of humor and regularly take our calls are a wonderful perk of the sales profession.  We often find ourselves spending an inordinate amount of time with these folks, while failing to ask some key questions.  Those questions include:

·         Is this person truly a decision maker?

·         Does this person have access to budget?

·         If the answer to the two questions above is “No,” is this individual sponsoring us upward to people who can make decisions and spend money?

Conversely, we’re all familiar with the prospect who is crotchety, uncooperative, or ill-tempered.  Too often we avoid those people like the plague – even in the event that they are the decision makers or the check writers.

There is a simple solution to this problem.  Make an inventory of your top-10 or 15 least favorite prospects.  Next, draw up a quick assessment of their true importance in the selection and buying process. 

For those who can make a material difference to the outcome of your sale, make a resolution that you will contact them at least once a week.  You can share relevant updates with them, check on progress, and even simply shoot the breeze.   Based upon the type of sale in which you are engaged, you may want to contact them more or less frequently – the point is to substantially increase your “face time” with them.

It’s true that some people are irredeemably hostile and unhelpful.  You will find, however, that those people truly are in the minority.  Once you’ve forced yourself to engage with people to whom you are not naturally drawn, you’ll find that many of them are quite decent people with a lot to offer.  They may be shy or socially awkward – but once you’ve penetrated their hard-candy shell, you may just find a person whom you like.

Oh yes, and you’ll also find yourself selling substantially more than you previously did!

James Werner has over 20 years experience in consulting and sales. Employing the exclusive Activated Selling™ technique, James trains staff, crafts new-market strategies, and offers unparalleled strategic sales advice to individuals and to companies of all sizes. You can contact James at www.activatedstrategies.com

By Sam Hunter

In 48 BC Cicero wrote in a letter to Brutus that “Eloquence which does not startle, I don’t consider eloquence”

Cicero had real insight; he knew the effect of startling his target, the power of “eloquence.” The quote to me implies Cicero recognised the need to understand his target, he wanted to startle them, he recognised startling them was unachievable without a real understanding of the needs of the target.

What is different today? Nothing at all.

As we seek to engage with our prospects we too often forget that we are first providing a solution they need and only second achieving a sale or a target for our bonus.

I prefer the word remarkable to startle, sorry Cicero.

If achieved the effect of being remarkable on the sale will be solid engagement with the prospect as he or she tries to find out more, and tries to understand why you can make that claim. As soon as the target so engages, the sales opportunity becomes rich.

A Better Way to Think About What You Are Selling.

Great advertising is almost always remarkable. Great advertising lines are also remarkable. Why should, what I call your single shot proposition or SSP not also be remarkable?

Remember these?

Have a Coke® and a Smile!

We try harder.

Let your fingers do the walking.

The first advertising ef­fectiveness model I applied back in the 1980s to make great Coke® ads was the AIDA Model: get Attention, hold Interest, arouse Desire, and then obtain Action.

I find myself wanting to add dimensions. I am not the first to attempt to improve the old model.  The old model needs renovation. To it I would add that mod­ern communication needs to also be Remarkable.  Attention is not enough, communication clutter is at an extreme, being remarkable will ensure consideration which leads to exploration.

Changing the value equation in the target’s mind can be powerfully achieved by communicating a remarkable benefit

To win, our targets have to choose us and look for our solution.

So how does our target choose?

When I was at Coke in charge of making ads my great friend, advertising consultant and mentor Tom Reynolds began teaching me much about consumer choice, these lessons naturally also apply to business to business situations as well. Tom said

“Decision makers choose courses of action (including behaviours such as the purchase of particular solutions) that seem most likely to achieve important outcomes.” And “customers use a means end approach to the understanding of choice. In other words, they chase value.”

If we know the problem, we can present the solution in a way that the benefit is seen as truly remarkable.

Customers get really excited by remarkable value.

By introducing the “remarkable notion” we are influencing the targets judgement of the probability of the outcome being desirable, and also we effect the targets mindful value equation. In other words we change the success and value perceptions. Tom Reynolds has done the hard academic yards he has all the backup you could ever want, but there notion is convincing to me primarily because it makes sense. Why wouldn’t decision makers choose actions that maximize the result? Therefore “remarkable” is an effective tool with which to relevantly differentiate our proposition.

Sam Hunter is the author of First Contact, which can be obtained by visiting his site at www.firstcontact.com.au. B2Bbuzz readers can receive a PDF of the book for free by emailing him at sam@firstcontact.com.au.

By Gerhard Gschwandtner

The word manipulation has many meanings. Dictionary definitions range from "artful skill" to "the act of changing accounts to suit one's purpose."

Today we seem to give the word manipulation only one meaning: “To make people do what we want them to against their will or their own judgment." Of course, any action or communication that might antagonize the customer is counterproductive in any selling situation. But does this mean that manipulation should not have a place in selling at all?

Oliver Wendell Holmes once said, "A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanging. It is the skin of a living thought that may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances in which it is used." Words are the tools of the selling trade and their meanings naturally change according to circumstances. Tone of voice, facial expression, emphasis, and emotional intangibles are all in play when a salesperson communicates. Accordingly, how we say something is often more important than what we say.

Take the simple sentence that a salesperson might say to a prospect or customer: "What is it that you would like to think about?" Read this sentence aloud three times in three different ways:

First, emphasize what.

Second, emphasize is it.

Third, emphasize you.

Can you hear and feel the different meanings when you change the emphasis from one word to another? What impact do you think those changes might have on your exchange with the prospect?

Superstars in selling can deliver the same sentence 20 different ways depending on the customer and the situation. They manipulate language in a way that harmonizes with the customer. But they never manipulate the customer.

Salespeople who try to manipulate customers break the rules of ethical conduct and violate the rules of professional selling. But salespeople blessed with artful communication skills have the potential to break sales records.

Gerhard Gschwandtner is the founding publisher of Selling Power magazine and regular host of the Sales 2.0 Conference series. He has trained more than 10,000 salespeople around the world and is a recipient of the Sales & Marketing Executives International, Inc. 2010 Ambassador of Free Enterprise Award. He blogs at blog.sellingpower.com.

By Paul R. Lloyd

What do you do when your customer base disappears and your sales fall through the floor?

Root Causes

Begin by identifying root causes and performing a thorough competitive analysis of industry trends and changes. Find out where the market is going and why you are not keeping customers. Is your market shrinking due to changes in the industry? Or something the competition is doing? Have they introduced a more competitive solution? Have you reduced quality or customer service? Have you increased prices? Or have you kept prices stable while competition has lowered their prices?

Studying the root causes involves taking a hard look at your organization, processes, pricing, and products. What, if anything has changed in the way you sell your products and services?  Talk to your customers. Why are they not buying from you? Products and services have a life cycle. Eventually something comes along to render your best work obsolete.

Revisit your niche and value proposition

Study the niche you serve. Is it still viable? Is the pool of possible customers large enough to support your business? Or has the market shrunk? Be careful with your niche. The tendency is to expand it to reach a wider range of customers.

Most of the time you are better served by narrowing your niche. It’s counter-intuitive, but it usually produces the best result. The more you narrow your niche, the sharper your focus becomes. With a clear, focused message, customers find they can make a quick choice to either select you or move on to someone else.

Confusion is the biggest enemy of effective marketing. With a narrow focus, you minimize the risk of confusing your customers. Confused customers tend to go away, especially if they are visiting your website.

Deliver on your value proposition

How are you doing on delivering what you sell? Check your quality. Test your customer service response. Compare your prices with your competition. Are you promising something you can’t deliver?

Your marketing materials may be implying something that isn’t true. So check your promotional copy for accuracy. Check it again for any implied promises that you are not delivering on. For example, are you unwittingly practicing bait-and-switch tactics with your special offers? What you consider an upsell from a special offer may appear as a rip off to your customers.

In the heat of the competitive bid process, you may make or imply promises that you have no way of delivering on. Make sure your customer has a clear understanding of what they have purchased.

Re-brand and redefine your market

Brands can grow stale, especially in light of bad press, underperformance or other negative issues. Your company has a brand. You can revitalize it through a new corporate image program and marketing campaign. Give your customers a new way of seeing you. Change their focus from your traditional value proposition to a focus on new or different benefits. How are you cheaper, better, or faster than you were before? Emphasize these improvements in your new branding along with the benefits the customer will receive.

Markets change so make sure you are changing with them. Take a hard look at your target market. Describe them in writing. Does your description point you in new directions or suggest prospective customers you may have been overlooking? Who are your customers selling to? And what does that tell you about your customers?

Who are your competitors selling to? Have they found marketplace opportunities in industries you may have overlooked?

Has the industry changed in ways you may have missed? Look at what customers are saying about the way they do business as reported in the trade publications and websites serving their industry.

Are you effectively using online marketing and social networking? The trend for online buying is well established. Business has moved onto the Internet. If you haven’t taken online marketing seriously or if you have been ignoring social networking, you may be losing customers to the new way to do business.

Review these issues to see where you can make changes to better serve your customers. Reach your customers the way they want to be reached – online – or risk losing them.

Often the issue of vanishing customers is a question involving every aspect of your business, not just marketing and sales. It’s a symptom that it’s time to revisit your basic mission and strategy. Instead of being the death knell for your business, it could be the energizing force for leading you in new directions, new opportunities and new revenue streams.

Paul Lloyd is the founder of Zuk-Lloyd Associates, a marketing firm that delivers solutions, develops strategic initiatives and implements them with a flair for the creative. He can be reached at paul@zuklloyd.com

By Alice R. Heiman

Manager: “Jay, how did that sales call go?”

Salesperson: “Great!”

Manager: “Did you close the deal?”

Salesperson: “No, but they love me and they want the product.”

Manager:  “When will it close?”

Salesperson:  “Probably this quarter.”

Sound familiar?  What does this sales manager now know about the sales call his salesperson just finished?  The answer: not much. 

Coaching salespeople when they return from a sales call is important business.  It needs to be done routinely and consistently.  Way too many salespeople “wing it” and others may try to prepare but just really don’t know how to do so effectively. 

Successful sales calls have several ingredients:

1. Pre-call preparation
   
2. Execution
   
3. Post-call assessment
   
4. Follow up on commitments
   

Salespeople should prepare for sales calls.  At a minimum they should look at their call notes from the last call, determine how to make the best use of the time, determine their objective, write down the questions they need to have answered to move the sale forward, and determine the action the customer would need to take to move the sale forward.

The preparation will improve their execution and help insure they don’t forget anything.  It will also make the customer feel like their time is valued and used wisely.

The post-call assessment is critical to ensuring your salespeople will be top performers.  You won’t be able to assess every sales call but intermittently working with salespeople on this is crucial.  These post-call assessments can be very quick and painless.

Here are some questions you could ask:

1. What did you do to prepare for the call?
   
2. What was your objective for the call? 
   
3. What did you do to make good use of the customer’s time?
   
4. What questions did you get answered that tell you where the customer is in the sales process?
   
5. What are the next steps?
   
6. What action did the customer commit to take?
   
7. What action did you commit to take?
   
8. Did the customer give you a close-date?
   
9. What will you do in follow up to this sales call?
   

Another thing this process will help is over-commitment on the part of the salesperson.  Salespeople are quick to promise the world if they think it will close a deal.  That is why questions 6 and 7 are so important.  By asking those questions you can determine if the commitment of the salesperson is comparable to that of the customer.  If it is way beyond, it may be a sign that the salesperson doesn’t understand where the customer is in the sales process.  If the customer doesn’t commit to do anything to move the sale forward, the salesperson may need to change the strategy. 

Managers will have fewer surprises if they make these questions a part of their daily coaching routine.  Benefits will be a shorter sales cycle, more efficient selling and better close ratios.  In the long run, this will lead to more accurate forecasting.

Alice Heiman is the founder and Chief Sales Officer of Alice Heiman, LLC (www.AliceHeiman.com). As a sales expert, Heiman mentors sales executives, transforming them into proactive coaches, while helping management establish a sales culture that will continue to grow the bottom line. Her blog can be viewed at http://smartsalestips.com/

Photo by nocklebeast

By Roger Bostdorff

Recently I was called by a construction company to provide them information regarding helping them create a Strategic Plan. Evidently they are part of a group of contractors across the country and this group suggested that they needed to create this thing called a Strategic Plan.

They called me in as well as another company. After meeting with me for 30 minutes and the other organization for about an hour, they called me to tell me they wanted to work with my company to facilitate their strategic plan.

Many times a strategic plan is created, put in a notebook and left on the shelf to collect dust. However, this is NOT the way I suggest we do it.

First we asked the management team to define their three year goals. This certainly includes sales revenue, but it also could include customer satisfaction, employee morale, market share, etc.  Once these goals are identified we then start working on a SWOT analysis.

A SWOT analysis focuses on the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) of your organization. As this economy becomes more and more global and challenging, we have to do an internal grade card on how our organizations measure up.

How does an organization get started in doing one of these? They take some time away from the day to day grind and go ask themselves the following questions and then discuss and debate the answers.

Strengths-

• What Advantages Does Your Company/Organization Have In the Marketplace?
  
• What Does Your Company Do Better Than Anyone Else?
  
• What Unique or Low Cost Resources Does Your Company/Organization Have Access  To?
  
• What Do Others See As Your Company’s Strengths?
  

• What Could Your Company Improve On?
  
• Where Does Your Company Have Fewer Resources Than Your Competition? (People, $, Manufacturing Capacity, etc.)
  
• What Should Your Company Avoid?
  
• What Are Others Likely to See As Your Company’s Weaknesses?
  

• What Obstacles Does Your Company Face?
  
• What is Your Company’s Competition Doing?
  
• Are The Required Specifications For Your Job, Products or Services Changing?
  
• Is Changing Technology Threatening Your Company’s Position in the Marketplace
  
• Could Any of Your Company’s Weaknesses Seriously Threaten Your Business?
  

• What Good Opportunities Are Open To Your Company?
  
• What Trends Could You Take Advantage of? (i.e. Changes in Age of Population, Lifestyle, etc.)
  
• Looking At Your Company’s Strengths, How Can You Turn These in to Opportunities?
  

Now you are half-way home. If you agree that it is important to understand the SWOT for your organization, then you should also agree that you should do this exercise for your major competitor. If your business is in a market that is growing, then everyone can ride the positive curve. However, if your market is not growing then the only way to grow is to take market share from someone else. In order to do that you need to focus your strengths on your competitor’s weaknesses. 

As you contemplate whether your company has the time, energy, manpower, etc. to spend on this endeavor, let me ask you a question. How will you feel if you discover your major competitor is doing their SWOT right now?

The SWOT analysis is followed by a discussion regarding how you take your strengths to leverage against your opportunities while minimizing your weaknesses and threats. This discussion revolves around how you accomplish your 3-year goals, by first accomplishing your short term goals (1-year goals). We do this by creating specific action plans with completion dates and responsible parties identified. All of these plans are laid out and we establish periodic meetings to insure that the action plans are getting done. Without the follow-up meetings these action plans seem to slide with the challenge of doing the day to day business.

If a company does not have a strategic plan then they typically operate day- to-day and never seem to understand why the company is not growing or accomplishing greater good.  Does your company have a strategic plan? Does your largest competitor have one?

Roger Bostdorff is the President of B2B Sales Boost. He spent over 30 years with IBM in sales and sales management.  B2B Sales Boost is a consulting company helping organizations improve their sales and overall business processes.  You can find more about B2B Sales Boost on the web at www.b2bsalesboost.com or calling 419-351-4347.  If you would like to receive the B2B Sales Boost Newsletter please send an email to sales@b2bsalesboost.com

By Carl Moe

One of the four core process of the Sales Revenue System 2.0 is the Bankable Forecast. Nothing has deflated the hopes of Chief Revenue Officers more than a sales forecast that reads like fiction. Unfortunately, you often don’t know what’s real and what’s fantasy until the end of the quarter when a string of zeros align next to your salespeople’s most promising prospects. However, a reprieve arrives when you are enthusiastically reassured by your sales team that all of the outstanding business is still alive (technically meaning it is not lost… yet) and sure to close sometime this millennium.

When you take a close look at how companies utilize their sales staffs, there are two clear reasons for Zero Visibility Sales Forecasts:

1. Salespeople are allowed to create their own forecast process
   
2. The forecast process aligns perfectly with the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Sales Model
   

You may have sales people who believe that telling you what you want to hear and keeping their job is better than giving you the truth and risking the possibility of having to seek other employment opportunities. These same reps can effectively convince, in Academy Award winning-style, the sales manager and Chief Revenue Officer that they are doing everything possible to bring in their pipeline. The acting scores a ten, but the revenue is still zero.

Flawed sales forecast can produce some sobering consequences:

Missed revenue and margin targets   

Maybe you’ve been surviving okay, meaning the business has been able to turn some profit. But what if a small profit could have been turned into something more substantial? How many real opportunities were missed? Was money left on the table? How many times can you afford to do that? And what if the entire market goes south? When will your current forecast process signal that change?

Mile-high selling costs 

A flawed sales forecast can mask poor sales performance and a string of bad prospects for a long period of time. Without a way to accurately identify real business from virtual business, you’re wasting time and money on ineffective salespeople and/or the wrong prospects.

Can’t get or maintain adequate funding 

This is why your forecast process is so important. When your financing resources no longer believe your projections, you are one step closer to becoming an all cash business unless you can get friends and family with enough net worth to co-sign the guarantees. 

Symptoms of a flawed forecast:

• High probability prospects never close.
  Instead, projected close dates just keep drifting.
  
• End of the quarter bulges.
  Does order production come by way of cave-in pricing to meet quarterly budget goals?
  
• Sales is asking for discounts late in the sales cycle.
  This usually happens because the salesperson skipped a step or two in the sales process, or the prospect wasn’t fully qualified.
  
• No sales forecast definitions.
  You asked your salesperson how s/he arrived at a ninety percent close forecast on a particular prospect and the response was: They are asking a lot of good questions, so they must be really interested!
  
• Too many high-percentage deals in the forecast.
  Sales may be listing hopeful prospects as “real deals” for their “keep my job” forecast.
  
• No forecast audit possible.
  Each salesperson is allowed to create and use his/her own forecast system.
  

By Dion Patrick Kenney
Everyone is talking about Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and, with its explosive IPO performance, LinkedIn.  It is widely recognized as a revolutionary force in communications and for building coherent, connected communities.  By now, nearly everybody has seen YouTube videos that have “gone viral,” reconnected with old friends on Facebook, shared photos on Photobucket and received links to news stories or funny cartoons from co-workers.  And it’s been widely covered how Social Media – Twitter, Google and Facebook in particular – empowered the organization of the Arab Spring.
But to follow the media coverage, you might conclude that Social Media is a phenomenon for primarily for person to person (P2P) interaction, and more recently a marketing phenomenon for consumer-focused (B2C) businesses to tap into all those fashionable young consumers.  Social Media, however, is a revolution of seismic proportion, not merely a temporary fad, that will forever change commerce and business operations, with tremendous implications for business-to-business (B2B) companies.
The underlying power of social media is the concept of the social graph – that ultimately we are all interconnected in a sea of overlapping networks.  The technologies developed and commercialized since 1993 have transformed “Seven degrees of separation” from a mathematical concept (and parlor game, when Kevin Bacon-ized) into a powerful business model for connecting business resources and capabilities.
Ignoring, for the time being, the potential for organizational efficiencies and operational enhancements, and focusing only on relationship building and communications, the power of Social Media is actually more ideally suited to the nature of B2B marketing than to B2C.
Social Networking is first and foremost about engaging audiences and building relationships, i.e. interaction.  Traditional B2C marketing’s focus on advertising, promotion and PR is the antithesis of engagement.  It is instead focused on spending marketing budgets and effort on impressions and click-thru rates.  This is also a pattern, or trap, that B2B marketers can fall into – focusing on crafting clever collateral and forgetting the value of relationship building and prospect interaction.
Credibility and established networks are critical to effective B2B marketing, and also to Inbound Marketing, the term used to describe marketing efforts – such as blogs, SEO and Social Media - that facilitate potential customers finding you.  This compared to traditional marketing, or Interruption Marketing, such as print ads, television ads, telemarketing/cold calls, direct mail/e-mail, etc., whose effectiveness results from intruding on a customer’s activities.
Your social media strategy, efforts and all online information (blogs, posts, videos, tweets, whitepapers, slideshares, employee bio’s, etc.) should be created with a sensitivity to the perspective of a prospect in your marketplace researching vendors.  The old admonition about email messages “never write anything you wouldn’t want to see on the front page of the NY Times” is even more appropriate in the world of Social Media, because unlike yesterday’s front page, everything lasts on the Internet forever!
The second potential Social Media pitfall for the B2B business is to assume that participation is optional.  If a bad online impression is unfortunate, a complete lack of a presence is a terrible, and increasingly fatal, phenomenon.  No website?  You don’t exist.  No LinkedIn profile?  You have no industry experience.  No Slideshare/Tweets/Blogs/Whitepapers?  You have no expertise and nothing to say.
OR … you do exist, have meaningful experience, expertise and something worth hearing, but not the vision or understanding of the game-changing nature of Social Media.  Look how well that approach worked for the governments of Egypt, Tunisia and Libya.
Dion Kenney is a Principal at y2 Strategic Group, a Social Media consulting practice, and can be contacted at dkenney@y2strategic.com.

Photo by Tim Hipps

By Graham  McGregor

“A competitive world offers two possibilities. You can lose. Or, if you want to win, you can change.”

I had a fascinating interview recently with marketing expert Neil Raphel the co-author of one of my favorite business books “Up the Loyalty Ladder.”  

 (Neil was one of over 23 marketing experts in five countries I interviewed for my ‘Unfair
Business Advantage Report.’)
Neil said that when you are competing in business and not doing as well as you would like it’s smart to change how you ‘play the game.’

He shared some great examples of businesses that had changed the way they played the game and were now enjoying amazing sales and profits as a result.

Make a ‘worse’ product and make a fortune...

The first example that Neil gave was the Flip Video Camera.

Flip came along about 10 years ago when all the video cameras were adding extra features, increasing the size of the image they were taking and more.

Yet Flip said, “Why don’t we make a worse camera?”

Let’s take out some of the features that we don’t need. Let’s make it really small, and let’s make the video quality a little worse.

But by doing this they changed the rules of the game for video cameras.

They made a cheaper camera, a smaller camera, a camera you could just plug and play into your computer right away; and they were a remarkable success story because that’s exactly what people wanted.

They really didn’t want more features, the products were too cumbersome and too hard to use. This was very easy. Even your grandmother could use it, and it worked extremely well for the types of videos that most people take.

A publishing firm changes the game:

Neil talked about the publishing industry and how his company has changed the game. The way the publishing industry worked in typical times was they gave the authors a big advance. They then gave the authors a little bit of money when the book sold. They figured they would have about nine failures for every success, but the success would be so big it would pay them back for all the money they had spent.

As Neil explained, those times are over. Many publishing companies haven’t survived. The ones that were doing that are all falling by the wayside.

You can’t have nine failures for one success. So what his company has tried to do in his own publishing business is change the playing field – change the rules.

Neil says to business people wanting to write books, we will be your partners.

“You put up half the money and we’ll put up half the money. You get involved in marketing, we’ll get involved in marketing. And when the money comes in, instead of getting you 8 perent of 10 percent, we will give you 50 percent of the sales.”

So he became partners with his writers, and the writers at the same time had to change the way they thought about things because now they are no longer just writers, they are actually partners in a business relationship.

Neil was delighted to tell me that instead of having nine failures for each success, he now has over nine successes for every failure.

He changed the odds, he changed the rules and he now makes good money with every book his business publishes.

Now this same concept of changing the game can be used in any type of business.

The strategy here is to ask a simple question:

What can I do differently in my business that would make a real difference to my clients and customers?

When you ask this question, you will be amazed at how simple it can be to change the game and get a totally unfair business advantage.

There’s a doctor in Brooklyn, New York, who did exactly this.

Guess what he is doing in his medical practice to be different?

He’s now making house calls.  Nobody makes house calls these days. He’s does it through the internet. Using Skype he puts himself in your house to talk to you and treat you.  He does one office visit to get all your background information but he keeps up with his clients regularly either by walking around Brooklyn and visiting them or doing it through emails and Skype. And he’s doing amazingly well.

Action Exercise:

Write down five things you could change in how you ‘play the game’ in your own business.  Then put into action at least one of these ideas.

Graham McGregor is a marketing consultant and the creator of the Unfair Business Advantage Report. www.theunfairbusinessadvantage.com You can email Graham on graham@twomac.co.nz