Keys to Small Business Sales Success
A small business constantly worries about where its next client is coming from. Without dedicated sales people typically, most entrepreneurs generate leads themselves amidst their multitude of other business functions including servicing existing client accounts. Often without professional sales experience, the small business owner (myself included) would be remiss to turn away some helpful tips on how to sell effectively. With this in mind, I took some time to interview a proven sales professional.
Following is my interview with Kenneth Barns, founder of Breaking the Sales Bottleneck (BTSB) Consulting (www.breakingthesalesbottleneck.com):
Kevin: What sales challenges do you see the small business owner facing most prevalently today?
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B2B Branding with PowerPoint
Branding is an imperative in business today if you intend to make your company stand out from the crowd. Many businesses (large or entrepreneurial) take this to mean a slick logo or a graphically pleasing website. These promotional/branding mechanisms are important and should be considered, however, one of my personal favorite means of branding a business and its offerings (primarily applicable for business-to-business organizations serving other businesses) is to leverage the PowerPoint medium. The ability it affords for you to develop and display graphical models/images that speak volumes about your business and the value your products and services provide, make this medium a true winner in my eyes.
Personally, through my many years of PR/Marketing/Branding experience, I have come to realize the true power of a company capabilities/sales presentation that tells prospects, investors, partners and even employees who the business is and why its products and services should be considered for purchase. I have developed countless capabilities presentations using PowerPoint and have come to rely on an eight slide format that works for any organization, regardless of size, marketplace, etc. The slides include:
1. Business challenge - Talk about the challenges your clients and prospects face that lead them to search for solutions like the ones you offer
2. Your value proposition – In business value (rather than product features) terms, describe how your solutions (product and services) solve the problems described in slide 1
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The Power of Business Partnering
Regardless of the size of your business or the industry you operate in, aligning your business with complimentary organizations that can help you expand your reach and even your set of offerings can be a highly effective way to succeed, especially if you are a small business with limited resources.
Business partners can serve a multitude of purposes in the course of a mutually beneficial relationship. Here are several examples:
1. Help you expand and round out your set of offerings – if you’re a law firm and want to also offer a lower-end “product”, you can align yourself with a pre-paid legal services firm, for example
2. Expand your reach and penetration into new customer segments and markets – if you have a small firm operating in the U.S. and can find a viable, complementary partner in the U.K., for example, you can tap international market segments without having to physically expand into the region.
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Is Your Brand Brawn Enough?
A carefully developed brand is similar to a carefully sculpted physique. It must be honed and sculpted to meet desired goals. Like a body builder, a brand needs to be proportionally shaped from top to bottom. In the world of Marketing this boils down to whether or not your brand identity is built with enough brawn to shoulder your foreseeable growth. You don’t want to get to the point where you have to play a desperate game of catch-up with your brand’s new-found ubiquity.
Like everything else in life and business, why not prepare for it while you still have time?
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The Power of Proofing in Personal and Professional Communications
When I was in college I took a journalism course called Editing. The key nuance of the class was that your grade on any writing assignment weighed heavily on how error-free your work was. For ever misspelled word or grammatical error, you lost 25% of your score. This is the true point in my life when I decided it made no sense to write anything at all that was overtly incorrect in any manner. I’m not one of those people that write personal emails to family and friends and don’t even take the time to press the “shift” key to make a capital letter at the start of the sentence. These people kill me. I mean what does it say about you as a person if you are that lazy that you can’t even properly express yourself in the written form? The same thing goes for incomplete sentences and missing punctuation like a period.
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The Elements Of An Effective Marketing Plan
I believe one of the single most critical components to any comprehensive business plan is the Marketing section. I mean, regardless of how great your product or service is, no one will buy it if you can’t effectively target and reach your prospective customer base.
In my many years of PR and Marketing Communications, I have developed countless Marketing Plans for businesses of all types, sizes and at different stages of growth – from the fresh start-up to the established bellwether that is launching a new campaign. From these experiences, I have learned that a carefully researched, planned and executing Marketing strategy is imperative to the success of any business.
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You Cannot Brand Your Business in a Vacuum
Branding is something you must do with your eyes looking forward, behind you and side-to-side at the competition, customers, partners and other industry forces. While your brand does describe the essence of your business and your solutions, it must be based largely on carving out differentiation in the marketplace you are playing in. You may claim to have the fastest widgets in the industry and base your branding largely on that fact. Well, what happens when your competition trumps you with something even faster? You’re entire brand essence is shattered. After all, you would no longer be the fastest.
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