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How to execute a Dream 100 prospect strategy
Remember the 80/20 rule: 20 percent of buyers will bring you 80 percent of your revenue. Focusing on the 20 percent will always bring you a greater impact, and it's also much more cost effective. Your top “100” prospects might be only 25 people or it might be 250, but it's always cheaper to go after the best and most influential buyers rather than all the buyers.
This target group needs to hear from you once a month – at a minimum. Most of the people on the list will probably throw your letter away the first four or five times they get it, but remember that you're committed to building a reputation, not simply getting clients. First, send them a letter introducing yourself and offer them something free. Then you're going to continue to contact them every month and you use that opportunity, not just to sell, but to show that you're the industry authority.
One of your top prospects might become your customer for life. How would that change things for you? Keep up the campaign and you may land several new customers over the year. The key is repetition.
- By Phil Gilkes, FocalPoint Business Coach and Trainer
Beating the Summer Business Blues with Proactive Planning
It’s summer. You and your employees need a break. Unfortunately, many of your customers are also taking vacations and that means slower sales and a sluggish cash flow. But with effective planning, you can beat the summer blues.
Take a Break – It’s Good for Your Health. Research shows that taking a break from work actually makes you perform at a higher standard. So take that break, get inspired and refreshed, and come back ready to move mountains.
Stagger Staff Vacations. Ask workers to schedule their vacation time in January of each year. Proclaim that all leave is allocated on a first-come, first-served basis. Stagger your daily staffing schedule during summer. Offer holiday work incentives and support telecommuting.
Peek Into Your Customers’ Plans. Ask customers about their plans. Wish them a happy summer and see if they know their needs for the next few months.
Plan Your Inventory. Negotiate upfront with your suppliers and ensure that you have adequate stock throughout the summer.
Run a Special Promotion. A special offer, promotion or discount also gives you an excellent opportunity to make contact with clients and increase awareness before everyone disappears for the season.
How to increase employee productivity by building a strengths-based culture
Employees who know – and use – their strengths are six times more likely to be engaged with their work than others. Getting to the point of having your staff utilize their strengths requires a framework that makes it possible, by:
1. Picking the Right People. Selecting the right fit, personality, skills and motivational factors can help you get the right fit for your job and culture. You don't have to rely "on your gut feel" totally, there are proven ways to hit the mark. At Focal Point we use validated assessments with our clients, including for hiring and training. We have a certified assessment expert and trainer on staff who works with us and our clients to help us apply the right assessment and interpret it properly.
2. Setting Clear Goals and Expectations. Identify the abilities your staff members have, match them to company goals and then assign responsibilities accordingly.
3. Develop Ownership and Accountability. Great work comes from doing what you love and applying your strengths in creative ways. You can’t force ownership to happen, but you can encourage it by creating an environment in which it will flourish.
4. Recognize and Reward Excellence. In an accountable organization, employees expect to be called out when they don’t deliver and rewarded when they do.
5. Create Development Opportunities. If you truly want to get – and keep – great employees, it’s essential to create the right opportunities for them.
Content Marketing: 5 Powerful Data Visualization Tools You Absolutely Need to Discover
Irresistible content is crucial to keeping your audience engaged with your brand and data can be a powerful tool in achieving this…when it’s understandable and not boring.
If you want to see your social media shares skyrocket, here is a selection of powerful data-visualization tools you need to check out:
- LiveStories lets you create engaging visualizations from your spreadsheets and provides access to its own databases.
- StatTrends
- DataHero lets you integrate data from multiple platforms, including MailChimp, SalesForce, HubSpot, and Shopify.
- Vizzlo allows you to easily create data visualizations for your website or social media channels. Choose what type of chart you want to create, add/import your data, and watch your creation magically appear before your eyes.
- Dataseed is another top tool for brand builders. Its handy interface lets you create data-rich visualizations perfect for sharing on social media and in your content marketing blog posts.
Thanks to terrific tools like these, marketers no longer have to rely just on photographs or videos to provide eye candy for their content.
What Kids Can Teach You About Selling
Recently, I was talking to one of my brothers about his attempt to teach his granddaughter how to ice skate. He had taken her out a few times to the local skating rink; she was making progress, but slowly.
Then one day she saw a young boy pushing off the edges of his skates and building up real speed. This gave her a clear vision of what she needed to do and how to do it.
It reminded me of how we need to learn from others and what I once learned from a drilling fluids salesman. He was frustrated with an engineer prospect who he couldn’t make any headway with. Then he heard about another salesperson’s success and got an idea.
Find out how a lesson in ice skating success helped that salesman land a big account by re-framing a situation from a perceived negative to a clear positive when you read the full article.
Your Online Reputation Can Launch or Torpedo Your Business
Bridle the Internet Beast and Make it Work for You
(Our In-Depth Article This Month)
Today, retailers must protect their brands by responding appropriately to negative reviews, promoting positive ones, and posting helpful information for an Internet-connected public.
Hersh Davis-Nitzberg, a Beverly Hills, California-based consultant suggests letting a few key principles guide your actions. The first is to realize that building a great reputation means more than responding appropriately to negative reviews. “You need to do more than just repair damage that is done online,” he says. “You also need to create a positive image for your brand.”
You need to know which social media are preferred by your customers, monitor your mentions, and respond appropriately and thoughtfully. Setting up a Google alert for your business name is one good way to get started.
Avoid the temptation to ignore the negative review. A lack of response makes a terrible impression on the public. People will think, “That retailer does not care about taking care of customer problems.” At the same time, avoid a knee jerk response.
When problems arise, you can take the “spat” offline, exchanging emails or talking on the phone. But if you do, be sure to post the resolution online so others can see the positive outcome.
Is Your Family Business Prepared for Transition?
When the time comes for a new generation to take control of your family business, will the process go smoothly? One way to find out is to take the quiz below. Give yourself 10 points for every “yes” answer.
- Have you established a structured plan to transition your business to a new generation of ownership?
- Has each family member communicated a personal vision of their role in a business transition?
- Have all family members bought into a shared business vision?
- Are all members of the junior generation involved in some way with the business?
- Has each member of the junior generation begun a program of education to meet the needs of his or her desired role in the transitioned business?
- Has a role been established for the senior generation in the business transition?
- Have you considered the use of non-family interim managers?
- Have you established a system to provide career satisfaction for valued non-family employees who might be shut out of advancement into management positions?
- Have you shared your transition plans with interested third parties such as customers, vendors and bankers?
- Have you a solid understanding of the financial requirements (including any requisite funding for buy-outs and taxation) for a successful transition to new ownership?
Total your scores, then rate your transition readiness on the following scale:
- 90-100: Congratulations! You are well on your way to a smooth ownership transition.
- 70-80: You have addressed your needs for a successful transition and need to do some final paving on the road ahead.
- Less than 70: Time to preserve the future of your enterprise by taking productive steps toward a smooth transition to a new generation.
Grow Your Business Fast Using Another Company’s Clients!
Today you’re going to learn how to find a target market of potential customers so you aren’t wasting precious resources on trying to find more customers using hit and miss blitz marketing programs. There is an more effective strategy and there are only two questions you have to ask yourself to take advantage of it are:
- What do people really want to buy from me?
- What related products are they already buying?
Learn how to find potential customers without wasting precious resources on hit-and-miss blitz marketing programs. There is a more effective strategy and the only two questions you have to answer to take advantage of it are:
- What do people really want to buy from me?
- What related products are they already buying?
With these answers, you can find other businesses with the same customer base that you can customer share with. You then strike up a relationship with those business owners to work out an incentive for customers to purchase from both businesses.
The trick is to make sure you’re getting enough lifetime value from these new customers to justify your incentive. Here’s the formula for figuring that out: LV = (P x F) x N – MC.
- LV is the life time value of a customer
- P is the average profit margin from each sale
- F is the number of times a customer buys each year
- N is the number of years customers stay with you
- MC is the marketing cost per customer (total costs/number of customers)
If you need help working through this process, check out our FREE test drive for the most comprehensive system of marketing tools and resources.
- By Coach Phil Gilkes
Saving the Family Business: How to Balance People and Profits
Too few family businesses survive into the second and third generations of ownership because the emotions of family members conflict with the demands of the bottom line.
Consider, for example, the damage that results when siblings compete for the position of company president. Sadly, parents often opt to ignore these issues.
“There needs to be a shared understanding of the purpose of the business, beyond just making money. People who possess a shared vision will be willing to make the necessary tradeoffs,” says Kathyann Kessler Overbeke, principal of GPS: Generation Planning Strategies.
Further, “Consideration has to be given to not just family members but all stakeholders,” says Paul Karofsky, Founder of Transition Consulting Group. “That means in-laws, bankers, suppliers, customers, and the cadre of non-family employees who are impacted by any business decision.” It may well be unclear if the second generation is capable of taking on the reins of management, or if they might be able to do the job with some additional education.
“The transition needs to be an exceedingly cautious, well played out scenario,” says Karofsky. Time must also be sufficient to recruit where necessary, to assess candidates, to create professional development plans, and to help the senior generation move to roles of significance.
Read the article's in-depth advice on what you need to address and resolve to keep the family business afloat - and in the family.
Winning in Life and Business: Understanding The Right Ratio of Attitude, Skill and Knowledge
I received a call from a client in the oil and gas drilling sector. He asked me how I was doing; I think he was expecting me to go down the “ain’t it awful” rabbit hole.
I answered, “It’s never been a better time to be in business, granted maybe not so great in the oil and gas exploration business these days, but in the business performance coaching and training profession it surely is.”
I talked with him about the Carnegie Triangle and how it identified the common traits of highly successful people in virtually every endeavor: skill, knowledge and attitude.
The Carnegie report said that 85 percent of a person’s success is due to interpersonal skills or attitude; only 15 percent of their success is the result of technical knowledge or skills. This 15 percent was split in half between knowledge and skills at 7.5 percent each.
Attitude plays the biggest part in the effectiveness for all of us. A good attitude equals a better life. You can train for skill and educate for knowledge, but if your attitude is negative you are not going to be able to have sustained change.
- by Coach Phil Gilkes