6 Sales Leaks that are robbing you behind your back
6 Sales Leaks that are robbing you behind your back part –1.
Recently when I was talking to a business owner and we started discussing how his sales team is performing. When I had a look at his team, I noticed simple mistakes that often creeps up on you (or your sales guy) without knowing about it.
The issue is that often this leads to leaving lots of money and business on the table and we don’t know about it. Not to say that I never made this kind of mistake but it’s often easier to take a look at other business than your own from very objective point of view.
Today in this 6 part article series, I am going to talk about…
How to remove these profit leaks from your sales system?
One of the major blunder or profit leak is “Not understanding what your customer wants”.
I’ve seen this sales leak in mostly service providers. The more services you provide, chances are higher of your making this mistake.
If you are not taking care of this, then you’ll find that you are trying to shove your product or service down the customer throats.
It’s like you have a hammer and you are using it to fix everything.
When you create packages that you are going to provide, you’ll make this mistake. Why am I so sure?
Simply, because when you have a product or service package you want to sell and you’ll try to fit your package or service to every prospect you meet. As you get more experienced and to handle this issue, you subconsciously create more packages and more services.
What’s the end result of doing that?
You end up try to do too much and spread thin yourself in many areas. Then you start hiring more people and give them training and it all starts cutting down on your profit. Then you produce more packages and the cycle goes on and on.
Yikes, scary thought. Isn’t it?
How can you avoid doing this simple mistake and end the Cycle of No profit and leakage?
First step is to don’t decide initially what product suits your clients. Don’t day dream about this at all.
Second step is to build a questionnaire for your client. This questionnaire should have as many question as need to help you and your prospective client make the right decision.
Take notice of your customer’s concern, fears, thoughts and most immediate need.
And then you provide them the solution (again, don’t try to hammer it and give your package).
For example, Just couple of days ago, I had a talk with a Webmaster and Internet marketer. He need and wants were something that I could provide, but I would waste lot of time doing the set up and necessary stuff (it was related to SEO).
Within 10 minutes I realized this and confirmed it with him. Then I told him, I can give this service to him but I won’t be completely honest with it, so he should trying going for XYZ company (that I recommended).
Now in this above scenario, I could have spend another 20-30 minutes discussing and find some way to sell it to him but in long term that would have been a bad idea for me. I have to talk to my SEO team and give them additional training and provide set up just for one guy.
His needs were different and I wasn’t ready for it.
In less than 10 minutes I made this decision. Remember I don’t want to follow the endless cycle of spreading myself thin and then losing control of it.
So, you have to spend some time understanding what your client wants and then decide what is the right option. Hammering everything you see is not the right approach for it.
Hot, Fresh productivity delivered in 10 minutes…
Last year I suffered from burn out and didn’t touched my blogs websites for 7 months. I knew I was working harder, I knew I was going to burn out but I never quit. Of course as you can guess, my business suffered.
If your are the major decision maker in your business, it makes your accountable for everything that happens. Being an entrepreneur is a High burnout job (even more than telemarketers, they can quit their jobs, we can’t).
Then I started finding better ways to improve my productivity without any burnout.
I literally exhausted myself again but this time finding way to help myself… cheh…
Then Eben pagan came to my rescue. He was recommended to me by a good friend of mine. And I took his advice and started following a simple method to improve productivity.
It’s called 60-60-30/50-10
The above numbers are all about how much work you do and then how you take a rest
First 3 numbers 60-60-30 are your work times
You are going to work for 2 and 1/2 hour block.
With every block of 60, you’ll work at 50 minutes and 10 minute break.
So you are taking break at every 50 minutes of work.
Taking these many breaks have changed the way I do things.
Those 10 minute breaks are life saver.
Remember when I am talking about 50 minutes of work, that means un-interrupted work of high quality. You just cannot check your emails, receive calls or do umpteen number of useless things.
When you get focused you produce better quality. When you get Take regular break, you become one of the rarer person who walks on high ground (err… kidding).
What you do in these 10 minutes is completely up to you.
Just do not lie down… it’s better if you move around a bit.
One thing that can help you in getting focused is Derek Franklin’s Action Machine. Put Your Own List and Add how much time you are going to spend doing each activity and Let the machine go. Take any task you’ve been putting off, give yourself 30 minutes to get it done, start your timer, and watch what happens. Click Here to get Action Machine.
For now enjoy this Dilbert comic strip (Photo Credit Segfault)
Business Map – Your Business strategy.
If you are starting your own business. You have to create a business map. Business map is just another name for creating a business plan. It’s just that Map is easily accessible and understood than a complicated plan.
Technically you should think and plan for next 12 months.
Think about…
- What are your goals?
- What are the key factors that stands against your goals?
- What are the key factors that’ll help your goals?
- What is your projected result in next 12 months (In terms of customers, profit, income etc)?
- What is your core message?
- What kind of products you are going to sell?
- How are you going to promote your stuff?
- What marketing techniques you are going to use?
- What is your client profile and demographics?
- What kind of existing products and companies you are competing?
- How you can utilize a chink in armor of other companies marketing strategy?
- What kind of media you’ll utilize in generating footfalls?
- Are you going to use web site as one of the revenue generation tool?
- How you’ll get traffic to your web site?
This is just a small list of questions that you should be asking yourself and trying to find answers for.
You should at least study for “Core Message”, “Client Profile and Demographics”, “Analyzing your Competition” and “Your major marketing strategy”. All of this will help you create your “USP – Unique Selling Proposition”. USP can play a major part in your business success.
You should remember this is work in progress. As you start working and growing your business, chances are you’ll change the main profile and strategies. These are not written in stone, so don’t worry about them. This is just a good start up profile you should at least study.
Why Your Websites are waste of time and money
You just got your website built. You are excited, and waiting for orders to roll in… After 4 hrs… Nothing… after 24 hrs still nothing… You get up next with enthusiasm and again wait for orders to roll in. Yet NOTHING…
WHY?
Did it ever occurred to you that your websites might be waste of time and money? For 98% of websites, I can tell without even looking at the websites, why they are not making any money for you.
But you spent thousands of dollars for that dream design and another thousands of dollars for Search engine optimization and blah blah blah…
1. Designers are nothing but tech nerds.
Now I know I might take flak on this statement but its more than often true. How can I say, well I use to be one of those designers 7 years ago. We were proud of our websites that we built. We were proud of things we could make those websites do. If you asked for a snazzy flash application, you’d get it. If you asked for a unique widget, you’d get it and plus some more.
In the end, it comes down to whether or not your website is making any money. When you want to get a website up, you have one goal. Often that is, either to sell or to generate leads or may be share information.
Let me say, designers are good at what they are doing. Often they are too good. That’s why you often need a full time Designer (as a programmer we hate touching other people’s code no matter how easy to use it is), a SEO expert and marketing & conversion expert to get your websites going and selling.
2. Too good to be TRUE SEO Expert
Though I don’t claim to be SEO expert or even try to pretend it on forums. But one thing I know SEO is one market full of pretenders. Of course when people see how much money is in this market, they instantly become SEO experts.
So beware, if someone is selling you something too good of a offer. There are no guaranteed top ranks. There is no magic software or super secret technique. Its pure effort and sheer marketing that can get you to top.
And trust me it doesn’t come easy or cheap. I only know handful of people who are at that level and I can count them on my hand. After creating & promoting 100′s of sites and blogs SEO comes like a second nature to me, I can say that for sure.
So what options do you have left?
Understand if you are treating website as just a handful of pages on internet or just another medium of promotion, you have to change you attitude. Website is a full time business. It’ll help you to learn the basics of Marketing and promoting your site. It’ll help you to learn the basics of SEO so that you don’t get cheated by SEO pretenders.
In this blog you’ll find many post related to marketing, conversion, design and everything related to promoting your website and business. You can read through it and don’t be shy in dropping me a mail and asking question. I do reply personally and often pretty quick.
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