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.

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)

Technically you should think and plan for next 12 months.

Think about…

1. What are your goals?
2. What are the key factors that stands against your goals?
3. What are the key factors that’ll help your goals?
4. What is your projected result in next 12 months (In terms of customers, profit, income etc)?
5. What is your core message?
6. What kind of products you are going to sell?
7. How are you going to promote your stuff?
8. What marketing techniques you are going to use?
9. What is your client profile and demographics?
10. What kind of existing products and companies you are competing?
11. How you can utilize a chink in armor of other companies marketing strategy?
12. What kind of media you’ll utilize in generating footfalls?
13. Are you going to use web site as one of the revenue generation tool?
14. 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?

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.

Myth : You need Experience to Charge High Prices

When I started with my freelance business about 9 years ago as a programmer… Something my first client that struck with me…

“You can’t charge high prices, nobody will pay you. Heck you have to work for free few months”.

It pissed me to no end when I heard it, moreover I can’t forget the most villainous look in his eye. Everything told me that I shouldn’t work with this guy… YET, I did it… Guess what, he robbed me on my efforts. He got the software without paying any single penny. Do you believe I was robbed off from 3 months of my effort?

Charging high prices is all about confidence. It isn’t about experience. Its just that with experience you feel like “You’ve arrived” that’s why you are start charging high.

Trust me it doesn’t matter much with experience. A 15 year old computer geek will write the same code as any 40 yr old computer geek. Heck there have been more than few occasions when 15 yrs kicked old guys arse.

Remember : Job Rules Doesn’t Apply to Freelancers

When I started with website designing… I adopted to new policy. 75% of payment first and then I’ll write a single line of code, 25% payment the moment you’ll clear the design. If they are worrying about prices, I’d told them how to get low price websites from college kids but you’ll get what you pay for.

Here’s your option, Get paid like a celebrity in 10 years from now or Get paid like celeb right now, what do you chose? There might be some unseen “getting paid” rule book for companies or getting JOB. but there is None for free lancers.

Ok here’s my secret of charging High…

Rule 1 : Stop Selling Yourself short : Throw all the negativity out the window. When you are talking to client, look directly into his eye and give your doubled price. Have confidence, heck don’t mind letting the confidence crossover to arrogance.

Rule 2 : Stop being an Expert in One thing. One of the biggest drawbacks of being the expert in one thing is that you can’t add-on the value. Let me explain… When I was a web designing, I knew about SEO(search engine optimization)… but never gave it a thought… I was an expert designer.

One day one of my client I was working with talked about SEO and grumbled how expensive they are… Well just for the heck I told him, I know how to do basic SEO and I could help him with SEO… Well to end the story short… I ended up being paid for basic SEO too. It literally doubled my income from that client.

Today If somebody ask me to design a website, I’ll end up selling him SEO service, Internet marketing consultant, copywriting services, blog consulting services and whole enchilada.

Rule 3 : Provide Value instead of service : Ok this might be bit of confusing to you. But read it carefully. Listen, anyone can provide service, but only very few can provide value.

let me explain this by a story : Last summer, I had to meet someone at one of the fast food chain(FFC for short). Now if you know about Indian Summer, its freaking hot. I sweat a lot and when I entered I was dripping wet. The person behind the counter greeted me and said “Its freaking hot today isn’t it?” and gave me paper napkin.

Now this is not something about courtesy. It had more about adding value.  This guy noticed did few things right.
1. Sympathized with my situation
2. Noticed that I wasn’t carrying the handkerchief
3. Gave me napkins and talked to me…

That’s it… If you learn any lesson from this blog post, then learn this… Provide Value instead of service.

Action Plan :
1. Double your price and be confident.
2. Add more expertise under your belt (even if its borrowed expertise or hired)
3. Provide more value.

• Overall market
• Current size as it stands
• Potential size for the future
• Actual penetration of current products/service within the entire market

Individual market segments

• Current size
• Potential size
• Actual penetration of current products/service within the total market
• Usage rates
• Frequency of product purchases
• Growth estimates (current and in the future) for:
• Overall market
• Individual market segments

Competitive Analysis

You must include a Summary of who your Current Competitors are

Listing the competition by market share ranking (by each target market if possible) is a good way to size them up. You can also be more specific by searching for individual points listed below.

Current Competitors – full analysis of top competitors including:

• Products & Services (e.g., description, uniqueness, pricing, etc.)
• Their Market share at current
• Current customers (targeted audience)
• Positioning and promotion strategies
• Partnerships/Alliances/Distributors
• Recent news

SWOT Analysis – Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities & Threats

It is extremely important to focus attention on the SWOT section of this report. While most other information in this report can be gleaned from company and secondary materials, much of what appears in the SWOT section is based on the researcher’s own opinions of the competitor based on the information that is collected.

Consequently, this is often one of the hardest areas of the report to write as well.

Potential Competitors (any competition in the future)

You will need to get an explanation (though it need not be as detailed as Current Competitors) on who they are or maybe and why they are seen as potential competitors

5. Additional

• Extraneous Variables
  Discuss factors that may affect this market (e.g., technological, social, governmental, competitive, etc.)
• Market Trends and what is expected to happen in the future

If you can follow these basic tips for finding and selecting your target market, you should be ready to search online and check out the competition and their rankings in the search engines.

In order to be able to conduct a decent targeting and marketing campaign, you must first understand the fundamentals of finding out who they are. They only way to do this is to follow a specific guideline for you to follow. Check out the guideline below.

1. Your Objective to the Research

Explain in one paragraph why the research is being done, what you hope to learn and for what purpose the information that you attain may be used

2. Description of the Market

This should be general like one paragraph

Who is your Target Market(s)

• Why you chose this particular market
• Get a complete profile of your market (e.g., demographics, psychographics, behaviors)
• What benefits does your market seek (i.e., what points-of-pain or problems are being solved)
• What factors can affect their decision to purchase or use your product/service
• What attitudes do they have about the products/services that are currently not on the market
• How is the product used
• Products and Services that appeal to the target market
• In general terms, what is currently so appealing to this market
• If there are no current providers, what types of products/services may appeal to this market in the future (i.e., what is used now to solve the problem).

If you have been following on my quick & easy way to make money series, then you should be making some serious cash by now. My believe is handling your money problems with some quick part time job like this can be really helpful for work at home moms, students.

In today’s series on making money on the side, we’ll deal with some internet opportunity. Now you can all take this lightly or another scam or you can work on this serious. The choice is yours. The only thing that’ll be holding you back is your fear. Your fear of rejection (calling or contacting all the business owners, its scary thought, I know I went through this)

Ok enough of rants. Here’s the todays formula. It deals with Skype, Your local business owners and some of your charm. Don’t worry if you are not a poster boy/girl. I’ll give you enough tips to get through this idea.

Well, to start off, you need a list of business owners. You can get it either from your Local Yellow pages or walk around 5 miles radius from your place and talk to each and every single business there.

You are going to tell them that you can help generate more leads and loyal customers without spending any money on the advertisement. If they are interested, then you can give your idea.

Of course, any business owner who doesn’t want more loyal customers is insane. So they’ll ask for your bright idea.

You’ll explain how educating their customer about their business will help them grow.

You’ll explain how relating and talking  with their customers will create relationship, increase trust in their business.

You’ll explain how this will make them as an Instant expert in their customers eyes for their market.

and so on… Again. You need to prepare a complete speech for this. Think of all the benefits you can if business owners interact with prospects.

Now, you’ll introduce yourself as a Expert Interviewer whose job is to interview important people in the market. You’ll tell them how you can use Skype and create a series of questions which you’ll ask them with a live audience and then this teleseminar will be like a live sales pitch going out to hundreds of prospects.

You’ll have to tell them, how he/she can differentiate their business on live teleseminar like this and generate more loyal customers.

The Only DrawBack: is when the business man is not into speaking. In these cases just tell them, you’ll be interviewing them on phone and there’s going to be no pressure on them to perform or You can ask his/her best salesman and help promote their business.

How much you can charge? You can charge anywhere from $600 – $1000 per interview. You can include a copywriting job for classifieds in this price. And rest is your efforts in interviewing them.

Now if you don’t know how to use skype to set up teleseminars, then Try out my Skype Secrets and Teleseminar Basics package.

To prepare for the interview. You should write out all the questions and give them to the business owners. Tell them to prepare on these questions. Give them direction that it’ll be more or less these questions paraphrased by you in interview. That’s it.

This is a technique that you can use it starting right now to make some serious cash.

Well if you are If you are a freelancer and want to start make some cash fast & easy, then this article might suit you. What I am going to show is not theory or just something I just made up while I was trying to write this post. I am going to give you 2 ways by which people have already implemented successfully.

I am going to give you to the point methods to generate fast cash. You’ll love these ideas if you work on it. If you don’t, well, I can’t help it then…

1. Making Money With Yellow Pages Fast and Easy. This is one technique I know quite a few copywriters implemented when they were short on cash (and experience). Here’s what you should be doing…

Open up your Yellow Pages: Check out any business that you’d like to work with (or know about). Now notice their ads. If you know copywriting 101, then you can recognize good ads from bad ones. If you want some basic Copywriting 101 then check out my earlier post on Advertising 102: How to sell more from your classified ads.

Chances are most ads are in pretty bad shape. This is your gold mine.

Now this is what you are going to do…

You are going to write a letter to these business owners. Write 3-5 tips on how they can improve their yellow pages ad and get more leads for their business. You are going to introduce yourself as a yellow pages copywriter.

Tell them how they are spending money on pretty graphics and color.

Tell them how they are wasting their ad space with nothing but big white spaces. You can write a yellow page ad which address the problem of their clients and generate more leads from their yellow pages ads.

Tell them how if they differentiate themselves from others will increase their chances of getting more calls.

All you need to do is write 10 letters to these business owners daily. In a week, you’ll be dealing with few of those. Then all you need to do is talk about how their ads can improve.

Here’s a Secret TIP: Never Ever Talk about yourself. Talk about them, their business, their clients etc… Sell them on themselves.

Another Power tip To increase cashflow for you: Do you know yellow pages publishing schedule is different for different states? Now this can be problem for you. But worry not, as I am here.

Here’s what you do, you just find business owners from other states and contact them. With internet everything is possible. Contact is dirt cheap. Use skype to contact them for free. But that’s not what I want to tell you in this tip.

You see, tell these business owners about classified ads. How you can help improve their calls just from classified ads. Basic copywriting 101 still works. If you can’t get yellow pages, try out classified ads job. I know its hard sell. but You don’t have much of a choice, Do you?

How much you should charge to generate cash fast? If you ask me, charge somewhere between $500 – $800 per yellow page ads. and about $400 for a small classified ads. If you get 1 job per week, you are set. Isn’t that right?

I’ll add second technique on how to making fast and easy money on the internet in another post. Take my suggestion and try this advice. It’s not that hard.

How do you market when chips are low? You think smarter than other guys. Here are few ideas to get your brains in gear.

Referrals : This is what you call “Words of Mouth” Marketing. People talk about you and you get business. But How do you get people talking about you? Isn’t that pain to think about it?

Yesterday I was doing an extensive consultation with a client. His Jaw dropped when I explained Referral Strategy for his business. There was nothing new about it (at least not to me). This strategy was very simple. Contact Existing clients and give them reason (incentive) to talk about his services.

I had him create 3 different lists of his clients/ New clients and prospects. Now you have to approach all of them with a different message to provide him referral.

For example here’s what I do, when someone consults me, I give them 2 Free Critiques Coupon of their advertisements (that’s $700 worth). They can use their first critique without any obligation. But If they need a second one, They’d have to provide this free coupon to their friends/colleagues or business partner, Only then their 2nd coupon will be valid.

Now after consulting with me and critique, often business owners want to get that free critique as its not just sham, the critique is real deal. It’s helping me generate business.

Email Signature: This is so simple that even experts miss them. How many e-mail messages do you send everyday?  You’re probable missing out on a simple, inexpensive marketing tool.  Seize the opportunity to promote your business to a highly targeted market without spending a dime by utilizing your e-mail signature line.

If your email signature line only contains your name and contact information, you’re missing out on advertising to e-mail recipients that have opted for communications from you.

These people are key members of your unofficial marketing network.  They are your prospects, clients, press contacts and colleagues and your signature line is the perfect, unobtrusive space for a unique promotional pitch.

Try these tactics to turn your “sign-offs” into sales:
?    Highlight what your company offers.
?    Offer an incentive for recipients taken a specified action.
?    Use the associated web address for the incentive, if it’s also on your site.
?    Give better visual positioning to the promotion rather than contact info.
?    Play with eye-catching fonts and colors.
?    Use less than 64 characters/line so that words don’t wrap to a new line.
?    Write a “signature” for different categories of recipients.
?    Change your signature copy frequently.
?    Never miss a chance to get your product or company noticed.

White Paper Writing:  This one is so underused and misunderstood technique, its unbelievable. Now Another thing you can do is create a white paper on some important topic in your niche.

You can always highlight the Obvious problems in your industry. You can always talk about changing trend in the industry. Again the Idea is to have a reason why people should ask for this document.

Now whenever a prospect calls, you can give this white paper away for free to educate them about your services and industry. This is good way to differentiate yourself from your competitors.

How much time it takes to write a White Paper? Well, not much actually. You don’t need to write a complete bible on the topic. All you need is good 4-6 pages of content and you are set. I can crank out 6 pages in about an hour. It’ll take couple of days, if you are really bad.

So what I am saying is You can always market your business when chips are down. If you are not doing it, you are just playing games.