Oct 6, 2014 | Marketing
“I don’t generate leads, all my business is word of mouth”. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard this response from business owners when asked how they generate leads. “Word of Mouth”, otherwise known as a referral, is one of the best sources of leads, but one you can’t take for granted.
Referrals are one of the most powerful way to generate leads in the world. It is a cheap and very effective, not to mention, extremely desirable situation when people start spreading the word for you.
If you are already getting referrals, it means you are probably offering exceptional value and service. But you can get much more business out of referral leads by using a purposeful, specific program designed to generate referral leads.
Step One: Ask!
Your satisfied customers, happy employees and devoted friends/family will want you to succeed in your business endeavors. But don’t sit back and wait for them to take action. Set up a program with specific timing, offers and sequence. Ask your customers if they are happy. If they are, ask if they know of other like-minded customers who have interest in your products or services. Make an offer that will entice them to take action. People like being viewed as having knowledge or expertise. If you help them do that by recommending your product or service, most are usually willing to help you.
When asking for referrals in your network, be specific. For example, ask them, “I am looking for people interested in getting in better health through new exercise programs”, or “My ideal client is a retail business owner with revenues between $1 million and $10 million.”
- Identify a number of potential referral sources for the next year.
- Schedule a lunch/breakfast with each referral, each month.
- That will result in 12+ meetings and exponentially more new business contacts.
Step Two: Hints and Tips
- Be specific with rewards; for example give someone who introduces his or her friend to your yoga studio with a free one week membership, or it could even be a “finder’s” fee paid in the form of a gift voucher.
- Offer a reward that is simple, easy to administer and clear, so people know exactly what they get for a referral.
- Be very generous with those who spread the word. Consider what you would have to spend on advertising to get the same results.
- Talk to other businesses that complement yours’ (ie; workout clothes or juice bar if you own a yoga studio). There are great opportunities to do a little reciprocal referring.
- Test and Measure, as always!
Test & Measure:
Just like any program designed to generate leads, make sure you are tracking the source of your referrals. Knowing where your customers come from gives you the power to make smart decisions about what to spend your marketing money on and where to further cultivate your referral system.
Hints and Tips:
- Keep meticulous records of where all leads come from and how much those customers spend.
- Monitor how well every single product sells, and WHY it’s selling.
- Keep running a referral program that works, even if YOU are bored of it.
The key is not taking referrals for granted and rewarding those who are your best ambassadors.
To learn more about how to generate leads and referral program marketing, join ActionClub starting next week on Oct 14, 2014.
Sep 29, 2014 | Sales, Self
Do you really know how to motivate yourself? Do you struggle with making deadlines? Do you feel burnt out and tired all the time? Do you frequently put tasks off? These are some signs of being unmotivated. Below are four key ways to help you motivate yourself. When you’re motivated you are more on top of your priorities and feel good about yourself and your work. Try these motivation tips to better yourself and your work.
1) Make time psychology work for you. If you have ever taken a time management course before, you have learned how to pack more into less. But have you ever noticed how difficult it is to leave a project or job incomplete? You can play on this psychology of completion by writing out a “things to achieve” list before you go home at the end of the workday. Chances are if you don’t have a good system for picking up exactly where you left off, it’s like starting over. Tonight, instead of just tidying up before you leave the office, lay out the pieces where you need to pick up to get off and running first thing in the morning.
2) Give yourself daily and hourly goals. Very few of us have the ability to stay disciplined all the time. Yet studies have shown that a big difference between those who succeed and those who fail is constant and concentrated activity. Big hitters report such behaviors as not taking lunch until they make a pre-set number of phone calls. They don’t allow themselves to play golf until they sell a certain number of units. Sure they make sacrifices. But in the meantime they also make sales. Most who practice this method of self denial say that when they do earn a lunch or a golf game, the taste is very sweet when linked to successfully accomplished activity.
3) Make selling a game. When you take your work too seriously, it becomes drudgery instead of enjoyment. Most top producers mention that their income takes a back seat to how much fun they have on the job. Interestingly, many poor producers look at their paycheck as being the biggest motivator. The problem is that your sales production will fluctuate. Try “playing” more often with your best customers. Send out birthday cards to prospects or customers you care about. Turn sales calls into a game by counting how many times you have to get a “no” before you get to a “yes”. Then make a game out of getting to that “no” number, knowing that a “yes” is just on the horizon.
4) Burn out is a key factor in maintaining motivation. A great way to avoid the symptoms of burn out is to link rewards to activity instead of success. This idea is a bit contrary to most opinion that you must set goals (and I agree!). But to change things up, and avoid killing motivation because you didn’t hit a goal, try giving yourself a reward for activity. A great way to create motivation is to give yourself a reinforcement gift that comes as a result of superior effort. If you maintain it consistently, effort always results in success!
For more great ideas on motivation and other topics, join the ActionClub program.
Sep 24, 2014 | Sales
Does your business use a defined sales process? If not, you’re not alone, but you’re also not getting everything you could from your sales team or your investment in marketing. If we want customers to buy from us, it’s only logical that we understand the best way to help them do it. Sales is nothing more than professionally helping people to buy. In order to help people “professionally” its vital to use a consistent process with the key steps clearly detailed for the sales team to apply to ensure greatest likelihood that more customers will buy.
An outline of the main steps of a defined sales process is as follows:
You can use this basic framework as the basis for any sales team to generate more sales. You’ll want to modify it to suit your own business, and add the important details that determine real success. By working through each of these steps the sales team can adapt the best practices for them, whether in a retail shop, services or product business, tailoring each process to meet their customers’ needs. For instance, in a clothing shop the “demonstration” step would be encouraging more customers to try on the clothes whereas, for a professional services firm the demonstration may take the form of known third-party testimonials, case studies or even site visits.
The key is to have a defined series of steps with detailed processes within each step, leading the customer through each step so that their needs are clearly defined while building on their desire to buy. A good sales process will not only lead to more sales, but more profit and more satisfied customers. For more help on developing your own sales process, get in touch with me today!
Sep 15, 2014 | Systems
I just finished reading The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande which is an intriguing book that makes the case that one can improve any discipline with the use of checklists. Gawande is a surgeon, so most of his examples are in the medical field and he has the statistical research to back up his claim that a simple checklist can save lives. (This book will make you think about some things before going into a hospital!). As a pilot I’m sold on the value of checklists for aviation, but he also draws from the fields of finance and construction to make his point that complex changing disciplines can benefit from checklists. It certainly made me think about how the businesses I know could benefit from checklists – including my own!
Now what he calls checklists, I would also call systems. They are a written series of steps taken to complete part of a job. And the point is to follow these steps every time you do that job. Examples in small business could be a sales process, sales script, marketing campaign, how you take orders, how you answer the phone, how you hire and train employees, etc. We know that systematizing things will lead to greater efficiency, happiness and profit. Yet there is always resistance to doing this; people just don’t like the sound of it.
Gawande explores this human resistance to checklists. He points out that we just don’t like them. They are not fun; they’re painstaking. And they are embarrassing. It somehow feels beneath us to use a checklist and it runs counter to our deeply held beliefs about how truly great people work on their own. People fear rigidity and working as mindless automatons. But it is actually the opposite! Systematizing certain routine processes frees up your brain to think about other higher level activities, allowing more creative problem solving to occur.
Every business I know can benefit from systematizing certain procedures, but it is not a smooth process to change over to. It means embracing a culture of teamwork and discipline. And discipline is hard! Having a system in place can help make priorities clearer and can prompt people to function better as a team. But you have to train your people in how to use them.
Here are some points from the book about writing a checklist. Use simple, exact wording and keep the list short by focusing on the most overlooked and most detrimental steps to skip. Make sure the list is precise, efficient, to the point and easy to use. And make sure it’s practical! Keep it free of clutter and unnecessary colors. And make sure there are communication check points on the list so teams talk to each other. First drafts will almost always need revisions and rewriting. Test it, change it, and test it again.
Creating good systems takes time up front, but will lead to increased efficiency with fewer mistakes and this will lead to increased profitability in the long run. If you need more convincing about the impact a system can have, I strongly recommend reading this book, The Checklist Manifesto!
Sep 8, 2014 | Finance
What’s the best bet for keeping score in a winning business?
Technology in sports today is increasingly sophisticated and enables monitoring of individual and team performance to levels unheard of even 10 years ago. We now take basic score keeping for granted and we see an instant array of data available for immediate analysis and magic eyes to challenge the decisions of human score keepers, umpires and referees.
In business it is much the same. In organizations large and small, or any fast-moving workplace, how easy is it for any of us to forget to do the basics? Many extremely useful business metrics don’t require any technology, other than simple personal discipline to test and measure, every day, every week and every month. It seems like a major undertaking at the start but like many tasks, when organized, established and routine it takes just a few minutes a day. The benefits of keeping score are eye-opening and powerful.
A “Dashboard”, just as the one in your car that tells you what’s going on, will give an instant perspective on your business’ performance for the previous week or month. The content will vary from business to business, however typical content might be as follows for the past week:
Keeping Score – Sales:
How many Leads did you receive?
Where did they come from by source? (eg referrals, website, print ads, telemarketing)
How many unit Sales did you make?
What was your Conversion Rate?
What was the Revenue of your Sales?
What was the Average Value per Transaction?
Keeping Score – Financials:
Did you hit your weekly Breakeven?
What was your Gross Profit?
What were the Cash Receipts?
How many Debtor and Creditor Days did you have at the close?
Keeping Score – Operations:
How many Direct Labor Hours were available for production or service delivery?
How many Direct Labor Hours were invoiced this week?
What is the Measure of Time Expected versus Time Taken on jobs and tasks?
What is the Percentage Right First Time?
What was the cost of Waste?
It’s tempting to focus on the completion of a “Dashboard” as a goal in itself. However without regular review there is no reflection on the wins, challenges and learnings for the week. It makes sense to set time aside to do this at a regular time each week and compare the results with pre-set targets which are stretching yet achievable and realistic. Some of these might be “Key Performance Indicators” looking at activity, whereas some will be outcomes or “Key Results Indicators”.
Measurement of Operational Performance can become more complex, however the simple difference between paid for labor hours and billable hours that appear on invoices (when multiplied by charge-out rate) may give a Blinding Flash of the Obvious in terms of lost profit each week. Maybe there is a need to generate more orders to fill the capacity? Maybe there are overtime costs that you can reduce? Or perhaps it’s a timely reminder to just raise the bar in productivity and re-engage the team.
Whether there’s a need to focus on more sales activity, sales performance, more marketing effort, better cash collection systems, or operational efficiencies, the old adage applies: “You can’t manage what you don’t measure”. Need help with setting up your dashboard and keeping score? Get in touch with me.
Sep 2, 2014 | Finance
Where has the money gone?
You may have had this experience as a business owner. You have dutifully been to the accountant to review last year’s financials and she gives you a hearty congratulations for having a profitable year. But you are puzzled. If it was such a profitable year than why isn’t there more money in the bank? Why is it that there are still unpaid bills, it’s still a struggle to make payroll each week and it seems there is no chance to buy that new car you have had your eye on for some time now.
This is a commonly asked question by business owners. Where has the money gone?
There are several reasons why you can have a profitable business but still have no cash. It would take a column longer than this one to explain all of the reasons, however generally cash will get tied up in your debtors and inventory and can easily be eroded through poor cash management in expenditures – including your drawings from the business.
A great way to ensure that you have profit “in the bank” at the end of the month (or year) is to actually open a profit bank account. I am sure your banking institution would be glad to help you out there. Set a goal for how much how much profit you would like to make in a year or month, which ever makes more sense for your business. You’ll likely need to run a break-even calculation first (I can help you do that if you’re not sure how, or look online for a calculator). Set a goal for how much profit you’d like to make over and above your breakeven. Your task now is to start depositing that amount of profit into the account each week. Its better to do it weekly if you can, but it really depends on the cash flow for your type of business. If monthly is better, then do that, but no less frequently than that.
Why Would I Do This
Creating a separate profit account and making regular deposits to it is what any good money expert will call “pay yourself first”. It’s important that it is a separate account, not the one you use to pay the business expenses. Most business owners are not in the habit of banking profit from their business. They will work all hours of the day and go to extraordinary lengths to attend to their customers needs but are not doing anything about looking after themselves or sometimes their families financial needs. By using a profit account it sets up a weekly discipline of banking profit. Once the profit is in the bank for the week then it is time to pay the bills. And most people will work much harder to pay their bills than they will to pay themselves profit.
Initially you should only bank a proportion of your profit and gradually build it up. The main thing is to pay yourself first.
And the best part.
At your next meeting with your accountant, you can confidently know where your profit has gone.
Not enough money to open a profit account yet? Sign up for my free seminar on the 5 Ways to Amazing Profits, this Friday.
