Category: Are You Ready?

How to Sell to New Prospects

Posted on by Amanda Bedell

We’ve all experienced the excitement and anticipation of attending a crucial industry networking event. With limited time to spare, we understand the importance of maximizing every opportunity to secure valuable customers. From meticulously selecting the perfect attire to ensuring your business cards are flawless, you leave no stone unturned. However, amidst all the preparations, the question lingers: How can you truly excel at making an outstanding first impression?

Let’s dig into this. Before you put together your approach, you’ve got to be crystal clear on who you want to work with. If you go in with a “spray and pray” approach, you won’t stand out to anyone. First, take a look at your notes and the research you’ve done about your prospects, your target audience. Then, decide which ideal prospect will be the easiest to approach for this event.

 

Position Your Business 

A great way to start, and separate yourself form your competition is to make the first move by creating free educational content to teach your ideal avatar something that will get them out a pain point they have. Next, build trust by answering their questions and ask them to reach out to you with other questions on your contact form. This genuine relationship building is essential for your future success.

You can also create a free e-book or online course to offer to your leads. This gives them the information they need to solve a pain point from you, the expert. When you create this freebie and market your free giveaway, it should be easy and automated. But, most importantly, your freebie needs to get the person receiving this valuable information on your email list.

 

Compile Your Prospect List

Start with your lead generation of email leads you’ve made using your freebie giveaway. You’ll want to compile a list of companies you’ve been considering if you’re a B2B business. You never know who will need your service, so send out an offer to everyone on your list that has been identified as your avatar. Don’t overlook obvious choices, whether they are big or small. Even small companies could be big fish in the future.

 

Considerations on Who to Contact First

Once your list is narrowed down, you need to decide which is the best fish to start with. You need to consider a couple of things:

  • Which have the most purchasing resources to spend?
  • Does their company vision complement yours?
  • What are their employee incentive programs related to your products/services?
  • What’s the company’s real need for you?
  • Will the partnership lead you to new clients and prospects?

 

Steps to Selling to Your Prospective Clients

Now you should have a target in mind to start with. Then, it’s time to plan your approach and execute that plan. Here’s the step-by-step plan to help you make a good first impression:

  1. Build and analyze your database. Divide your leads into three different categories: hot leads, great fits, and secondary leads.
  2. Send introductory mailings to your target to introduce yourself, your company, services, products, and your vision. They need to be short, clean, and concise. 
  3. Follow up with your first phone call 2-3 days after they would have received the mailings. During the call, find out to whom you need to be speaking in the future and try to set up a meeting with the right person.
  4. Follow up your phone call with another mailing that thanks them for speaking with you and offering more details about your products/services. Use this letter and the opportunity to set up a meeting to do a presentation.
  5. Follow up the letter with another phone call a couple of days after they would have received the letter. This phone call will help you further develop your relationship with the prospective client. You should also be able to set up a presentation meeting with them. 
  6. Call again a week later if they haven’t agreed to a meeting or presentation. Ask if they received your creative letter and if they have a minute when you can stop by and introduce yourself in person.

Now, don’t be upset if you don’t seal the deal right away. Some people simply take a little longer to woo. This can all be a little intimidating at first, but you can’t go wrong when you know you are offering a quality product/service.

Once you’ve gone through this process and made first contact (and hopefully a good first impression), it’s time to put your best face forward, which means sending the right salesperson to seal the deal.

How to Efficiently Run Your Business in 2023

Posted on by Amanda Bedell

Each business is a living, breathing entity in and of itself and will pass through stages as it grows and prospers. Today I’m going to talk about the life cycle of a business and how to get the most out of each cycle while extending your business’s lifespan. Let’s talk about each of your business cycles, what they mean, and how you can grow and expand your business’ lifespan within each life cycle.

 

Infancy Stage of Your Business

This is generally considered the technician’s phase, which is the owner. At this point, the relationship between the business and the owner is that of a parent and a new baby. An impenetrable bond is necessary to determine the path your business will follow. And remember to never drop your baby.  

The key in the stage of infancy is to know your business must grow to flourish. Although the most exciting stage, this stage, like human babies, is fleeting and will go by very quickly. You’ll have the most passion for your business in this phase and be very excited, but always remember to create a plan of action with a goal at the end so you can keep your business stamina going throughout the other three stages of your business.

 

Your Business in Its Adolescence

In this stage, you need to start bringing your support staff together to delegate to and allow growth to happen. The first line of defense is your technical person, who needs to bring a certain level of technical experience. This cycle really belongs to the manager, though. Next, the planning stage needs to start, and a relationship should be built with the entrepreneur to plan for the future. 

There’s a point in every business when business explodes and becomes chaotic, also known as growing pains. It’s a good problem to have, but a problem nonetheless. You are faced with several choices at this point in your journey:

  • Avoid growth and stay small
  • Go broke
  • Push forward into the next cycle

Business Maturity

The last cycle is maturity, which doesn’t mean the end of your business. Your passion for growth must continue for your business to succeed. You need to keep an entrepreneurial perspective to push your business forward. 

You can see how all four of these cycles are connected and depend on a strong foundation for your business to succeed. All three of your key roles (the technician, manager, and entrepreneur I mentioned in my previous post) must work together to work through these cycles.

If you’re having trouble putting together your business life cycles and figuring out which of the key roles you fit into, schedule a time to connect with Amanda at BusinessGrowthDemo.

The Importance of Having Support Staff in Your Small Business in 2023

Posted on by Amanda Bedell

As a small business owner, you know every detail to keep your business running smoothly. As we hire staff, there’s not only a mindset shift but a skill set upgrade many of us must undergo.

My clients often tell me one of two things when discussing hiring support. Either they jump in and tell me about the sales executive or fractional CFO they want to hire… or they are on the opposite side of the spectrum and say they can’t afford to hire help.

For both of these types of entrepreneurs, I give the same advice. Let’s track your time. Seriously.

It seems so simple, yet no one does it, and here’s why: it’s a lot! When you track your time in 15-minute increments for two weeks, you get the data you need to decide who that next hire is. Group together tasks outside your zone of genius and hire someone else to do it.

With this data, you can assign a budget to your new hire. Things to think about before gathering the job description are:

  • How will this generate revenue for your business? 
  • What is the learning curve? How much training time can you expect to get someone up to speed?
  • Realistically think about the time it will take you to train this new employee. 
  • As you train a new employee, your productivity will decrease for a short time. When will you break even on the new hire?

Once we have our roadmap, we can discover who we need to hire.

 

Hiring a Virtual Assistant

You can hire several types of support staff in your business, and most people start with a VA or virtual assistant. A VA can provide a variety of tasks for your business, depending on the skills of the VA. To find a good VA:

  1. List the skills you need based on your assessment of the time outlined above coupled with your most significant business need right now.
  2. Write up a job description.
  3. Look for someone who can fill that slot and provide quality support in a timely fashion.

 

Finding a Technician

When hiring a technician, you’re looking for a person who is an expert and a “doer.” Consider hiring a technician for your business for several reasons.

A technician is a trained and skilled professional with expertise in a specific field or area of work. Hiring a technician can bring in someone with the knowledge and skills to handle a wide range of tasks and responsibilities related to your business.

In addition, a technician can help improve efficiency and productivity by completing tasks quickly and accurately. This can free up time and resources for you and your team to focus on more critical duties and responsibilities.

They can also help ensure that work is completed to a high standard, improving the quality of your products or services and helping boost customer satisfaction.

A technician may also have access to specialized equipment and tools necessary for specific tasks. Hiring a technician can bring in someone with the equipment and expertise to handle these tasks effectively.

Hiring a technician can sometimes be more cost-effective than completing specific tasks in-house. For example, suppose you need to repair or maintain specialized equipment. Hiring a technician with the necessary skills and experience may be more cost-effective than trying to train someone on your team.

Hiring a technician can benefit your business, including expertise, efficiency, quality, specialized equipment, and cost-effectiveness.

 

Onboarding a Manager for Your Small Business

As you grow, there’s simply a point where you can’t do it all. This person takes over the day-to-day and works to fix problems by learning from past mistakes. They are on the practical side of the business.

Consider hiring this essential position for your small business to build a solid foundation for your business to grow beyond you. Finding the right people for this role takes time and a complete mindset shift as you relinquish some control over the company and instill trust in people to allow them to do their jobs. 

If you’re like me and got the entrepreneurial bug, you know this journey has highs and lows. During the high times (this is what makes entrepreneurship so addicting), it’s like you can do no wrong, everything is smooth, and you’re hitting sales goals. It feels so great!

Then, there are the lows. The less than anticipated revenue, staff doesn’t show up, you made a wrong decision, or you can’t get a day off, so your mental health suffers… you know those times. It feels like nothing will go right. During these times, you need someone in your corner who knows the business from all angles. And hint, this isn’t your life partner (wink). 

Remember, BCC Business Consulting is here to partner with you and help you through processes that will get you to a place where you run your business, not the other way around. 

 

Start with my Profit Jolt workbook, where you can work through eight processes to bring in more revenue and profit into your business >> https://www.chaostocalm.xyz/profitjolt

Marketing Tips for Entrepreneurs Part III

Posted on by Amanda Bedell

Here we are! The last in my series of marketing tips for entrepreneurs! 

If you haven’t read through the last two blogs, grab those takeaways here Marketing Tips for Entrepreneurs Part I and here Marketing Tips for Entrepreneurs Part II.

Now, the most important piece is this: of all these tips, what is ONE thing you can use to grow your client base this week? Send me a note of what you decide on so I can keep you accountable.

 

Create a Great Marketing Plan

A great marketing plan doesn’t need to be complicated. I understand marketing can be elusive and a little intimidating. But, I promise that you don’t need fancy technology or an all-in-one solutions…. You can start simple and you can start manual.

Pick up a regular paper calendar. Decide how many days per week you want content to be posted. Remember, you can start small! There’s no need to create content every day of the week or send out multiple emails. Maybe it’s simply dedicating 1 hour a week to social media, posting twice a week, and an email one time a month. 

Once you know what content you want to begin with, simply take that calendar and color code days of the week. Each color represents a pillar from your content pillars document. (If you haven’t received my content pillars template, email me and I’ll send it to you, for free!). 

Remember starting small is OK; you can always build on your marketing plan when you get into the habit of consistently creating content for your business. Fine-tune and refine your marketing plan based on your data and feedback.

 

Make Sure Your Marketing Fits Your Branding

There’s nothing worse than hiring a marketing company for your mountain-town vacation rental for them to post a picture of a couple walking along a beach! Ensure your social media, newsletter, lead magnets, and blog content have the same look and feel. The voice and style should make your brand recognizable among all your platforms. And, you’ll want to ensure your marketing and advertising fit your company image, products, services, and quality.

 

Review Your Current Marketing Plan

Remember the 80/20 rule? For business, the principle states that 20% of what you do is generating 80% of your income (revenue). With this lens, review your current marketing plan. What is bringing in clients? What isn’t? Make a plan to improve on the things that are working and drop the ares that aren’t. You don’t want to be spending money on marketing that isn’t giving you a good ROI (return on investment).

 

Educate Your Clients and Leads with Value-Driven Content

People don’t buy because of your fancy logo or cute tag line. If your materials aren’t addressing the problem your prospect has that they don’t want and doesn’t provide a result that alleviates the pain they are in, the marketing simply won’t work. Rather than pushing your company name and bio out to prospects, consider develop all your ads, campaigns, and sales materials with attention to compelling and factual information that solves pain points for your readers. Don’t worry about giving away too much information – when you’re in service of your audience, the right customers will be attracted to you.

How to Create a Marketing Plan for Your New Business

Posted on by Amanda Bedell

When you think of marketing, your mind may slingshot to social media. While this is one aspect of marketing, there are many other elements to digital marketing that you need to know before you jump right into social media. It’s important to design your digital marketing around a plan so that you’re spending less time, in the long run, working and posting your digital marketing than you are in the other aspects of your business.

 

Marketing Plan Step #1: Build a Website

Make sure to have your own website with your domain name. No one else can pull your information off the internet when you have your own website and domain name. You also have control over all your content. Make sure not to mistake having a social media page as your “website.” Your content or entire page can be pulled down at any moment, with no recourse, leaving you to start all over with a new site.

 

Marketing Plan Step #2: Choose an Email Service

While there are many email services out there today, Convertkit is one of our favorites for creators. Start with an email service that gives you a free account, then add the emails you have from prospects. Start with three to five tags, which are categories that you can set up to identify your email subscribers. A few categories that are good to start with are: clients, prospects or leads, and workshops (if you offer a free workshop). Whatever works for your business, categorize your email subscribers so that when you have an email campaign in the future, it’s easy to develop a targeted campaign right to the avatar you want to send them to.

 

Marketing Plan Step #3: Design a Lead Magnet

What is a lead magnet? A lead magnet is a freebie that you offer that is typically easy for you to generate and doesn’t use more of your time when your potential client takes you up on the offer. A lead magnet is a way to collect the email addresses of potential clients interested in what you offer.

Examples of freebie lead magnets are: ebooks, a mini-online course, a video series dropped via email, or a newsletter. Take one of the most common questions you get in your business and give them that information in your lead magnet. If you’re not sure what’s popular in your niche right now, take some time to do a Google search to find out what’s hot and trending online. 

 

Marketing Plan Step #4: Create Content Pillars

Content pillars are themes that you want to build your content around. For example, if you’re a florist, weddings, proms, and holidays are three content pillars you can build your content around. Create a theme for one to three months of content and build all of your marketing content, both print and digital, around the same theme. In doing this, you are continually reminding your followers about the service you offer. 

Why do you want to build your content around pillars? 

Because nowadays, in marketing, it takes up to 15 impressions for people to buy from you with all of the content they see on social media, email, and video. With that many impressions needed before someone considers buying, you need to think long-term for your digital (and traditional) marketing efforts.

When you’re building your marketing plan and content, remember that your plan doesn’t have to be perfect! Start small and see what works. Your first plan may be an email once a month, social media three days a week, and adding one blog to your website each month. Once you have a groove and are comfortable, start adding more content to your marketing!

Four Essential Keys to Marketing Success Part I

Posted on by Amanda Bedell

Marketing is a word that scares many business owners but is a necessity to bring in new clients. Whether creating digital or traditional marketing, you can always repurpose or reuse your content. However, use these guidelines to create a successful and reusable marketing campaign that you can duplicate with minor adjustments – making less work for your small business in the long run!

 

Four Essential Keys to Marketing Success

While there are many details to successful marketing, we’ll be going through the four essential keys to a successful and reusable marketing campaign. Once you have these basics down, you can use them every year, making minor changes for new ideas you have to add to your marketing campaign. We’ll go through each of these, so you can see exactly how to use them and how they all affect the overall outcome of your marketing campaign.

 

Marketing Essential #1: Define Your Unique Selling Proposition

Your Unique Selling Proposition, or USP, is the perspective your clients who hire you will have about your business. To find out your USP, take the time to ask yourself questions from the perspective of your current favorite customers and clients. What gets their attention? What needs are you meeting? Which pain points are you solving for your clients? What promises are you fulfilling for the people you provide a product or service to? Why are they hiring your services? Once you know the answers to these questions, you can start putting together a plan to meet the needs and wants of prospective clients.  

Next, take a look at the USP of your competitors. Then, utilize the components of the USP they are using to help you develop your unique USP. Your focused USP is what you are “promising” your customers and clients. Your unique selling proposition will set you apart from your competition and distinguish what you do and who you serve as a small business.

 

Marketing Essential #2: Putting an Effective Sales Offer to Work

You’ll want to take the time to develop an effective sales plan for your business or platform. If you don’t plan, your marketing efforts could be as effective as throwing spaghetti against a wall, hoping your efforts will pay off. Often, a good marketing plan will not only give you a sense of satisfaction. Still, it will pay off in more income and profitability for your company. Check out our weekly blog for a future post about how to create an effective sales plan and for more detail on the steps to take when making a sales plan for your business.

With a sales plan, you’ll combine what makes your products and services unique and stand out among your competitors. Your sales plans should compel customers to buy. The plan you come up with should make them feel they need to buy, even if the product doesn’t cover a basic need. Your sales pitch should answer a question, solve a problem or feed an obsession with your ideal client.

 

In your sales pitch and plan, you’ll want to provide your lead with all the information they need to make an informed and confident decision. When you do, you’ll be sure to land the sale and make a new customer! 

 

Check back for this series on marketing essentials, as we will post part II at the end of this month! 

Strategic Steps to Take For Business Growth

Posted on by Amanda Bedell

Strategic Steps to Take For Small Business Growth

The first step to creating a more profitable business is to consider the 80/20 or pareto principle. This rule states that 20% of your actions result in 80% of your results. This is true, no matter what vertical or category your small business falls into. Now, consider this. If you multiply the 80/20 rule by 4; it states that only 1% of what you do generates 50% of your business income. Imagine what would happen to your business if you found that 1% activity and focused on it relentlessly. Would you agree you would have one profitable business?  

Let Me Hold Up A Magnifying Glass To What Makes Up That 20%

The five elements of business that make up the 20% of activities that are making you the most money in your small business are leads, conversions, transactions, pricing, and profit. When you look at these components that make up your 20%, seek out one action item in each area. Focus on your best lead generation effort, tighten up your conversion rate, add value to create another point of sale for your customer, examine your pricing structure, and audit your costs; if the cost is not making you money, get rid of it. That’s just a few options out of literally hundreds of strategies. Even a small shift of 1-3% can make a big difference to your bottom line. Would you like to see how compounding works, visit my free Profit Simulator >>

How to Make the Right Marketing Decisions for Your Business

Okay, so we know that we all HATE being sold to but we do LOVE to buy stuff! Each time we purchase anything, we are looking to either solve a problem, create certainty, or have a meaningful experience.

With more than 10,000 messages per day bombarding consumers online, how do you get your message to stand out among your competitors with your marketing?

You’ll need to find your voice and narrow down what you’re saying to your prospects with focused messages. To break through the noise and create a message so compelling it’s like a dog whistle to your superstar client or customer, you’ll want to get down to the fundamentals of what your message is for your business (also known as your market dominating position or unique selling proposition). Really, what separates you from everyone else selling what you sell? Besides examining the inside of your company or its services you also need to know who your target customer is for your business. 

Your Target Customer is More than Just Demographics

Instead of looking at typical demographics such as age and gender, I coach companies to dig deeper and find out more about their ideal customers. When you’re only marketing based on common demographics, you’re only scratching the surface. Instead, I want you to think about the process people go through when they buy anything. The buyer’s journey is where 99% of prospects that consider buying what you sell are in the investigative stage. They are considering reasons to buy a product/service and overcoming objections to the purchase. It’s not until the very last 1% that they are considering WHO to buy from. 

To dive beyond simple demographics and create this compelling message, we need to tap into the emotional reason for your customer to buy. 

How Do You Know What Your Superstar Client Looks Like?

To identify your superstar clients/customers, you need to do nothing but look at your most loyal customer or the easiest clients you work with. You know the ones, who jumped at your offer, are excited to become customers, love what you do… really in their eyes, you do no wrong. The relationship is fluid… you’ll hear me say, in Changing the Sales Game Podcast, “If you feel goosebumps talking to someone, they are close to your ideal client.”

To find out more steps you can take to grow your small business, listen to my interview with Connie Whitman here >>

 

Are you ready for the next phase of your business?

Posted on by Amanda Bedell

My business was running me.

If you’re anything like I was, your business is running you. The everyday struggles of a bakery employing 15 people and non-stop production almost killed me. I was beyond exhausted and wasn’t sure where to turn.

When I went searching for support, I was overwhelmed by the amount of tactical “solutions” recommended to get my business to the next phase. It seemed like everything was surface-level. I didn’t want the latest marketing trend, a social media calendar, or prompts for content, or dead-end financial management support.

I say this often, “You don’t know what you don’t know until you know what you didn’t know.” I know now that I needed someone outside my business to help me see beyond the day-to-day. A person with the financial know-how to examine and question current systems — someone that could get us beyond what I already knew. 

Does this resonate with you? Maybe you feel stuck and aren’t sure how to get to the next level. Or your business is growing but relies on you 24/7, and you don’t know how much longer you can take it.

Download my Profit Jolt book and we’ll also share a link to an email training series on how to build a profitable business. We’ll get you off the “hamster wheel” so your passion can fuel the world.

Let’s take care of you and your business.