Alternatives to Cold Call Prospecting

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Some salespeople rarely make cold calls. They’ve developed other prospecting activities that can produce the sales they need without having to spend long hours on the phone. If that sounds good to you, you’ll need to put in the time developing said alternative prospecting channels so that you’re getting enough leads from those sources that cold calling becomes unnecessary.

Warm Leads

The most effective way to cut down your need for cold calling is to build multiple sources of warm leads.

A warm lead is a prospect who comes to you already interested in buying. Building a strong network will, among other things, help you to achieve a stream of warm leads from contacts. However, keep in mind that a business network requires time and effort on your part to maintain. Network contacts expect you to help them out with leads and other assistance or they won’t be inclined to help you.

Another good source of warm leads is referrals from existing prospects and customers. The final stage of the sales cycle, after closing the sale, is asking for referrals to friends and colleagues of your new customer. Because these referred leads know your customer and he can (hopefully) confirm how happy he is with his new product, it’s much easier to close a referred lead than a cold lead.

Finally, warm leads can come to you from a website or social networking site. These leads are people who visit the company site or read its Facebook profile and decide they want to learn more, so they ask for a salesperson to contact them.

These leads tend to be eager to buy since they’re clearly interested enough to want to know about your products, but they are also likely to have solicited information from your competitors, so be prepared for some heavy negotiating.

If your warm leads aren’t enough to keep your sales high, you can consider other methods of contacting cold leads.

An email is an excellent option. You can craft one message and send it to a large number of potential prospects with one click. The biggest concern regarding emails to large groups is accidentally crossing the line into spamming. Sending spam can create a lot of trouble. Not only are there laws in place that make spamming illegal, but it’s also unprofessional and can result in fines, losing customers, getting a bad reputation, and even having your email account shut down by your hosting provider.

Direct Mail

Direct mail is a traditional way to reach out to prospects, but it is also the most expensive. A simple letter will only cost you for supplies and postage, but if you decide to put together a professional direct mail package with a brochure, you can end up spending a great deal of money on design and printing costs. On the other hand, if you have a good lead list you can end up with very high returns on direct mail solicitations.

Door to Door

The classic door-to-door approach can also be effective. If you’re selling to consumers, you can pick out a good neighborhood and start knocking. B2B salespeople can target large office buildings and stop by every suite. In-person visits are time-consuming but can also lead to quick closes, if you can talk to the right person at the right time.

Most salespeople will find that these methods can supplement but not replace cold calling. A salesperson who is a keen networker with strong social media skills and a willingness to put in a lot of time can cut cold calling down to a tiny fraction compared to a salesperson with no network or Internet marketing. Still, there’s no reason you can’t shoot for the gold ring and try to get to the point where you never need to make another cold call!

15 Ways to Scale Your Business and Make More Money

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Taking your business to the next level is a step-by-step process.

There are two things that every entrepreneur wishes for: more time and more money. We yearn for more time because balancing any semblance of a career with the demands of a family life, friends and other interests, becomes overwhelming.

We desire more money so that we can run ads or pay for employees or expand our operations, and everything else in between. Yes, having more money would be great but it’s wasted if you don’t know how to spend or properly invest that money on marketing or growing your business.

The truth? It’s often hard to find time to do anything when you’re enthralled in the perils of building or scaling a business to any degree. Not only do you need to effectively bootstrap your growth by wearing many hats, you also need to constantly work to increase your skill set while struggling to wrangle sales, dealing with customer service and tending to other tedious issues that tend to take up a large chunk of time.

If there never seems to be enough hours in your day, join the club. If you’re not properly managing your time with an effective time management system, or you’re immersed in one bad habit after another that seems to be eating away at all the precious moments you do have, then the problems compound on themselves.

Setting proper goals is necessary for anyone who’s serious about scaling their business, making more money, producing more product or achieving any other dream. They need to be smarter goals and there needs to be powerful reasons behind why those goals absolutely must be achieved.

By creating a plan, taking action and staying persistent no matter what, you can leverage the following strategies and methods to scale your business. It’s not easy. No one ever said it would be. But it is well worth it.

1. Leverage legitimate SEO techniques.

SEO seems complex and confusing, but it really boils down to a few fundamental principles. Those principles are the bedrock for over 200+ rules that go into Google’s current search algorithms. Learn SEO the right way, leveraging the proper techniques, while adhering to Google’s many rules, and you’ll succeed. Your visibility will eventually grow, resulting in a natural increase in leads and sales.

2. Create and share content on a blog.

Starting a blog is simple and straightforward. What isn’t simple and straightforward is actually posting useful and unique content that adds a tremendous amount of value, and doing that consistently. However, blogging is one of the best ways that you can build authority and create an organic audience over time. By becoming an authority, you’ll end up attracting customers rather than chasing after them.

3. Answer questions on Quora.

Quora offers up a great opportunity for online marketers to connect with a massive audience by answering questions and engaging with like-minded individuals from around the world. Use Quora to spread value and further establish yourself as an authority, effectively helping you to scale your business by boosting your visibility through the platform’s massive footprint.

4. Connect with influencers.

I’ve long been fascinated with the concept of influencers, gravitating towards them to uncover the secrets behind how they’ve built such massive audiences. It’s not easy to become an influencer, but if you have a small budget, one near-instantaneous way you can scale your business is to get influencers on board to champion your products or services. This is a quick way to get out in front of a very large audience. But not the cheapest way.

5. Run a contest or giveaway.

Contests and giveaways offer another quick way to market. The word free is very enticing, and people will naturally want to sign up for anything that involves a potential windfall prize. Your giveaway needs to be worth it if you’re going to collect that all-important contact information. However, be sure to pay homage to local laws and regulations when running any kind of contest. FTC regulations run fierce in this arena.

6. Post content on Medium.com.

Medium is by far one of my favorite sites for content marketing. This authority site offers up the ability for anyone to post useful content to market anything online. However, don’t use this to spam. Instead, create useful discussions and tutorials that will further enforce anchor-content on your website. The goal is to market your site the right way and not by spamming links through thin content.

7. Setup a social media content channel.

Social media offers one of the most abundant opportunities for scaling any business, no matter what type of business you’ve started. It also offers an avenue to tap into the world’s connected population, quickly and effectively. Clearly, achieving a massive following is no simple feat, but that shouldn’t deter you from establishing a content channel where you can spread value throughout social media to raise the awareness and visibility of your offers.

8. Build in-depth YouTube tutorials.

Deep-dive into the world of video with YouTube tutorials. Creating a popular YouTube channel isn’t easy, but it is well worth it. To do it, you have to provide in-depth tutorials, helping people to really understand a niche or solve a problem. Whatever it is that you do, help to educate the world on how best to do it. In turn, you’ll become an authority and an industry leader, ultimately leading to greater exposure and eventually, more sales.

9. Create a lead magnet and sales funnel.

Ask any smart online marketer about how they scale out a business, and they’ll tell you the same thing: build an effective sales funnel. Draw them in with a value-laced lead magnet and drop them into a funnel where you can sell them on autopilot. The right sales funnel, split-tested to oblivion, with a clear understanding of your cost-per acquisition, can be scaled infinitely. Not only will you grow your business by leaps and bounds, but you’ll make tremendous amounts of money no matter what business you’re in.

10. Deliver real value through email marketing.

Email marketing is the most powerful driver of sales for leading online marketers and businesses the world over. This isn’t just about your email drip-campaigns that go out automatically; this is about truly reaching out and connecting with your subscribers. It’s that connection to you that will help sell whatever it is that you’re selling on auto-pilot. However, it has to be done the right way. Not by spamming but by genuinely sharing and trying to help others.

11. Hire commission-based sales reps.

Most businesses can’t afford to keep a large staff of sales people on board. Instead, they turn to commission-based sales reps to help provide a stepping stone to the next level in their business. However, those sales reps need to be effectively trained; they can’t simply be hired and forgotten about. Take the time to create training videos and helpful guides to walk them through your entire system and business, and use it to quickly scale things out when you need to bring on more members of the team.

12. Advertise with AdWords or Facebook.

Conversion-pixel tracking is a great way to grow your business online by targeting the right audience. You can do this with a Facebook conversion pixel, while also tracking any event such as shopping cart abandonments or products that were added to a wish list but not purchased and so on. You can then directly target these individuals with ads, enticing them to come back. Similarly, on Google’s AdWords platform, you can use re-targeting through contextual or search-related ads as well.

13. Create coupons on RetailMeNot.

RetailMeNot is a massive online repository for coupons and offers. Companies turn to the site, which is the biggest in the United States for aggregating coupons, in order to help drive traffic to their offers. If your store isn’t already listed, you can request to have it added, then post your coupons afterwards.

14. Setup an affiliate program.

Affiliate programs can drive a significant amount of traffic. In fact, some of the biggest online marketers rely heavily on affiliate income generated through email marketing or pre-existing website or blog traffic. However, setting up an affiliate program isn’t always simple, since there are so many facets involved. If you’re an absolute novice, turn to some of the leading affiliate sites such as Link Share, Impact Radius and Commission Junction. to quickly build an affiliate program.

15. PR outreach via HARO.

If you’re looking to scale your business through the press, utilize HARO, a platform where reporters seek experts and business sources for comments on articles that they have in the works. HARO, which is short for Help A Report Out, is a great forum for connecting with reporters, writers and contributors to some of the leading publishing platforms, without attempting to come in with a “cold” message or contact, which often doesn’t pan out.

Why You Should Work Your Day Job While Starting a Business

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Should you have to pick and choose between the two?

It’s one or the other: you’re either an entrepreneur or an employee.

A workaholic that executes brilliant ideas in your garage, or a play-by-the-rules corporate employee that conforms to societal norms.

Right?

It’s easy to slap a label onto ourselves and place everything into neat little boxes to make better sense of our world. But have you ever considered being both?

There are numerous reasons why everyone should try starting a business — even if, and especially if, you’re already working at a company. There are few experiences that will help you grow personally and professionally like balancing a side gig and a day job.

Here are four reasons why it’s a good idea to give entrepreneurship a try as you continue working your job:

1. You will start off small.

Contrary to what the media portrays, you don’t need to quit your day job and start working in a dingy basement or garage. But you will start off small, and you likely won’t even have a customer base at the beginning.

This is fine, because you can slowly nurture your side business while relying on your main source of income from your day job. As your business (hopefully) grows, you can scale it continuously to generate more clients and revenue, or maintain it at the same level to keep yourself sane as you manage your full time job.

2. Failure is not the end of the world.

I know a guy who decided to open up a burger franchise. After investing thousands of dollars, it hasn’t been doing well. Due to lack of sales, the restaurant’s going to close down soon.

But one very good thing came out of this: a job offer.

He got a position in corporate finance at a global bank. In fact, opening a franchise restaurant was the tipping point that led the interviewers to hire him. They don’t know how well (or poorly) the business has fared so far.

Of course, you don’t need to open a business with high start-up costs. Some businesses can be started with $100 or less. These include knowledge-based businesses, such as consulting, tutoring and writing, or even selling physical products.

And if your venture fails to take flight? No problem. You still have your day job, and you can still tell everyone that you started your own business (but decided to ditch it to focus on your job).

3. You learn about yourself at an accelerated pace.

So you started off just pursuing a hobby and decided to monetize it for fun. Or maybe you knew early on that you wanted to go all-in to rake in the big bucks.

Isn’t it interesting how we set out to do one thing, but often things turn out another way?

Having both a day job and a side hustle gives you options. It gives you an idea of how much you enjoy your full time position and which direction you want to pursue. Or maybe you like both and want to have it all.

The point is that starting a business and failing is way more impressive than not taking action at all. Starting a business takes initiative, drive, and business acumen, which are incredibly attractive characteristics to employers.

Along the way, you’ll learn more than you thought about sales, marketing, customer relations and your own abilities. You might be surprised at what you can achieve.

By testing an idea out on the side, you learn more about yourself, and what you’re capable of — a valuable lesson you can carry anywhere in life.

10 Types of amazing businesses you can build after 6 p.m.

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That daytime job of yours may be terrific. But there’s one thing that is far more rewarding and meaningful than good pay and benefits: being your own boss. There are several different, quick, and easy ways that you can bring in some extra income while still in your day job. Whether you live in a metropolitan city or any other city you can find variety of offline as well as online part time jobs in your city.

Here are the 10 Types of Businesses You Can Build After 6 p.m,

1. Start your own blog

The internet is filled with different kinds of blogs that are devoted to all kinds of topics. Many of them do not make any money, some make a decent amount, and there are some that draw in lucrative and regular income.

If you manage to make $400 each month from blogging, that can certainly be useful, especially when you are unemployed. So, if you are passionate or have a lot of knowledge about a subject which others will be interested in learning, you may able to make some extra money by setting up a blog and generating revenues from sponsored posts or affiliate marketing.

2. Teach online

If you have a skill, a trade or knowledge of a certain foreign language, you can easily make money by teaching others. There are many websites that are looking for people who can teach these skills online.

There is one bonus that comes with this. You will get an experience you can put in your resume and help you score a job later on. But be careful; many people have managed to make a successful career out of teaching people online, however, not everyone can do this successfully.

3. Sell what you know

Packaging your skills and knowledge into an ebook for people seeking to learn a skill or build their career can be highly profitable if you have a strong value proposition and know your target audience.

If you’re an expert on any topic, there’s likely an audience of people willing to pay to learn what you know. If your expertise does not lend itself to ebook form, you might also create and share online courses. Either way, once you create the digital content, you can continue to sell it over and over again. There’s no inventory threshold or manufacturing cost.

4. Entertain and educate

Podcasting is another terrific way to use an hour or three in the evening to build a regular audience around a specific topic of industry. Build your audience enough and you can start to pick up show sponsors that will pay for product discussions or short advertising spots.

There’s a small investment in equipment, but hosting a podcast online is free.

5. Set up a Youtube channel

Starting a Youtube channel and becoming an “online celeb” might appear easy on the surface but, truth be told, not many make it to the big time. You may have to purchase some recording equipment as well as have a new and exciting idea but it’s not impossible to make good money. The way to profit from creating videos is becoming a Youtube partner. This means you get paid for impressions and clicks on ads that show up during your video.

6. Become a freelancer

So-called freelancing takes selling your skills to the next level whereby you offer a more professional service to a small number of clients. As a result this path commands higher income for your time.

Freelancing will appeal most to entrepreneur minded types, with the most common freelance professions being copy writing, graphic design, web design and even social media. Starting off is now relatively easy thanks to websites such as Upwork which allow you to advertise your services to a global audience. Once you have a few jobs under your belt you should have some good references and possible referrals.

7. Give music lessons

You’ll probably want to stick to the instrument(s) you know well, but you can bank the most income and build a solid businesses teaching multiple instruments, or those in a particular class, like strings or woodwinds. Start by giving lessons to individuals to grow your business and get your name out among the community.

8. Manage social media accounts

There’s a good chance you’re guilty of spending a little too much time on social media. So, if you’re going to be there in the evenings anyway, why not get paid to put your expertise to work? Plenty of companies, especially startups in retail, want to build a strong social presence, and they need people to help them make that happen.

9. Draw art to sell online

Perhaps you are a decent artist. If that’s the case, then there are various places you could sell your talents. DeviantArt is one of the best places to sell art. It allows users to upload their art, sell prints, take commissions for others, etc. You control your own work, sell it how you want, and talk to your fans directly.

10. Content writing

Content writing is one of the best part time option if you love writing. There are number of ways you can make money writing content.

You can check the job sites like Indeed, Quikr etc. where you can find jobs related to writing work or join the sites like Lexiconn, Fiverr, UpWork & other freelance sites to find work related to writing.

Find Your Company’s Sweet Spot

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Here is a simple template to find the best leverage point to grow your company…

How do you find the best places to focus your company’s limited time, attention, and money? Simple – go for the “Sweet Spot.” Here’s how.

Every business has a “Limiting Factor” (capital L; capital F). Your company’s Limiting Factor is the single biggest constraint currently limiting your growth. It’s the one ingredient that, if only you had more of, would allow your business to grow instantly.

The first step in finding your Sweet Spot is to identify, as clearly and concretely as you can, your company’s Limiting Factor. The more precisely you can identify your Limiting Factor, the easier it is to effectively push it back.

For example, if you say your Limiting Factor is “lack of sales,” you might come up with a dozen ideas to increase sales. But dig deeper and see if you can pin your Limiting Factor down more precisely.

Is it the need for more leads on the front end? Perhaps your business has enough leads but instead lacks the sales capacity to effectively follow up on all the leads you are already generating? Or is it that you have plenty of sales staff, but lack a proven sales process so your sales team’s conversion is too low?

As you can imagine, depending on your answer here, you’ll need to take an entirely different approach to solve that Limiting Factor. That’s why it is so critical that you narrow down your Limiting Factor to the most accurate kernel you can.

Your Sweet Spot is your best ideas on pushing back your Limiting Factor. Every time you push back your Limiting Factor so it is no longer your biggest constraint, you expose a new Limiting Factor to work on. Good! This is how you grow your business in a leveraged way–by focusing each quarter on pushing back your current Limiting Factor.

Now that you’ve pinpointed your company’s current Limiting Factor, step two is for you to brainstorm a list of all the potential ideas you have to push back your Limiting Factor. (See the Sweet Spot Analysis Tool below.)

Don’t settle for five or six ideas, push yourself to come up with at least ten, ideally fifteen to twenty ideas.

For example, if your Limiting Factor is a lack of sales capacity to follow up effectively on the leads you currently generate, your list of ideas could include:

  • A better lead qualification system to prioritize your sales effort
  • Hiring more salespeople
  • Creating a sales video to do some of the selling for you

The key is to push yourself to come up with as many ideas as you can that could potentially help you push back your Limiting Factor. The best way to come up with a few great ideas is to first come up with a potential list of a lot of ideas.

Next, run your brainstormed list of potential tactics through two filters: the “Low-Hanging Fruit” filter and the “Home Run” filter.

A Low-Hanging Fruit is an easy, straightforward idea that you’re almost certain will work. While it may or may not have a big impact, it is simple to implement and you have a very high level of confidence that it will work.

A Home Run, on the other hand, is an opportunity that if you hit it well and all goes just right, has a huge payoff for your business.

Go through each brainstormed idea on the list and ask, “Is this tactic a Low-Hanging Fruit?” If it is, check the box next to it with “LH” for Low-Hanging Fruit.

Then in a second, separate pass, go through your list of brainstormed ideas and ask of each item in turn, “Is this tactic a Home Run?” If it is, mark it with “HR” for Home Run.

What you’re looking for are those tactics that are both Low-Hanging Fruit and Home Runs; these are your Sweet Spot ideas, the highest leverage choices to push back your Limiting Factor.

By definition your Sweet Spot ideas are Low Hanging Fruit (i.e. easy to implement with high odds of success) and Home Runs (i.e. will have a big impact.) These Sweet Spots are the best tactics to focus your company’s resources on first.

The final step is to turn your Sweet Spot ideas into a mini-action plan of who does what by when.

Three tips for turning a business idea into a reality

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Getting your ideas off the ground can be daunting, but three young entrepreneurs explain how they brought their whiteboard sketches to life.

Tonight, Shell will crown the winner of its annual LiveWIRE Young Entrepreneur of the Year award, created to recognise some of the UK’s most innovative and inspirational low-carbon businesses and sustainability entrepreneurs.

Here, three youngsters shortlisted for the award, each at different stages of development, share their tips on getting a business idea from a whiteboard sketch to tradable product.

Drop the jargon

Making sure that everyone fully understood how his product worked was crucial for Fergus Moore to secure funding and advice for his company, Revive Eco, which recycles coffee grounds to create high-value bio-oils.

“When starting a business – especially in technology – it’s important to remember that not everyone you speak to will know what you’re talking about,” he explains. “You should be able to clearly explain your concept with as little jargon as possible, in one or two sentences.”

Mr Moore found that opportunities dried up early on. “We had real issues accessing funding and grants because we just kept regurgitating the technical aspects of how the product worked, rather than explaining what it does and why it’s different.”

Stripping back the idea into two simple, easy-to-understand sentences meant that funders became more excited about his proposition. “People won’t buy into or get excited about something that they don’t understand.”

Two prototypes are better than one

Elena Dieckmann, co-founder of start-up, AEROPOWDER, which creates insulation material from waste chicken feathers, says that it’s a good idea to work with two prototypes when developing your product.

“You should have a visual lookalike and a working model that displays the proof-of-concept in a technical manner,” she explains. “The visuals will get people excited about what the final product will look like, while the working prototype should show pretty clearly how it will perform.”

They don’t have to be perfect, she adds. If they’re a little rough around the edges, that’s fine. “If your product is electronic, for example, the working version can be a module with wires hanging out, so long as it visualises how it might work,” says Ms Dieckmann. “The visual version could be a 3D-printed model of any size and colour that you like.”

Work out the costs

For entrepreneurs who have ideas for lots of different products, cost forecasts are a sensible way to work out what should come first. So says Terence Chung, founder of FRUU, which uses fruit bi-products to create natural cosmetics and has already started trading.

“Run the numbers for each idea and for different business scenarios,” he says. “Then develop the product, or products, with the highest cost-to-impact ratio.”

That’s what he did for FRUU’s first product range, lip balm, which was cheap, but still showed off the company’s concept.

Choosing the most cost-effective route meant that Mr Chung could get a quick and early indication of what consumers thought about the brand and the technical process behind it – and gain valuable feedback on what other products they were interested in, helping him to work out what to focus on and launch next.

Things to consider when starting a small business

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For many, the great American dream includes opening your own business or “hanging your own shingle” as a consultant or freelancer. If you have an idea for a company that you believe could be successful and want to pursue this dream, it is important to do your homework.

There are important steps that every small business owner must take – they include:

*     Identifying an opportunity in the market

*     Researching your customers and competition

*     Preparing a detailed business plan

*     Choosing a company structure that is right for you.

Being financially prepared is another crucial prerequisite to becoming a successful entrepreneur and it starts with a solid financial plan.

Create a financial strategy

If you’re serious about becoming a small business owner, it should be considered a financial goal like any other, such as retirement. It is important to develop a strategy for funding the company over time. A business that lacks a sound financial base may have a higher risk of failing. For greater success, estimate not only your startup costs, but the amount of money you’ll need to fund the company for the next three to five years.

Depending on your plans, these costs may be significant. When striking out on their own, many self-starters optimistically believe that the business will generate enough income to meet their needs and expectations, and even help them expand their lifestyle one day.

While this is a worthy goal, be conservative in your initial projections. It isn’t unusual for a business to lose money in the early stages. You need to have sufficient cash in place to support your personal financial needs while you work to make the company profitable.

Earmark money

It is important to establish a dedicated pool of savings to help finance your new venture. To start, consider setting money aside from each paycheck for this purpose. Determine how much you can afford to save each month and how long it will take to build cash to meet your goals. If anything, err on the high side when projecting how much money you need to save before you open the doors to your business.

If it’s practical, consider establishing your business on a part-time basis before you quit your day job. This lets you test your ideas, make modifications and build a base of customers while also maintaining a stronger financial position.

As you’re putting money away for your future business, make it a priority to continue saving for retirement as well as into your emergency fund. If you do, you will likely have stronger financial security in the event that anything happens to your new company’s revenue.

If capital is required to finance your startup, you may need to borrow money. Be cautious as you consider your borrowing options. It adds another level of financial risk to your plan. You must be confident that you can stay current with your loan repayment schedule.

A good place to learn more about borrowing options is the Small Business Administration website (www.sba.gov). Also be careful about using personal assets (such as your home) as collateral to fund your business ambitions. If possible, you want to keep your personal and business assets separate.

Remember that if you are financially prepared to make your entrepreneurial dreams come true, you will be in a better position to withstand the difficult periods and allow the business the time necessary to grow and prosper. Talk to your financial advisor to determine the best approach to build savings dedicated to your future business.

10 Steps to Change Your Business Image

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With the global business continuing to evolve rapidly, companies are faced with the reality that they often have to update their image to remain relevant in the minds and hearts of their customers and target audience.

If your audience sees the same old look and feel to what you offer, they may conclude that you aren’t putting any effort into following the trends or even leading the way. Or, it may be that you have had some issues in recent months that have tarnished your business image due to a bad decision or an unfortunate turn of events in the market. Whatever the case, your audience and customer base may seek out a competitor.

How to Change Your Business Image

However, you can work quickly and effectively to stay relevant and rebuild trust by transforming your business image in these 10 ways, including numerous solutions that get you there faster:

1. Strategize on a new direction and approach. One of the most challenging aspects of changing your business image is adjusting your operating model to best suit the customer’s needs. Often, it’s hard to separate from longstanding approaches or preconceived notions of departmental responsibilities and employee job descriptions. That makes it more difficult to figure out how to redesign the structure of your business to enable it to address the current and future needs of your target market. This is when it helps to bring in a company like ON THE MARK, which assists in seeing this bigger picture and offering a new blueprint of what your business model looks like and how it can run effectively.

2. Change how you interact with customers to shape how you transform the company. Listening to what your customers are telling you about what they want and what you can change to assist them with a better experience should be part of your plan to transform yourself. When your customers see that you have listened to them and adapted to suit them, you will go a long way toward making the right changes in your strategic direction and delivery, but you will also strengthen existing relationships. You may already have that information to tell you how to transform in your available data but no way of actually knowing what it all means. A company like Salesforce can provide a CRM platform and project management system that organizes and highlights those areas where you may need to make changes or that can define how you transform your image.

3. Engage your audience with content that illustrates your new business image. Today’s audiences rely primarily on written and visual content to make their decisions about a company whether it is on a website, on a blog, or on a social media profile. This is an opportunity to leverage their interest in content to get your messages across about what defines your new business image and, most importantly, how it specifically helps them with their issues or problems. Your content becomes your new business image because it is the communication channel and conversation platform between you and your customers. They can tell you what they think of the new business image or ask questions about what that image means for them. Since it’s an integral way to get noticed and share your new image, it’s critical to have expertise in content marketing from a company like Contently, which can help you to formulate your messaging and craft the content necessary to get the best reaction to this new business image.

4. Put the new business image into your visual presentation. It helps your audience to have imagerythat represents this new business messaging because these are symbols that help your audience connect and remembers the new brand attributes you want them to know about. When you want to change your business image, it’s an opportune time to update your logo, slogan, and website in terms of symbol, color, and messaging. This is where graphic design becomes your best friend, offering a way to consistently revise all visual representations of your company. You can use tools like SummitSoft to create a logo and Wix for a website without having to claim artistic status to make a great impression.

5. Add expert talent in areas of your business where you lack skills. You can change logos and websites all day long, which will help to a certain degree with a business transformation, but it’s really the people you surround yourself with that can make a transformation stick. While you may not be in the financial position to hire a team of full-time talent, you can tap into outsource workers and freelancers that specialize in areas that can help you transform how your business operates, especially in improving technology, marketing and sales, and customer service. Look to agencies like Toptal for IT talent and iFreelanc for graphic designers, marketers, salespeople, writers and even virtual assistants. All these talented individuals can do a better job than you in these areas because it’s what they do, which then allows you to focus on those aspects of your business that you do well.

6. Put influencers to work selling your new business image to the target audience. Influencer marketing is one of the biggest areas of marketing to have a significant effect on convincing target audience members to purchase a specific product or service. With more interaction becoming virtual, consumers and businesses are relying on others to recommend and review products and services before deciding to buy them. It’s these influencers that almost become more critical to a business reimaging than trying to go directly to the audience. Influencers often have more leverage and can sell the message you want to transmit more effectively. Platforms like the AI-driven Influential connects you with the best influencers for your particular segment and helps get your business image revamp to those audience members that can most often be converted.

7. Improve the financial underpinnings of your business. Having the right financial knowledge and tools can help you transform the operational aspects of your company by increasing cash flow, informing sound money decisions, bolstering the security of your transaction systems, and adding opportunities to fund the transformation and growth of your business. Business transformation isn’t always about the public image but it is often more important to focus on behind the scenes mechanisms like anything related to company finances that can make the biggest difference. Financial partnerships are out there in the form of companies like InDinerothat provide the information and platforms you need to revamp your financial processes and approach.

8. Deploy thought leadership strategies to build credibility with your audience. By establishing credibility with your audience that you know what you are doing and have the most visionary, insightful information on a particular topic, you can drive the message of your revised business image home. Your byline and syndicated articles, as well as blog posts, can be the basis for explaining why you revamped your business image in relation to industry trends and issues that your audience understands. Aligning these can make the transition in your business image as seamless as possible and actually build greater trust because the audience sees that, as a leader, you realized changing your image would be more useful to the audience and in response to market evolution. Most industry publications accept bylined articles while news syndicates also readily accept new and relevant content.

9. Take your business image message to Livestream video. In order to get your message to the right people, you need to use the mediums and platforms where they want to hear from you. Livestream video on Instagram, Periscope and Facebook have become very popular due to the interest in consuming video content at a nearly voracious pace. You will be able to reach a larger audience with your revamp messaging and present it in a format that they are most receptive to, helping to create a visual picture of what your new image represents.

10. Plan a campaign around the business image refresh. Turn the business image makeover into an event by creating a marketing and ad campaign around it with a set of collateral designed to excite your audience as though you are launching the business for the first time or even a new product or service. In many ways, that is what you are doing. Create a set of messages to be broadcast on social media by using Hootsuite to blast it out as well as develop an email blast, blog post, and landing page on your website.

Don’t forget to track every tactic you use to transform your business image to see what type of impact it has on your audience. It may take the time to sink in so you may need to repeat some of these approaches and continue the dialogue with your customers and audience until the new image of your business replaces the previous one.

4 Things Every Founder Needs to Know About What it Takes to Make a Big Idea Stick

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A startup isn’t a smaller version of a big company, it’s a search for a sustainable business model


All too often, people want to see entrepreneurship as if it were an action movie. The hero, transformed by a great moment of epiphany, champions his idea despite being besieged on all sides by those who seek to thwart him. He prevails in the end by being loyal and true and never wavering from his initial vision.
That’s a dangerous fantasy. As Silicon Valley startup guru Steve Blank has often noted, a startup is essentially a search for a sustainable business model. It’s not like an episode of Mission Impossible, where you have a clear and concrete objective and execute a plan with split second precision.
In fact, it’s more like a role playing game. There are certain rules to play by, but no clear path forward or ending sequence (except, of course, for bankruptcy). Instead, you have to progress through a series of challenges while gaining experience and artifacts along the way. In the end, everyone needs to forge their own path, but here are four things you should know going in.
1. Develop A Customer Before You Develop A Product

Many entrepreneurs treat a new venture as if it was a smaller version of an existing business. You develop a product, identify a market and sell to customers. In the Mission Impossible version of entrepreneurship, once you come up with a trailblazing idea, all that’s left is to execute your plan effectively.

In the real world though, your idea will almost always be flawed in some way. So by developing a fully featured product before you test your idea with real customers, you will almost certainly end up wasting scarce resources. Then, you’ll find yourself scrambling to correct your mistake before you run out of money.

There is a better way. Consider the case of Nick Swinmurn, a young entrepreneur who thought he could sell shoes online. To test his idea, he took some pictures of shoes and built a bare bones website. When someone ordered a pair, he went to the shoe store and bought whatever he needed to fulfill the order. He lost money on every sale.
Clearly, that’s an incredibly stupid way to run a business, but it’s an ingenious — and incredibly cheap — way of testing a business model. The business Swinmurn built, Zappos, was acquired by Amazon in 2009 for $940 million,
2. Your Idea Has Probably Been Done Before

For most of his career, Jim Allison had been content to be a research scientist and had earned some renown in his field of immunology. But in the mid-1990s, he had a breakthrough idea that would change his path. His research suggested that there might be a way to unleash the human immune system to fight cancer.
It was more than just a vague concept. He had done studies on mice that had shown incredible results. They were so impressive, in fact, that he felt he simply had to get the research translated into an effective treatment. So he started going around to all the big pharmaceutical companies to try to get them to invest in clinical studies.

He had no takers. The problem wasn’t that his idea was too radical, but rather that they has seen so many similar ideas before. In fact, there had been hundreds of trials on immunological approaches to cancer and they had all failed. Many agreed that Allison’s approach held promise, but after being burned so many times, no one was willing to take another plunge.
It took three years and tons of heartache, but eventually Allison got a small biotech firm, Medarex, to invest in his idea. Today, Cancer Immunotherapy is considered a miracle cure and many believe that Allison will receive a Nobel prize for his work. Medarex was acquired in 2009 by Bristol Myers Squibb for $2.4 billion.
3. Your Idea Needs To Combine With Other Ideas

When Elance was founded in 1999, it seemed like a really good idea. Taking its name from a Harvard Business Review article titled titled The Dawn of the E-Lance Economy the founders sought to match freelance contractors and firms much like Monster.com did for full-time applicants. Unfortunately, the it didn’t gain any traction.

So the investors decided to hire a new CEO and take the company in a new direction. Instead of matching firms to freelancers, it would help companies manage relationships. This idea met with much greater success and E-Lance became a pioneer in vendor management software. In fact, it became so successful that it attracted stiff competition from the likes of SAP and Oracle.

At that point, the investors felt it was time to sell, but the new management team thought that they could build an even bigger business by combining the two ideas — matching freelancers to firms and helping to make those relationships successful. So they sold the software business and kept the brand name, a small staff and some intellectual property.

In the years that followed, those two ideas combined with even more ideas. The firm partnered with training companies to offer accreditation of specific skills, helped its customers build “private clouds” of preferred contractors and developed algorithms to create better engagements. In 2013, it merged with oDesk to form Upwork, the world’s largest freelancing platform.
All too often, people want to see entrepreneurship as if it were an action movie. The hero, transformed by a great moment of epiphany, champions his idea despite being besieged on all sides by those who seek to thwart him. He prevails in the end by being loyal and true and never wavering from his initial vision.
That’s a dangerous fantasy. As Silicon Valley startup guru Steve Blank has often noted, a startup is essentially a search for a sustainable business model. It’s not like an episode of Mission Impossible, where you have a clear and concrete objective and execute a plan with split second precision.
In fact, it’s more like a role playing game. There are certain rules to play by, but no clear path forward or ending sequence (except, of course, for bankruptcy). Instead, you have to progress through a series of challenges while gaining experience and artifacts along the way. In the end, everyone needs to forge their own path, but here are four things you should know going in.
1. Develop A Customer Before You Develop A Product

Many entrepreneurs treat a new venture as if it was a smaller version of an existing business. You develop a product, identify a market and sell to customers. In the Mission Impossible version of entrepreneurship, once you come up with a trailblazing idea, all that’s left is to execute your plan effectively.
In the real world though, your idea will almost always be flawed in some way. So by developing a fully featured product before you test your idea with real customers, you will almost certainly end up wasting scarce resources. Then, you’ll find yourself scrambling to correct your mistake before you run out of money.
There is a better way. Consider the case of Nick Swinmurn, a young entrepreneur who thought he could sell shoes online. To test his idea, he took some pictures of shoes and built a bare bones website. When someone ordered a pair, he went to the shoe store and bought whatever he needed to fulfill the order. He lost money on every sale.
Clearly, that’s an incredibly stupid way to run a business, but it’s an ingenious — and incredibly cheap — way of testing a business model. The business Swinmurn built, Zappos, was acquired by Amazon in 2009 for $940 million,
2. Your Idea Has Probably Been Done Before

For most of his career, Jim Allison had been content to be a research scientist and had earned some renown in his field of immunology. But in the mid-1990s, he had a breakthrough idea that would change his path. His research suggested that there might be a way to unleash the human immune system to fight cancer.
It was more than just a vague concept. He had done studies on mice that had shown incredible results. They were so impressive, in fact, that he felt he simply had to get the research translated into an effective treatment. So he started going around to all the big pharmaceutical companies to try to get them to invest in clinical studies.
He had no takers. The problem wasn’t that his idea was too radical, but rather that they has seen so many similar ideas before. In fact, there had been hundreds of trials on immunological approaches to cancer and they had all failed. Many agreed that Allison’s approach held promise, but after being burned so many times, no one was willing to take another plunge.
It took three years and tons of heartache, but eventually Allison got a small biotech firm, Medarex, to invest in his idea. Today, Cancer Immunotherapy is considered a miracle cure and many believe that Allison will receive a Nobel prize for his work. Medarex was acquired in 2009 by Bristol Myers Squibb for $2.4 billion.
3. Your Idea Needs To Combine With Other Ideas

When Elance was founded in 1999, it seemed like a really good idea. Taking its name from a Harvard Business Review article titled titled The Dawn of the E-Lance Economy the founders sought to match freelance contractors and firms much like Monster.com did for full-time applicants. Unfortunately, the it didn’t gain any traction.
So the investors decided to hire a new CEO and take the company in a new direction. Instead of matching firms to freelancers, it would help companies manage relationships. This idea met with much greater success and E-Lance became a pioneer in vendor management software. In fact, it became so successful that it attracted stiff competition from the likes of SAP and Oracle.
At that point, the investors felt it was time to sell, but the new management team thought that they could build an even bigger business by combining the two ideas — matching freelancers to firms and helping to make those relationships successful. So they sold the software business and kept the brand name, a small staff and some intellectual property.
In the years that followed, those two ideas combined with even more ideas. The firm partnered with training companies to offer accreditation of specific skills, helped its customers build “private clouds” of preferred contractors and developed algorithms to create better engagements. In 2013, it merged with oDesk to form Upwork, the world’s largest freelancing platform.
4. You Don’t Need A Business Plan, You Need A Business Model

For traditional businesses, strategic planning is essential. You need to anticipate demand, allocate resources and coordinate the efforts of hundreds, if not thousands of people. It takes a significant organizational effort to keep things running smoothly and meet the needs of customers, partners and employees.

Yet a startup has few of these concerns. Usually there are just a handful of employees, if any, a few partners and maybe a customer or two, if things are going well. So it’s not a business plan that you need, but a business model — a clear idea of how you will create, deliver and capture value — and there’s no way of knowing exactly what will work going in.
That’s why it’s much more important to explore than predict. Nick Swinmurn didn’t just dream up a new way to sell shoes, he tested his idea before taking the plunge. Jim Allison studied the immune system for decades before coming up with his miracle cure. Elance continually honed and iterated its model before it came up with a winning formula.

So we need to get over the myth of the heroic leader. It doesn’t take superpowers or a magical suit of armor to be a great entrepreneur. Rather, it takes the courage to begin the quest knowing that you’re just a normal person who will have to find a way through to the other side.

Your Competition Wants Your Customers

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Competition is a part of business life. Some would argue that competition forces businesses to strive to get better at what they do for the fear of losing customers to rivals. Losing a few customers periodically is inevitable. However, losing too many (especially your best customers) must be avoided at all costs.

For most businesses, the top 20% of their customers account for 80% (or more) of their profits. While much thought and strategy typically go into bringing in new customers, not enough is spent on retaining existing customers. That’s where the real gold lies.

It may be a little uncomfortable to think that some of your best customers might be looking at making a change, but it’s something you must consider if you want to avoid having it become a reality. Everyone talks about taking care of their customers, but in many instances that’s a phrase not truly backed up with action. To build a fence around your customers and keep them far away from the prying arms of your competitors, you mus truly care, protect, and guide them.

Gather customer feedback on an ongoing basis.

Most businesses put a lot of hard work into getting a new customer. But after they become a customer, little effort is put into nurturing that relationship. A customer should never be taken for granted.

It’s easy to get wrapped up in the day-to-day operation of your business and lose touch with what’s happening outside your doors in the marketplace. Phone calls and emails to customers can be a great way to communicate and stay connected. But to do it on a large scale can be unrealistic. Informative company newsletters and surveys can help keep your customers up-to-date and give them a way to express their needs and concerns. These efforts can provide an early warning system to catch a customer jumping ship before it happens.

Tell them what you do.

Your competitors will do anything to steal your customers, including promising the moon. You know that some of these are false claims or teasers to get their foot in the door. Some of your customers may not know that. Your job is not only to provide a great product and service but also to continually remind customers about the value you provide that your competitors can’t match. If you don’t tell them, no one else will either.

Informing your customers through educational marketing content is a powerful way to keep them engaged while differentiating your company as one that truly cares about their success (not just your own).

Where are the weaknesses?

To help plug the holes in your business, start thinking about things from your competitors’ point of view. After all, they’re always looking for any weaknesses they can exploit, so you should, too. That way, you can shore up your weak spots before they get out of hand and, in the process, strengthen your position in the marketplace.

To discover your weaknesses, talk with your customers. Ask them about the areas you could improve. Stay up-to-date with industry trends that could create a possible gap in your defenses, too. You can’t buy every bit of technology as soon as it hits the market, but you can stay informed so you can address concerns with your customers when they arise. Sometimes the best defense is a good offense. Be proactive in your customer communication.

“There is only one boss: the customer. And he can fire everybody in the company, from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.” ~ Sam Walton, Wal-Mart

Customer retention starts with providing great service and value. Getting to the top is hard work, but staying there requires just as much effort. Being aware of the competition while shoring up the weak areas in your business can go a long way in helping keep your customers coming back.

Monopolies and the lack of competition aren’t in anyone’s best interest. Keeping your best customers satisfied is. Use competition as a motivating factor to continually improve your services. Communicating with and showing appreciation for your customers will give you an invisible force field to keep the competition out of your backyard.