Business Growth Insights

A guy I used to work with drove me crazy. It seemed that every time I asked him whether he had taken care of something I had asked him to do, he would say, “I don’t have the time. I can’t do it.” This baffled me since I saw him take long lunches, leisurely surf the internet, clown around with other employees and even take time out of his day to run personal errands. Yes, he was busy all right, but he wasn’t productive.

Gandhi said, “Action expresses priorities.” Don’t we all make time for those things that are most important to us? What my colleague was really telling me is that he didn’t see the importance of the task. Let me give you an example: As a working mom I put my kids in daycare. One day I got a call from the daycare telling me my daughter had fallen out of her highchair and bumped her head. I dropped everything I was doing to go pick her up. She turned out to be okay by the way, but I decided that I had to take control of my time and my priorities. I sat down with my calendar and cleared it out. There wasn’t anything more important in my life than my child. She was going to receive all of my time and attention.

Think of your business as your child. If it’s screaming for your attention and you say, “I just don’t have the time” then you are fooling yourself and hurting your business. At OneCoach, we recognize the importance of spending time wisely. We get our clients focused in on their highest impact and income-producing activities (HIPA). Maximizing your ability to focus in on those valuable activities will increase your revenue, your cash flow and your profit.

Juggling too many day-to-day tasks will force you to become reactive instead of proactive. Being reactive — putting out fires all day — long reduces the effectiveness of your performance and ultimately your bottom line. Stop trying to be a “one-horse show”, wearing so many hats that you will start to feel like what one of my clients told me recently… “one of those plate spinners at the carnival.” You can’t run a business by barely keeping everything together!

You may be so overwhelmed that you don’t know where to begin each day. Here’s how to eliminate all the time wasters and time bandits in your life and maximize your performance by focusing on the best use of your time.

Start by keeping track of your time.
You should be very, very clear on everything in your day that is taking up your time. Take a good hard look at all the activities you are doing, all your processes, procedures, and commitments. Are you a serial procrastinator? Do you spend time reading junk emails, daydreaming, making personal phone calls and surfing the web? Or are you on-task and laser-focused on your goals for the future? Accountants and attorneys usually bill by 15-minute increments. If they don’t track their time, if they aren’t performing activities that are billable, they don’t get paid. How are you spending your 15-minute increments of time? Wisely or foolishly?

Take a minute to figure out what your time is actually worth.
Divide your annual salary by 2080 (which is 52 weeks at 40 hours per week). This will give you an hourly rate for your time. For instance, if you are making $100,000 per year, your hourly rate is $48 per hour. Are you doing activities that could easily be delegated to someone at a much lower hourly rate? Are there some tasks that you should be eliminating, delegating, and outsourcing? Wouldn’t it be more productive to spend your time generating leads vs. doing menial work? Why not pay someone $10 per hour to run your personal errands so you can spend your time closing deals and generating more revenue?

Prioritize your activities by how much revenue they bring.
After you’ve looked at everything you are doing on a daily basis then pick out the activities that will bring you the most revenue. But keep your list short. What is the most valuable task on your list? Establish a ranking value for each task. Decide whether it is a first, second or third priority.

Organize your activities.
Remember the “touch it once” rule. If you touch it…take action. Don’t reread, revisit or re-file. The whole idea is to be efficient. Get your workspace under control. De-clutter and get rid of things that you don’t need. I use four paper trays each labeled as follows, “To Do, To Read, To Pay, To File.” This helps me keep things under control.

Plan ahead.
Before the end of the day, review your schedule and plan what you intend to accomplish the next day. I always pick the hardest task to accomplish first. That way everything else seems easy by comparison.

You have a clear choice. You can either stay in overwhelm or you can take control of your life. Remember, you are exchanging your life and your time for your business. Make sure that you choose the way you are investing your time as well.

If you need help with managing your day-to-day overwhelm, I recommend you check out OneCoach’s Business Momentum Club to learn proven strategies to growing your business.

Many business owners are allergic to planning. After all, there are too many things to do to stop and plan!

Big mistake.

Your plan is the key to focusing on the right things at the right time, and it helps measure progress toward your goals. Creating a sales and marketing plan as a subset of the overall business plan is critical for accelerating your business growth.

The fundamental function of marketing is to generate qualified sales leads. There are any number of tools that can be used to do that–but how do you know which tools to use if you don’t have a plan? And how do you know if you are investing in productive marketing activities if you don’t know have a budget or know what results you are trying to produce?

A marketing plan doesn’t need to be an extensive document. First, start with your business objectives for the next 6 months or year. You should already have these, in terms of target revenues if nothing else. Now, what marketing objectives align with those business objectives? For example, how many leads need to be generated in order to give sales sufficient numbers to close the deals necessary to reach the revenue objective? What strategies are going to meet those objectives? Will you need to get more publicity? Expand into a new market? Reach more people in your current market?

At this point, you know what you are aiming for, and you know how you need to hit the target. Now, determine what specific activities will achieve your strategies and objectives. This is where you choose from the enormous pool of marketing options–and you choose the activities that will work best for the audiences you want to reach and the results you want to produce. You might need to have a tradeshow program where you get face to face with your market, you might need to launch or improve your web site, you might need to implement a campaign for current customers. The list goes on and on.

Whatever the right activities are, put them together into an integrated program and create target metrics (e.g., number of click throughs, number of lead cards collected). There’s your marketing plan. The next step, the sales plan, focuses on the leads generated by marketing, how they will be converted to customers, and how follow on sales will be made to those customers. Articulate sales metrics in terms such as conversion rates, overall revenues, and revenues per customer.

Now you have something to measure against and you can review things periodically to see if you are on track in terms of the results you need to get or if something needs to be adjusted.

This whole process doesn’t need to take a lot of time. And having a sales and marketing plan will give you a lot more insight into how well this part of your company is working, and will let you make changes quickly if things are off course.

Need help in creating a plan? Check out the Business Momentum Club to learn the fundamentals of creating a successful sales and marketing plan.

A shopkeeper was dismayed when a brand new business much like his own opened up next door and erected a huge sign which read ‘BEST DEALS.’

He was horrified when another competitor opened up on his right, and announced its arrival with an even larger sign, reading ‘LOWEST PRICES.’

The shopkeeper panicked, until he got an idea. He put the biggest sign of all over his own shop. It read: ‘MAIN ENTRANCE.’

Not only is this anecdote funny, it is also a great reminder that there will always be competition in business…always.

Your success in business is not contingent upon a lack of competition, but, rather, your ability to separate yourself from those competitors. Innovate, differentiate your business from others in the marketplace, continue to be the best at what you do and communicate it effectively, and your competition will become irrelevant.

Note: the joke mentioned in this post was originally found on http://digitaldreamdoor.nutsie.com.

The success of every direct marketing campaign is intimately related to the offer being made. You may have a very good offer…but you will see a huge difference in profits if it is not just “very good,” but absolutely irresistible.

If you want to spend your time and money wisely, come up with an irresistible offer, and of course, have a list of the right people to present it to. (for tips on building your prospect list, read this!)

Here we offer you six pointers to make your offer absolutely irresistible to your potential clients:

1. First of all, define your target market
   This is so key that having clarity on who you are targeting with your offer will put you 90% ahead of the competition. The majority of business people design an offer, and only then, they start thinking who to present it to. By working through this process the right way, you ensure that your offer is 100% designed to meet your target market’s needs or desires.
2. Second, make the offer’s value easy to see
   Today, everyone is swamped with all kinds of sale offers, thus, people are always on guard and not very patient.  An irresistible offer is grasped in seconds, without any explanation.
3. Third, the offer should include a discount or gift, or both
   People take action when they know they will receive something of value for free or at a much lower price, thus, as you ask them to do something for you, give something back, as a sign of appreciation.  This simple gesture can increase the response rate to your offer by as much as 30%. Remember, people don’t make the decision to buy based on price, they make it based on value.
4. Fourth, the offer must have a valid reason, and it should be communicated clearly
   Any irresistible offer that doesn’t have a valid reason is suspicious; it is just “too good to be true.” You must have a reason to offer such an amazing deal; it can be your business’ anniversary, Christmas, customer appreciation week, opening week, end of the quarter, etc.  Think out the box, but always with a good reason.
5. Fifth, generate urgency
   Prompt your clients to act immediately by setting an expiration date, an extra bonus, a limited quantity or any other mechanism that will make people buy right away. Open-ended offers rarely yield great results.
6. Sixth, make the call to action easy to understand
   Just as its value, the offer’s call to action must not leave a single doubt on the customer’s mind. Tell them exactly and clearly what you want them to do, make it easy to do, and give as much detail as necessary. Keep it simple…

Analyze these pointers with your business coach and give them a try the next time you think about creating a direct marketing campaign…then be sure to track the results and response from your clients and prospects.

An absolutely irresistible offer will give you absolutely remarkable results, and now you know how to do it!

Do you have tips for creating an incredible offer? Please share by leaving a comment below!

Even if you are swamped with work, as a small business owner it is critical that you devote time to create a sales and marketing plan for your company. It is a key component of your business plan, the one that will map out and enhance your business growth.

The object of such a plan is to help you focus on the right things at the right time, and to measure the progress you are making in achieving your goals. What marketing does is produce good sales indicators, and it can do it through many ways; however, you need a plan to know which ways will give you the best results. You have to know how much money you have to invest and what goals you want to achieve.

It may sound complicated, but in reality, there is an easy way to create a marketing and sales plan:

Marketing Plan

• Write down your business goals for the next six months or next year. You probably already know what they are, but if you don’t, better stop and define them, because you are flying blind.
• Define what marketing goals match your business ones. For example, how many new sales you need per month to reach your profits goal.
• Define what strategies can get you those new sales. Maybe you have to reach for a new niche, or more people in your current one, or maybe you have to advertise more.
• Once you have the above, you will know where you are going and how to get there, and it will be easy to define specific activities to reach your goals.

Here’s where you select, from all the marketing activities there are, the ones that will give you the best results. For example, you may decide to throw a networking event, or you may need to enhance your website, or you may try to give your product or service a new look to entice your current customers.

• Bring what you chose all together into an integral program and work to define target metrics.

Sales Plan

This plan centers on the indicators produced by the marketing efforts, specifically, how this will be turned into clients and how you will sell to these clients. Your sales metrics should be expressed in conversion rates, total profits, and profits per client.

At this point, you have a base for measurement, and you can check if you are on the right track to reach your business goals. If you’re not, you can adjust.

Your sales and marketing plan can be simple, and the benefits will be enormous. You will be prepared to face the market and to make fast and relevant adjustments when they are needed.

If you need more help in creating your sales and marketing plan, consult with an executive business coaching firm. No one is better prepared to take you down the road of creating a successful plan that centers on your company’s specific needs.