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I often get asked to provide training to address a number of problems that business owners have with selling their product or service to potential customers. Here are four of the most popular:

I haven’t got enough people interested in buying what I have to offer.

This is really a marketing problem, not a sales problem. Sometimes business owners think that they don’t like selling, but actually they have misunderstood the difference between sales and marketing. Marketing is about getting  people interested in what you have to offer, (ie creating ‘prospects’), sales is getting those people to buy.

If your problem is with not having enough prospects, you need to re-think your marketing strategy. Call me for advice, or to set up a free business review, and go to the ‘Free Advice Sheets’ on this website for more information about marketing.

Lots of people are interested in my product/service but they never seem to buy from me.

Again, this could be a problem with your marketing strategy. If you have lots of prospective customers but too few of them eventually buy from you, it may be that you are selling to the wrong people. Think carefully about the unique selling point of your product or service, and how you can introduce yourself to the people that this unique selling point will appeal to most.

You also need to make sure that you have a structured ‘sales process’ in place for converting interested persons into paying customers. You might start with a phone call to arrange an appointment, leave a quotation following your appointment and follow it up later to find out whether the person wants to buy, but you must be keeping track of when you need to contact your prospective customer next. You make sure that you agree a specific date for when you will next contact them, and that you do contact them on the date that you agreed. If you always contact them when you say you will, you are giving them a sense of how reliable you are. If you don’t have a structured process in place for asking people to buy from you, you won’t convert prospects into customers.

I don’t have time for selling; I’m too busy running the business.

You must make sure that you allocate time to making sales, particularly if you don’t enjoy it and would rather be doing other things. It is great if you have so much work on that you haven’t got time to worry about selling to new customers, but if you have no new orders in the pipeline, when you finish the jobs you’re working on now, your cash flow will end up suffering.

But I’m not a salesperson! I hate selling to people.

You don’t actually ever need to ‘sell’ what you’re offering to your prospective customer. If you know that what you are offering will solve a problem that your prospective customer has, then you can engage them in a conversation about their problem, and establish how valuable it would be to them if you could solve that problem for them. At that point, you only need to ask them if they want to buy what you are offering. They may well say yes right away. If they need time to think it over, you arrange to follow up with them at an agreed date and time. If they say no, you find out what the objection is, in case it is something that you can resolve or negotiate on. If you can’t change whatever is preventing them from buying, you can always ask them if they know of anyone else who might need what you’re offering.

For more detailed advice on selling, come along to the training course on October 28^th, which will be held in Wolverhampton Novotel and costs £45 per head plus VAT. Get in touch for further information. If you can’t make the course, call me for advice or for a free business review at your convenience. The free advice sheet on our website, ‘Sales’, will help you get started, and the DVD available from the online shop provides in-depth guidance for you to refer to at your leisure.

What is Growth Accelerator?

Growth Accelerator is a grant funding option available to SMEs wanting to grow. It provides the funding to help ambitious businesses to develop and implement a growth strategy, with the support of business coaching and training. To be eligible for Growth Accelerator, your business must be registered in the UK and based in England, have fewer than 250 employees and have a turnover of less than £40m.

Aren’t grant applications difficult and time-consuming?

It needn’t be. There are a few, simple steps, and we can manage it for you, so you don’t need to spend hours on it.

Why should I apply?

The grant will allow you to benefit from the services of a business coach with a small amount of outlay, so that you can increase your profits. They will review your business, help you to create a strategy for improvement, and support you while you implement it.

Another client found that their business was lacking a clear structure.  There were some areas of the business that no one was taking ownership for, and, you guessed it … nothing was happening in that area – and it was holding to company back. We helped them to create a structure and identify exactly who was taking care of each and every aspect of the business, so that everyone was clear about what was their responsibility. Profits increased right away.

What do I get?

£3,500 worth of business coaching with a consultant, including six training course workshops run by Pera

Are there any added benefits?

Once you are on the programme, you have access to additional funding for Leadership and Management training. It is match-funding up to £2,000 per senior manager, (Key person in the business), so if you have a training requirement that you have believed to be too expensive, then this is a solution for you.

 

After a decade of helping dozens of small businesses across the West Midlands grow and be successful, Matthew and Doug decided that if they could get their joint knowledge into the form of written, practical, straightforward advice, they could share the advantage of it with a much wider community.

This was what generated Getting Down to Business. When asked about what prompted their decision to write a business advice book, Matthew explained that the writing process helped to ‘marshal our thoughts and capture the benefits of all that experience’.

So far so good – but it wasn’t all plain sailing. The first big obstacle, to which all writers can relate, was setting on the clearest and most coherent structure for presenting the advice. As Matthew put it, ‘it’s one thing to engage a client in conversation over several weeks, quite another to organise the experience of working with many clients into a logically flowing narrative in which the sections both stand alone and hang together’. He and Doug remember the relief when, half-way through, the ‘eureka’ moment came, and they found the right arrangement of sections and chapters to embrace all of their experience.

That was the content taken care of – but how were they actually going to get published? Mercifully, Doug knew a former client, Sue Richardson, a director of a marvellous team of publishing professionals. She supplied Sarah, who edited their work and kept them to schedule. is site down This made it a relatively smooth journey to the wonderful moment when the edited manuscript was handed over to the proof readers. Now excitedly looking forward to seeing the book published in all its glory in September, Doug and Matthew say that the terrific response and the support that they had from the professionals that they engaged to help them complete the project was one of the most rewarding aspects of it.

When asked what they want their readers to take away from the book, above all else, they say it is the awareness of how to monitor what you do, in order to be sure that you are doing what you need to, and to know how to make changes if not. This is what Matthew and Doug want to give to business owners, and this is what Getting Down to Business can provide.

To pre-order your copy at the special pre-release price of £9.99, visit the online shop on the website. Come to Launch Night on September 16th to collect your signed copy and meet the authors!

We’re delighted to announce that our book, Getting down to business – a practical, no-nonsense guide to growing your small business – is all set to hit the shops in September.

We’ve brought a wealth of experience from some 25 years of helping clients reach their business goals to the book, with proven guidelines for how to not only survive but excel in a chosen business field.

You can pre-order a copy for the special price of £9.99 from our website.

Starting a business in a recession is a popular thing to do, whether through need or want. When times are tough, small firms can identify niche opportunities in a market and move quickly to fill them. Help available includes that from industry bodies, government assistance programmes with loans available and using technology to innovate, raise finance and find new customers.

Now help is also available from our book, with information on everything needed for the small business owner – from managing finances to marketing and everything in between.

Getting down to business also includes chapters on getting started, setting goals, sales, marketing, finance, IT and managing yourself.

Published by Sue Richardson Associates, due out in September 2013, the book can be pre-ordered through the ETC website  for an early bird offer of £9.99.

It will be available in printed, e-reader and smart phone compatible format. Dogger

As I hope that you’ll be well aware by now, we have recently launched Velocity – a new programme specifically with micro businesses and sole traders in mind.

It’s been an exciting time for us so we’ve not been shy about telling everyone!  Now that we’re finally able to properly launch our new blog, (quite excited about that too), I thought that it was the perfect opportunity to explain a bit about why we’re so thrilled with our new programme, and what motivated us to create it.

From time to time, we would meet with micro business owners who really wanted us to help them boost their business, but who just weren’t ready or able to commit to a long term growth plan at the time when we first met. We’ve always prided ourselves on our flexibility, and on tailoring our service to meet our clients’ needs, so we had a good think about what we could do for them.

Velocity was born…

As it turned out, these clients became our willing Guinea pigs for Velocity. Our approach was to start with a couple of half day sessions working intensively with the business owner so that we could get a solid understanding of where the business was at. This was enough for us to identify some key things that could be done to improve their profits right away, and get an action plan together. Afterwards, we followed up with the clients each month by telephone or Skype to make sure that the plan was being followed and that everything was going smoothly.

With this follow up, and the reassurance of us being on hand to give advice by phone at any time, one of our Guinea pigs actually found herself too busy with increased business to continue with us, only four months down the line, and put the programme on hold for a whole year before she felt like she needed our support again.

Tough making a living doing what you love?

Another client was trying to make a living from his hobby, but was struggling to turn the thing that he loved to do into a profitable occupation. We tried the same approach with him, and after twelve months of support on Velocity he feels that he has become a true business man and is employing his first staff.

This is what we love about Velocity – it has given us the opportunity to help more individuals who were struggling but desperate to make a living from the work they were passionate about doing. The best part is seeing their pride in themselves when they finally get to achieve their goals, once we’ve had the chance to teach them the right attitude and approach to do it.

Now we’re excited about the next people we can help with our splendid new programme!

To find out how Velocity could work for you, e-mail Doug@exec-tc.com

Testimonial from a Velocity client:

“I called Doug for a free consultation, and, if I am honest, I didn’t expect to like him. I was expecting someone pushy who would give me the hard sell. When Doug turned up, I couldn’t have been more wrong. Doug listened, and understood where I was coming from. The morning flew by, and before long I had a big ‘to do’ list.  I had found the something I needed, and just knowing I was doing something pro-active made me feel much better. […] I have not only gained a business coach, but a good friend, and he has more than paid for himself. I would thoroughly encourage anyone who is struggling to invest in some support”.

 Mel Riley

Psychotherapist in Private Practice