Category: Blog

 The key thing about retail is that your customers come to you. They need to be able to find you easily, and you need to convince them to buy from you, and not from the next shop or website. Here are some pointers on how to encourage them:

1. Work out where your target market can be found.

Customers come in all shapes and sizes, but what description fits the ones that give you most business? Men, women, children? What age? What spending power? What sorts of jobs do they do? Once you’ve worked out who they are, you can think about how you can reach them, or else they might congregate, and target your marketing accordingly.

2. Let your customers know that you’re there.

Think carefully about where and how your target market learns about where they can buy the things that they want or need – whether an advert in the local paper or a glossy magazine is more likely to be seen by them. Also think about who else sells to the same demographic as you, and where there’s no conflict of interests, try to make some partnerships where you agree to promote one another.

3. Make them want to buy.

Once you’ve got the prospective customer to come to you, make sure that you have your goods attractively laid out so that it is easy for them to find what they’re looking for. On a website, it is particularly important that products are well described, and that the pricing is clear. In a shop, access should be uncluttered, shelves should be easy to reach, and prices clearly displayed, when appropriate. In addition, try to apply some of the same psychology used by supermarkets: try putting the stuff that people regularly buy, (like the bread and milk!), at the back so that people have to walk past your other goods to get what they came in for, and impulse purchases by the tills.

Retail advice taken from Getting Down to Business, section ‘Getting Into Retail’

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles, freedigitalphotos.net

This blog is for everyone who might have heard me mention my ‘sales board’ but haven’t yet got around to coming to one of my training sessions and finding out exactly what they’re all about. The Sales Board is a prop to help business owners implement a ‘sales process’ when they’re selling their product or service. It’s a ‘dry-wipe’ white board, ideally displayed prominently on your office wall, where you can’t help but see it, with all of your potential customers, (as l call them, ‘Prospects’), listed in a column on the left-hand side. Here is an illustration:

You use the board to log the date when you first made contact, whether it was by phone, e-mail or face-to-face, then to tick off when you have sent them a proposal/quotation, when you follow up the quotation or proposal to see what the Prospect has decided to do, if they can’t give you a deision right away, and then when you next follow up if they still need longer to decide, (it is down to your own discretion how many times you choose to follow up before you decide to leave the Prospect alone, if they persistently fail to give you a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’).

These are the benefits of the Sales Board:

1)      You have the date that you will next contact your Prospect up on the wall right in front of you, staring you in the face, so you won’t forget to do it.

2)      Because you agree with your Prospect the date that you will contact them next, you are saved from feeling that you are hassling them, or that you might be catching them at a bad time.

3)      Always calling your Prospect when you said that you would reinforces your credibility, as it shows your Prospect that you do what you say that you will.

More details about how to work your Sales Process are coming in future blogs – watch this space. If your business is a shop you might be thinking that the ‘Sales Board’ isn’t applicable to your sales process, so I’ll be addressing retail separately in my next blog. If you want more help with setting up a Sales Process in the meantime, or if you have any questions, call Doug on 07946 730475.

For the benefit of those who haven’t yet managed to make it to one of our sales training sessions yet, I’m putting a little series of blogs together about how to work your ‘sales process’. We’ll start with having a look at what I find people commonly get wrong when they’re selling.

Imagine that someone makes contact with you, by phone or e-mail, because they’ve been to your website or they’ve seen an advert that you’ve published, and they’re interested in using your services. What do you do? Do you tell them all about the services you can provide, and how good they are, and, once you’ve made it clear how excellent your product or service is, start to tell them about what it will cost? In many ways this seems like the logical thing to do, but, in fact, it’s not the best way to make sales.

There are two significant problems here. You haven’t given yourself the opportunity to find out why the prospective customer needs you – presumably they have a problem or a need which your product or service can resolve and fulfil for them. If you can find out all about what it is that this customer really needs, rather than relying on the limited information that they have offered at the start of the conversation, you might find that you were about to offer them something that wouldn’t have been as good as something else that you sell, or you might find that they actually need to buy more from you than you realised at the beginning. This knowledge is important in order to properly satisfy your customer and to capitalise fully on your sale.

The other problem is to do with the psychology of value for money: you haven’t given your customer the opportunity to compare the cost of what you’re offering them to what it costs them to do without it, financially and emotionally. They probably don’t have much of a frame of reference, and, when you quote a price, they are likely to compare it in their heads the cost of what you’re selling to whatever they last purchased, which might have been a cup of coffee from the vending machine. In all likelihood, the cost comparison won’t flatter you. You need to be able to make them see the true value of your product or service, which you will only be able to do once you’ve taken the time to talk to them about the real cost of the problem or requirement that they have come to you for help with.

 In the next blog we will describe how to put a ‘Sales Process’ in place to help you avoid the pitfalls that we have discussed here. If you can’t wait, or if you have questions in the meantime, call Doug on 07946 730475 or e-mail doug@exec-tc.com. You can also check out our advice sheet on Sales on our website.

 

In our last blog we explained how to establish exactly what your goal is for what you want your business to achieve. This time, we’re going to describe one of the support methods you can use to help you to achieve the targets that you have set yourself – and eventually get those goals.

As well as helping others with growing their businesses, I’m also constantly working on growing and expanding my own. One support method that has been very helpful for me over the years is ‘Masterminding’.

A Mastermind group is a group of five or six individuals who can be considered peers in terms of having broadly similar experience and career achievements. The group meets regularly, every month or two. The meetings are treated formally – as if it were a meeting with a major client – and, as in any business meeting, social discussion is kept to a minimum. Every group member has an opportunity to share with the group what their goals are, and what targets they need to hit to achieve the goals. They also share with the group what problems and constraints stand in the way of the targets being met.

Because they understand your business, but are detached from it, the other group members can think objectively and give you helpful suggestions. Importantly, after you have received the suggestions from the group, you commit to implementing at least one, and report back at the next meeting on what progress you have made. website loading speed test The commitment is the critical part: this maybe the only time that you, as a business owner, are held accountable to another person or group, and this is what will drive you to achieve.

These are the characteristics of a really effective Mastermind group:

–          The participants are people that like and trust each other, but they aren’t just a group of good friends or people that normally meet in a social rather than business context. This is important because they have to be able to be frank and objective, not feeling obliged to spare feelings or just patting one another on the back. The atmosphere should be a professional one.

–          There are no conflicts of interest among the members, so they should not be suppliers, or clients of one another, or members of the same organisation. Again, this is because the group members have to feel comfortable with being frank with one another.

–          The group takes their commitment to meet, and their commitment to the challenges that they set each other, as seriously as they would their other business dealings. It is the accountability that really makes it work.

We wish you all the best with your Masterminding – let us know how you get on, or if you’ve got any questions. For more ‘self-help’ growing your business, try our book Getting Down to Business, available from the online shop at www.exec-tc.com.

If you think that your goal is for your business to make £X amount of money this year, you probably have the wrong idea. You need to ask yourself, why do I need the money? What do I actually want it for: to buy a second home abroad? To be able to afford to retire in five years’ time? To pay off a loan? You work out what your goal is by asking yourself, ‘why do I want it? Why do I need it?’ until the true goal becomes clear.

Many business owners misunderstand the difference between a goal and a target. The goal is what you want from your business or your lifestyle; the target is the actual revenue that the business will have to earn in order to get there. In my book, Getting Down to Business, I’ve described the definition of a goal for a business as, ‘not to earn a million pounds, but to send your children to university and have the option of retirement at fifty-five.’

 In my experience, a large number of business owners have not got clear goals in mind for their business, and so do not have a clear idea of how to take the business in the right direction to achieve what they want. Setting your goals properly is the way to make sure that you set the right targets for the business and achieve what you want in the long term.

The experience can be illuminating: frequently, the business is actually set up in a way that makes it difficult to achieve the goal. For example, one business owner that I worked with wanted to spend significant amounts of time in a second home abroad, but his business was set up in such a way that it was impossible for him to be absent for any length of time. It would be necessary for him to re-organise his business, either to employ a manager who he could co-ordinate with remotely by internet and telephone and run the business that way, or to stop what he was doing and embark on a different sort of business altogether which was better suited to the lifestyle that he wanted.

Only once you have a clear goal can you start to plan effectively and set targets which can be sure to bring you nearer to what you really want from your business and your life.

 Our next blog post will be about how to go about achieving the goals, so watch this space! In the meantime, if you want more advice on how to set goals for your business or how to go about achieving them, contact Doug D’Aubrey on 07946 730475 or Doug@exec-tc.com.

The first pictures from Launch Night have been released!

We hosted around one hundred guests at WS10 Conferencing and Banqueting Facility in Wednesbury for our Getting Down to Business book launch on Monday September 16th. The event featured a memorable performance by magician act Slightly Unusual, because, according to Doug, ‘business success isn’t magic’. Instead, Getting Down to Business is a practical, no-nonsense guide to growing a business, and includes chapters on getting started, setting goals, sales and marketing, finance IT and managing people and yourself.

Guests raised £125 for the Midlands Air Ambulance through donations and a raffle. Doug is keen to support the air ambulance because it relies so heavily on public support – having to raise millions of pounds a year to keep the service running. Sofia Voutianitis, fundraiser at Midlands Air Ambulance, said: “We’re extremely grateful to Doug and Matthew for supporting the Midlands Air Ambulance at this event. Business support is hugely important to us as a charity, so this was a perfect audience for us to spread our message about what we do and how people can help. We have to raise £7million every year to keep our three helicopters flying, saving lives across the Midlands area by saving time in getting people to hospital. Every penny counts and we’re thrilled that the book launch raised £125 for us.”

We hope you enjoy the pictures from the big night. If you haven’t bought your copy yet, Getting Down to Business is available to buy from our online shop.

The eager audience

 

Matthew and Doug make their appearance, magicked out of thin air by the marvellous ‘Slightly Unusual’ illusionists.

 

Matthew lets the audience see the real star of the show.

 

Doug working hard to keep up with demand.

 

Lovely to see readers keen to get stuck in!

Our publisher, Sue Richardson – to whom we are profoundly grateful for making sure that we had a book to launch at all.

 

 

 

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Some pictures and responses from the last sales training that we did:

‘Fantastic eye-opener’ – Ben Fones, Ben Fones Photography

Delegates doing exercises in pairs, using their workbooks

‘very useful … clear and concise’ Joanne Lovell, Beewebb

 

Doug illustrating the point for the benefit of the room.

‘Exactly what I needed at the start of my new business – very practical […] I’m going to put my sales board up tomorrow’ Denise Waite, The H R Dept Wolverhampton

 

Our next training session is on October 28th at Wolverhampton Novotel. The cost is £45 per head plus VAT. E-mail Doug@exec-tc.com to book a place.

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!