Extracted from the on-line forums of Speed Business Networking
Provided there is actually a market for your product or service, the following steps, properly adapted to your unique business environment, and correctly executed, are a failsafe recipe for business growth. Despite the guarantee of success that this strategy offers, it is surprising how very few businesses actually employ it.
1 Targetted Database
No business can succeed without a database, as targeted as possible. If a targeted database can be purchased, this is best, but most SME’s don’t have that luxury. Great sources of databases that can be at least minimally targeted are: white pages on-line, yellow pages on-line, Department of Commerce Business Directory. Your own referrals and contacts should be added to this database. Most business people can readily manage a database of 800-1600, which will take no longer than 30 minutes to 1 hour daily to “farm” correctly.
Obviously, if you don’t have a database, or it is a poor database, this strategy can’t even get off the ground. What database do you have? What help do you need, if any, to develop it?
2 Plan, Schedule, Track, Analyse and Refine Your Database Communication
If any of these steps are missing, you will certainly fail. If you already have a database and are not doing these things in a regular, disciplined, and strategic way, you are wasting a vital resource. If you have staff who are supposed to be making calls, but you don’t have written evidence, KPI’s or analysis of the activity, then you are certainly losing a great deal of money. Too many businesses operate on trust when it comes to the telemarketing function (or indeed any function!), and we are yet to see that trust justified in even one instance. After the first call, these calls are no longer cold calls. By calling within a 90-day cycle, using appropriate scripting, you ensure that calls remain warm and that they build relationships, not burn them.
How often are you contacting your database? What information are you keeping? What analysis do you do? How have you been able to refine this part of database massage in order to get continuously improved results?
3 Ensure that What You Offer to Your Database is Actually Relevant to it
Your script should be something the listener actually wants to hear. If you haven’t got something they want to hear, then you wouldn’t have a market! A lot of people come unstuck here but would be surprised how easy it is to come up with a great script if they get together with their business friends to construct one.
What script are you using? Did you test it properly and compare it with others, or did you take a guess? Do you have a series of different offers so that your clients hear something fresh and interesting each time you contact them?
Tip: If you’re not getting an absolute minimum of 1 appointment per 20 calls on the “cold” (first) call, approximately 2 appointments per 20 calls on cycle 2, and at least 10 appointments per 20 calls by cycle 4, then something is very wrong! Speed Business Networking member Petrese McGurdy, MD of True North Financial Solutions, refined her script and got 1 appointment per 14 cold calls, and 100% of her warm referred calls! Listen to the free podcast recorded on www.speedbusinessnetworking.com to see script development in action!
4 Have Impactful Marketing Material to Leave with the Client Potential Client
Use your business friends to critique your marketing material and help develop a simple package which compels people to take action. (Check out our Member Showcase to see Leonie Davis' before and after of her marketing flyer for Imagine.)
What do you actually show potential clients when you visit them? What is the quality of this material compared to the best you’ve seen? What do you actually leave with clients? How does that material work to hold the client’s interest and keep them “warm”, or even contain a really strong “call to action”. How does that material compare with the best you’ve seen?
In what way does your marketing material follow the classic AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action)?
There is much more to business success than this, but these 4 steps are the most crucial things you can do to build your business. This is a major strategy of highly successful businesses and yet it is almost free. Why would you not use it? (Scared of the phone? Find out an easy, permanent solution!)
Sincerely
Christine Sutherland
PS: Mark Walsh, president of VerticalNet, says that business people who avoid on-line strategies are “like dinosaurs that gather together to eat the last leaves."
Don’t be a dinosaur, take the plunge into on-line business communities and reap the benefit, not just today, but for your future!
Your Simple Steps to Easy Business Development
1 Download the free ebook “Speed Business Networking – the Manual” to understand a much more effective (and more fun) approach to utilising networking to get real results. Your business community is your key to success if only you know how to build it, not only for referrals, but for advocacy, strategic alliances, and generous sharing of expertise.
2 As well as attending your business community’s networking events (and of course we recommend you join Australia’s ORIGINAL Speed Business Networking group), and getting help to carry out your own schedule of informal networking for warm referrals, diarise at least one hour a week where you will LEARN and USE far easier, faster ways to take your business to that next level, enjoying more success than you ever dreamed possible, with far less stress than you have experienced up till now. There's a vast array of business development resources available free at www.betterbusiness.speedbusinessnetworking.com.
The Four Essential Steps to Developing Business Revenue Even from Scratch - To learn more about this author, visit Christine Sutherland's Website.
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