It’s June 1st, How Are You Pacing On Your Year-End 2009 Goals?

Your 5/12 or 41.37% completed with the year, do your numbers tell you if you are going to make your 2009 year-end budget numbers today? If you had a twelve month pacing model in place for your business, you would have an accurate reading about this question.

A pacing model can help your business unit gauge if it is on pace to meet the goals set forth and gives a quick “YES or NO” to that pacing question throughout your goals’ time frame.

A pacing model is different than a forecasting model, since a pacing model takes your historical numbers to date plus what is pre-sold/reserved and compares that number to where you want to be at the end of your goal, which in turn can inform you if you are on pace to meet those goals in the allocated amount of time, with no variables included in its calculation (seasonality, pricing variations, external demand and supply situations, etc.).

Think of a pacing model as a macro model that tells you yes or no to the success of finishing your goal in the time allocated. By having a pacing model in place, you can determine if your current sales activity is enough today, to generate the numbers needed to make your year-end goals, even if you are less than 50% completed to that year-end. It is not just good enough to produce your numbers TODAY; you must also look forward and make sure that today’s numbers will match your goals tomorrow. By knowing if you are “on pace” or not to your year-end goals, management can make decisions TODAY if the marketing and pricing strategies in place now will be adequate to meet those goals, thus implement changes if they are not.

Stopping and looking forward is the only way a good business person can guarantee that today’s efforts will lead to tomorrow’s goal achievement.

Do you have some sort of pacing model in place for your business unit? If not, you should, how else can you make sure you will be at the 100% to goal for year-end numbers, even though you still have 58.63% to go?


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Use Amenity Selling To Increase Your Sales!

In the hotel industry, they talk about amenity selling because amenities can set a hotel apart from its competition’s price point, because a hotel’s core product (the bed and shower) functions the same as most everyone else’s. But, when you sell your core product with amenities wrapped around it, the opportunity for rate variation and “apples to oranges” comparison selling exists within the marketplace. Amenity selling is a perceived value, not concrete, that can lead to greater revenue opportunities from your client base.

For example, a majority of hotel customers can quickly compare room rates at one hotel to the room rates at another hotel, but a hotel’s customers’ estimation varies greatly on the dollar amount that they will pay for items like turn-down service, indoor pool, Wi-Fi, free breakfast, express check in/out, frequent stay clubs, tennis courts, theme decorations, amusement/water parks, ocean/beachfront views, twenty-four-hour restaurant, spa, golf course, casino, shopping outlets, location of the hotel, bars, etc. These are all examples of amenities that wrap around the core product (the bed and shower) that raise room rates and cause variation within the same product line and competitive set.

What about roadside assistance plans from the auto makers, another amenity? What about the fast food industry, have they not sold us on an amenity we call the drive thru? What about the emerging use of accepting debit cards as payment in businesses (flexible payment options) around someone’s core product line? What about the laundry detergent bottles that have a “no-mess bottle?” Just one more example in a long list of products that sell amenities around their core product line.

Look all around and you can see that most businesses have an amenity to sell in one form and fashion, but have you really put great thought into amenity selling for your marketing campaigns to increase your pricing points and acquire more customers? Probably not, but why? Examine your business unit’s amenities that are in place now, and what could be added, so that you could wrap them around your core product line to create rate variations within your marketplace and gain greater market share, thus growing your bottom line.


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Stop The “What If’s, Of Why Your Business Numbers Are Down!

Instead, start taking responsibility for your own actions in all situations, even the ones that you cannot totally control.

If it happened to you, your actions, no matter how small a part that they played in the outcome, are still a part of the outcome; so take that portion of the responsibility without hesitation. Did you not market your business, thinking, if you built it, they would come? Did you not focus on client retention, when business was booming? Did you not sell value, instead of price when asking for the sale?

There are many factors as to why things happen the way they do. Some of your own actions account for it; some do not. No matter the “what ifs,” remember that sitting around and wondering about them will only displace your time and stop you from changing your situation. Stand out of the crowd, accept your situation, and stop questioning, “Why me?” and, “What if?” after you commit to an action of change to resolve the situation. Only then can you execute a plan to change within.

No matter what, you and you alone have the ability to change your situation. It may not be immediate, but change will happen with an executed plan from a person who has first accepted the reality that it is only their actions that can improve this situation. Taking responsibility for actions in your life is a big step to turn your situation into success.

The difference between success and non-success is in an individual’s ability to believe in themselves as their own element of change and the daily commitment of that individual with that knowledge of success to execute those changes.
So, are you going to take action today? Good, now finish reading and implement.


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Script Your Dialogue For Greater Business Success

Scripted dialogues can benefit your business unit in the following ways: consistency; professionalism; assurance that the operational and sales talking points are covered; on-boarding, cross-training associates are effectively accomplished; and objective, clear, and non-derogatory answers that can be discussed to a broad-base spectrum that can be documented and used for legality protection.

Ever make a reservation at a hotel? The reservation screen is actually a fill-in-the-blank script that the hotel uses to capture its requested reservation information. In fact, there are parts within that reservation screen that will not let the reservation agent produce a confirmation number until the required information is completely filled in and correct. Ever call an 800 number for reservations? Ever get a wake-up call from a hotel? These are all examples of scripting within the hotel business.

Now, focus on your business unit and ask yourself, “What tasks can be scripted to help send my business unit into a proactive approach to talking with the customers and converting that captured time with them into a more qualified database for mining, better close ratios, lower miscommunication experiences, and higher profits?”

Once you identify those scripting opportunities, make sure that there is some sort of ongoing quality assurance program installed and corrective action responses in place to maintain all of the benefits that a “scripted company” can yield for itself.

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Market And Sell Your Small Business 24/7/52 To Be More Successful!

24/7/52. What this phrase means is twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and fifty-two weeks a year; this is the golden rule if you are marketing and selling your business unit's product line. Your marketing and sales efforts should never close, which means that you have 525,600 minutes a year to be open and to make sure that your business markets and sells itself in the best and most efficient way that it can, be it through on-line or off efforts.

No matter what the posted hours on the doors are for your business, you must be in the mind-set that your business is always “on, open, or alive,” 24/7/52. Think of it this way: When your business doors are closed, do potential, current, or future customers (economic decision makers) stop spending their money? Do outside and inside factors affecting your business and your competition stop, or is someone out there creating a better widget than you, ending their day when you do? No, they are not!

Obviously, many factors come into play as a big part in determining your operational hours. But when was the last time you truly looked at your business unit’s hours with a critical and objective eye and made sure that they were appropriate to make your future goals? Or are those hours just posted for “your convenience?”

If you get into the mind-set that you are always “on, open, or alive,” 24/7/52 when marketing and selling your business, you will then start to think about how to make the most out of all that “extra” time you have to increase your business’ success model.

The traditional hours of Monday through Friday, nine to five, are a very antiquated way of thinking. This is a global economy that is always “on, open, or alive,” 24/7/52. When you are sleeping, someone from halfway around the world is working.

Your business unit must have a 24/7/52 mentality to be more successful. Only when you embrace this mind-set will new ways “to do more” arise, because you are now always “open” to more success in your marketing and sales efforts.

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Share-Shift Marketing For Greater Sales Growth Of Your Small Business

Share shifting is a term used to describe moving a client base from your competition, to you. Share shifting is not getting new businesses to try your product line; it is taking a current client database (clients already having needs and currently using your competitors) and moving it to your database (they use you). There are “X” dollars spent on any product line at any one time. The objective within share-shift marketing is to move more of those finite dollars spent on any product line into your business unit. You will be going for a bigger slice of the pie, but it is still just one pie that has not gotten any larger, just your portion of it has.

You need one of two things in place to sell any item: the clients either want or need your product line or a combination of both. Without a want or need from the client, you cannot sell much of anything to anyone. So, the advantages of share shifting over getting new customers/clients are:

• The want and need are pre-established

• The client is already buying, so spending habits are historic, thus forecasting can be done for pre-qualifying their future spending consumption

• Having purchased from your competitor in the past, selling strategies on your product line’s advantages over your competition can be highlighted and exploited

• A pre-qualified database for quicker sales effectiveness, ramp up/your “low hanging fruit”

• Builds revenues in a soft or downward trending marketplace

• No wasted time on “uncovering” needs in your sales stage progression. Due to this, you can move the client quicker through the sales pipeline to the purchase phase

With share-shift marketing, your top-line growth will be faster than with most other sales campaigns, due to the fact that you have an accelerated cycle built into this sales effort. So, go on out there and get a bigger piece of that market share pie, before someone else does and then throws it in your face.

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Building Top of Mind Awareness and Brand Recognition for Your Small Business

Billions and billions of dollars a year from every industry and various product lines are spent to perform these above functions. Do you? No, not spend billions of dollars, but do you incorporate top of mind awareness and brand recognition within every one of your sales and marketing calls?

Building top of mind awareness and brand recognition can be costly, but it can also be as simple as putting your logo and contact information on everything that a client receives when doing business with you. Go find your happy medium, but find it you must. If not, almost half of your effective message is lost the same day you deliver it to a client, and the rest of your selling message goes shortly after that.

I want you to conduct a poll for your business unit’s product line. Call your clients, vendors, associates, and some individuals off the street and ask them what’s the first thing they think about when you say “X” (something associated with your product line). Then ask them what your company does. Be prepared to be shocked, because you cannot expect to build new and repeat customer orders without having any top of mind awareness and brand recognition. Look at your sales message; is it clear, concise, and repetitive? If not, refocus the sales approach on the two key factors that can keep and attract new customers: top of mind awareness and brand recognition.

Another approach to remember about building your top-line sales growth is co-branding. How many product lines are out there in the marketplace that would be non-intrusive, complementary, or have a positive impact on the buying decision of a customer regarding your product line? A lot! All of those product lines mentioned above have a database of customers, and so do you. Why not work up an agreement between your business unit and theirs and cross promote, advertise, solicit, market, and bring visibility to each other’s product lines for share-shifting opportunities from each other’s competitive set?

Co-branding can also lower costs, offer more product line access to your clients, and prospect to a more qualified database in less time. In the hotel business, everything from the preferred credit card to long-distance service provider is co-branded. What are you waiting for with your product line? Someone to call you? Co-brand your product line today with top-of-mind awareness that has brand recognition so you can yield greater sales growth for your tomorrows to come.

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Know What the “Joneses” Are Doing

Knowledge is power, and it must be a cornerstone of understanding for operational and sales success against your current and future competitive set. Do you know what your competition is doing right now to market and operationally produce a similar product line? Do you know what cross-selling potential your competition is aligning itself with for greater sales growth? Do you know what improvements from an operational, administrative, sales and marketing, and management approach your competition is going to make, thus shifting higher demand for it? Do you know who is going to become a competitor for your customer’s finite dollars and erode your market share? I am not asking you to predict the future, but I am asking you to take stock and know about your competition as well as you know about your own product line, from a customer’s viewpoint.

The only way to defend competition from taking your business and allow you to grow your revenue is to have a better product line, know how to market it more effectively, know your strengths and weaknesses compared to other product lines, know what changes your business unit is going to make to protect itself from a threat from the competition’s product line, know the marketplace and forecast trend opportunities, know that you truly do have an “apples to apples” product line compared to the competitors, know what changes your business unit needs to make it run more operationally and make sales more efficiently, and know what success and failures your competition is enduring. Most importantly, you must know the why to all of the above questions!

Having knowledge of all of these above issues is what is meant by knowing what the Joneses are doing. Start learning about the “Joneses” today, or be prepared to be bought or sent out of business by one of those “Joneses” tomorrow.

One great way to get with the "Joneses" and know what is going on, is a site called Alltop at http://alltop.com/. Alltop helps you explore your passions by collecting stories from “all the top” sites on the web. They have grouped these collections ”aggregations” into individual Alltop sites based on topics such as environment, photography, science, celebrity gossip, fashion, gaming, sports, politics, automobiles, and Macintosh. At each Alltop site, they display the latest five stories from thirty or more sites on a single page — they call this “single-page aggregation.”

You can think of the Alltop site as a “dashboard,” “table of contents,” or even a “digital magazine rack” of the Internet. To be clear, Alltop sites are starting points — they are not destinations per se. The bottom line is that Alltop is trying to enhance your online reading by both displaying stories from the sites that you’re already visiting and they help you to discover sites that you didn’t know existed.

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"Remember the Hook" when marketing for your small business

Have you ever been fishing or seen how fishing is done? Without some sort of “hooking” device, very little fish would be caught (most do not just jump into the boat willingly). The same is true in selling your product line. Even when you have the most wanted product around, if you do not inform customers where to buy it (the hook in this example), you will see very little quantity sold.

When you think of a hook, remember, it is to grab the client’s attention long enough for the sales process to begin between the buyer and seller. The hook is not meant to make anyone buy on the spot (but it could), rather the hook’s goal is to have the clients open up their minds and communicate (verbally and/or non-verbally) to you, “I am interested in potentially buying your product. Can you please inform me about it?” This allows you, the salesperson, the opportunity to move the client into a sales opportunity for a purchase. A hook must be deliberately directed to target the clients that you would like to sell your product line to; there is no “one-size-fits-all” hook, so you want to have multiple hooks designed for your different clients.

By having different hooks in the marketplace, your business unit increases the opportunity to produce sales across a vast number of potential demographics.

Hooks are not only for your new customers; make sure that your product is using hooks for repeat customers as well. With so many products, promotions, and messages out there for a customer to listen to, make sure that you “reel” them in before someone else does.

Happy fishing!
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