Identify Express Service Potentials For Your Small Business

We live in a world driven by express services, a quick this or a quick that, and we need it “this very moment” kind of mentality. In the hotel business, it was identified that two of the largest opportunities for express services were the checking in and out processes of a customer’s hotel stay.

Currently, that express service is done at most hotels in one form or another, but what if you were the first hotel to do it, thirty or so years ago? Would you not have had the competitive advantage to grow your repeat and future guests by offering this untapped, demanded express service? Would that express service not have set you apart from the rest of the hotels and made a marketing niche available for promoting the difference in your whole product line to that of your competitors without changing the core product line?

Take a look around your business unit, listen to your associates and customers, keep abreast of market trends and your competition, and never stop asking yourself, “Is there an opportunity to convert and deliver this or any process in the operations and sales functions to an express service module?”

Demand for express services will only increase with this “time crunch” world we live in. By conducting beta testing on potential express services, examining the results, and finalizing the outcome, your business unit can develop an express service to get ahead of the demand curve within your own industry and gain market share doing it.

Once your business unit can identify and implement express service potentials, you will reap the benefits through operations, sales, and eventually monetarily. “Express”ing how your business unit is different today, than that of your competitors, will only add to your core product line for years to come.

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Stop Wanting Things To Stay Consistent For Your Small Business Success

Start understanding that the only consistent thing in life is change. If you want something to happen, no matter how little of a movement it is within your life, it will never take shape if you do not first embrace the change element behind it. Change is a great catalyst with a specialty to accelerate events and make all things possible. Once you have that mind-set, you will no longer have the attitude, “Okay, what's next to go wrong with this situation?” Instead, you will say, “Great! What's the next opportunity to make, not have, success come to me?”

The flexibility for action that you have when your mind-set is changed to the latter is amazing. When you have the understanding that change is right around the corner, it will give you the edge over the competition, because instead of looking into your life as a constant, stagnant model, you are continuously looking to embrace its metamorphosis into a great opportunity.

By successfully taking the change element and working with it, rather than against it, you will be ahead of the change and its time frame, thus making you more available to capitalize upon it before others, leading to greater success. “Change gives you the ability to rise above and deliver upon command, therefore leading to more positive outcomes.” Embrace your change element today for your tomorrow’s success!

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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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Radical Sales And Marketing For Your Small Business

The meaning of the adjective radical is “not bound by traditional ways or beliefs.” Here are the “must dos” of a seasoned business unit’s radical salesperson and marketer.

No stone goes unturned in your search for new leads and clients; no sales idea is too silly or stupid to try; you sell to everyone, every day, no matter what their size; you sell more than you market; you utilize yield management techniques; you just do not leave collateral, you collect a database for follow-up; you go down swinging and then get back up for another round; you are always in “selling mode;” you network, not just talk to people; you are “it,” no one but you can make it happen; when you fail, you succeed by learning from it; you start your day with a goal and focus on its achievement; you look for ways to sell to prospects that others are not; you carry your business cards with you everywhere; wherever you go you see a future client; no matter how many no’s they have given you, you write down phone numbers from passing businesses on the street; you see customer obstacles as an opportunity to get testimonial referrals from them by meeting their expectations; you work on the probability theory; you radiate confidence and bring direction to clients; you take ownership of your sales 100%; you are out finding new revenue generation that your competition never knew existed and selling to them before they do; you see doors of opportunities, not slammed ones in your face; you are asking for the sale every time, in all possible ways, with each client you communicate with; you are a relentless “door knocker” and grass roots marketer; you look at your sales reports for new business that purchased from you; you drive the desire and passion for each sale with every presentation; you fight tooth and nail to retain a client and make new ones every day when you come into work; you smile until it hurts just to go to bed and wake up to attack your business leads all over again tomorrow.

Are you ready for the challenge? Are you ready to become a radical salesperson and marketer for your business unit? Why not? Are you afraid to get a little emotional about your sales and marketing? Only emotional selling sells to clients on a regular basis with consistency. No one wants an order taker in their sales department; your product line is not that special to afford you that luxury. If you are not emotional about the product line that you represent, your sales will never reach full capacity.

Keep it (sales and marketing campaigns) simple (KIS theory) for the biggest bang with the fewest bucks! Oh, by the way, the above sentence is the longest sentence in this blog. Do you know the reason why? Because it is aggressive and unconventional and “not bound by traditional ways or beliefs,” just like what a radical sales and marketer for your business unit needs to be.

Go be radical today!

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Stop Looking For The Quick Fix For Your Small Business

Instead, start understanding that most good plans to success are not the winning lottery ticket.

You must always set a goal and continuously measure it with reliable statistics and logical data for comparisons, monitoring its progress, and taking corrective actions to get back on track. Achievement is like building a home. It must be pre-planned, budgeted for, executed with daily hands-on management, have managed solutions (contingency plans), and be ready for situations when other ways to achieve the end result must be applied within a finite time frame.

You must always make sure that your foundation is laid correctly and is “rock-solid” before you move on to the next phase of your “finishing schedule/plan.” Always keep a fresh visualization of what the finished product/goal needs to look like and have several benchmark signoffs along the way to make sure that you are on pace. Goal achievement does not happen overnight, and a lot of people, both directly and indirectly, come into your life that factor into your achievement or non-achievement of those goals. Depending on others to follow through or play a part in your goals must be an understanding.

You cannot go from A to Z in your goals, without “C”ing that “U-R” going to meet “X” person along the way, who will contribute to or detract from your achievement. Reaction to that exterior catalyst must be planned for, and you must understand that your goals have to unfold, like this blog, one page at a time.

“To the World you might very well be one person, but to one person, you might very well be the World to their goals and achieving them.”

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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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Walk-Around, Hands-on Management with Leading by Example

Walk-around, hands-on management with leading by example is a powerful management tool. Remember, actions mean more than words and those actions speak louder than those words could ever sound. To lead associates to a business unit’s success path, you must first be given the permission of those associates to be their leader. To gain this acceptance and trust, there is no quicker, rock-solid foundation than by walking around, being in the associates’ “lion’s den,” seeing what challenges they face, and rolling up your sleeves to help them through those challenges. Leading an associate through a situation, with the correct procedure for that action, reinforces that you “practice what you preach”, and you would not ask them to do an action that you would not be willing to do yourself. You have a built-in, universal language to speak and demonstrate your expectation levels for those tasks, when you lead by example.

Once you can demonstrate to your associates that you do walk around to see what is really happening and can do, not say, actions by being hands-on, leadership platforms and directing associates can be built and allowed to grow, because your associates are permitting themselves to be led and directed by you.

Go be a leader with walk-around, hands-on management. Forget sending a memo to the associates on how to do it; show them yourself.

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