As a small business owner wanting to grow your business you will be looking at ways to improve your business to generate more profit and cash, to free-up working capital, and to make more effective use of your own time. While there may be one-shot improvements you can make, such as outsourcing an overhead function to make a net saving, there will always be those issues where the benefits are obvious but the means of achieving them are not so clear. Continual Improvement is not just for manufacturing quality Adopting a systematic, continual improvement approach to those issues could be the answer. It used to be thought that continual improvement was about manufacturing quality, but these days, quality is seen as something that should be embedded right across a business. And likewise the continual improvement methodology can be applied to issues, right across a business, in every function, for example: improving the enquiry rate from an existing marketing budget increasing the … [Read more...]
Appointment making tips
How do I get to meet key decision makers? A question that I am frequently asked. First, like all Sales people and marketeers, it is key to identify your target audience, and have a message ('the hook') that is likely to spark their interest. Once you have both of these clear in your strategy then you can act. An exercise that has proved successful is to attend an exhibition. Research an exhibition that has some relevance to your business area of expertise. Check all the companies that are within your 'geographical' target, exhibition web sites make this quite easy to achieve before travelling. Take note of exactly where they are on the floor plan. Prepare a few words that demonstrate your knowledge of the subject, without it being a 'sell'. It is vitally important to make sure that you are NOT selling here. In fact 'selling' to exhibitors is highly unethical, after all they have usually paid 'big bucks' to enable THEM to sell! Only approach when all is quiet on the stand, its … [Read more...]
