Building & Turbo Charging Your Sales Team

Frustrated with your Sales team or lackluster results? Are you constantly thinking about sales training in your local region? Stop settling for sales performance that isn’t generating significant earnings.

You CAN set a higher bar, strengthen your sales team, your sales processes and drive higher sales in a matter of months! This straightforward PowerPoint presentation,“Build & Turbo-Charge Your Sales Team”, gives you a practical step by step checklist on what to do to make it happen.

Rank your current status A, B or C on each item. If you score an “A,” keep up the good work, if you score a “B,” focus on it & figure out how to do better. If you score a “C,” get some help re-engineering it or out-source it. Sell more right NOW! I’m allergic to long sales cycles… and you should be as well.’

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Business Survival During A Recession: Defiance and Irrepressible Spirit

Ever wonder what it might take for you to succeed in the most difficult conditions? Or have you wondered about business survival during a recession?

According to Laura Hillenbrand, author of “Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption” two factors are “defiance and irrepressible spirit.” If this story and that of Ms. Hillenbrand herself don’t inspire you, please check your pulse. More »

How to Raise Capital for a Small Business

Need to know how to raise capital for a small business?

Raising capital is very difficult but there are best practices that greatly improve your probability of success. Many entrepreneurs are frustrated and disappointed by the process, not understanding the critical success factors that make all the difference.

Here’s a quick primer on how to get what you want… by giving investors what they require.

Use it as a guide to constructively assess where you stand so that you can effectively exploit your capital-raising strengths and to mitigate your weaknesses and become “investment grade.”

I’m happy to provide you with more pointers in my presentation “How to Raise Capital“.

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Falling into the same (Mouse) Trap – Getting Out of Sales Slumps

Getting out of sales slumps: unique case study ahead.

We have a 110 year old arts and crafts bungalow whose old basement with a very low ceiling is visited by mice every winter.  In 12 years as official mouse warden, I’ve trapped more than 100 mice and that’s a large enough sample for me to believe that I know at least a little about what works and what doesn’t. I’m a freelance Consumer Reports of mouse traps.

For years, my staple “tool” has been the familiar spring-loaded trap that sits on a ¼” thick 1.75″x4″ piece of wood. My bait of choice is thick, sticky peanut butter. The particular mousetrap brand I’m using now is from www.tomcatbrand.com and features a yellow cheese-looking platform to hold the bait. More »

Sustained Business Growth is About the TEAM

Your business has potential — there’s room for business growth. The idea that you had worked – and worked well. The business has really started to kick off and you are getting successful. It is a great feeling.

Beneath that great feeling is a level of unease. You know that what is keeping your business going is all about you – and the stresses and strains of that are starting to show.

It’s a feeling of exhilaration tinged with fear and disillusion. You know that you cannot keep up this pace forever. What happened to the success and what it was supposed to give you?

What’s more, you want a vacation.

Want Sustainable Business Growth? Then Think Again…

It is time to think again. It is a problem that is solvable – and that solution may not be as far away as you might think.

What you have right now is unsustainable, so you need to switch that into something that enables sustainable business growth. This is making sure your business prospers and grows, without the backbreaking work on your part. Giving you the time to enjoy some of the fruits of your labors too.

To give sustainable business growth, there is one ingredient in the recipe that needs to be taken out of the equation, at least as far as the grunt work – the everyday operation of your business – is concerned. YOU.

Yes, it is now time to ensure that you are as little a part of the sustainable business growth package as possible, by creating a bunch of people around you that are able to do your work; to take the weight off your shoulders, by being as good, if not better at running your business as you are – or think you are.

In fact, by turning over running your business, not only will you achieve sustainable business growth that doesn’t kill you, but you will also build a business that thrives on others doing the work you help so close to your chest for so long – understandably, because it was your baby.

And when others are a part of your ‘master’ team, it will become beyond sustainable business growth, it will elevate into a far better business proposition than you might have dreamt.

Sustainable Business Growth Is About Letting Go (Yes, You!)

By developing a group of people in your team who are capable; enthusiastic; motivated and focused, you will be able to loosen your reins of control. You will be able to take a back seat in the running of the business. To quote a well-known phrase, you will be able to work ‘on’ the business, rather than ‘in’ the business. And that’s a big step.

Five rules of ‘letting go’:-

1) Rigorously consider everything you do and decide just how little you could do if you had the right person in place.

2) Decide on a timescale of letting that go to someone else, even if you don’t know who that might be right no (hint – be challenging with timescale – 6 months should do it).

3) Consider who you have in your team now who could step up what they do to the next level.

4) Create a quick and dirty 6 month program of developing (supporting, challenging, delegating and above all trusting) each of the people you have already, to step up. If you haven’t got the people you think can do it, plan to recruit inside 3 months (note – you probably have the potential inside the people you already have, so check that out first).

5) Start tomorrow

One thing you need to know. It will take a big shift in attitudes from excuses and reasons for it not being possible, to ‘can do’. And the biggest hurdle that you will find in creating this sustainable business growth model of shifting total accountability to others, will be you. Your people will love it; love you and take it in their stride.

The capability will most often be there. It’s up to your to let go, support and take a vacation, safe in the knowledge that your business is thriving.

Psst – most often it will do even better when you are not there!

–Martin Haworth