The essentials: Understanding the difference between sales and marketing
It’s important to understand the difference between sales and marketing and it’s even more important to understand that you need to be doing both marketing and selling at the same time. That may seem like a “no-brainer,” but in a small business it’s often the same person or people who are responsible for both sales and marketing. When that’s the case, it’s easy to tip too far in one direction to the detriment of the other. For example, if your sales team is paid largely by commission, it’s easy to see how they would want to spend almost all of their time selling…but I’m getting slightly ahead of myself. Let’s examine the important differences between sales and marketing. Marketing Marketing is a “big picture” enterprise. Marketing strategies convince buyers that your company is the right company to do business with; it works to bring buyers and sellers closer together. Marketing draws a picture of the market today and looks ahead to see what buyers will want or need in the future. Success is measured via general trends. Sales Sales persuades individual prospects that your product or service is right for them today. It measures success via incremental sales. Sales builds and maintains relationships with specific buyers. The sales and marketing balance As I was saying above, problems can arise if you fail to strike a balance between sales and marketing. Closely tied to this question are the talents and inclinations of your team. It’s extremely important that you have the right people slotted for sales and marketing positions. If you have someone who is a top earning salesperson, you may not want to burden that individual with marketing responsibilities, and the reverse is true as well. Since sales is demonstrably feeding the top line, it can be tempting to let marketing slide. However, if you do this you open the door for a competitor to come in and start out performing you in the medium-term future. Always be looking forward and task your marketing team with “preparing the soil for next year’s...
read moreThis week in small business: Tips from and to entrepreneurs both young and old
I’ve been doing this for a while now and this week was the first time I ever saw entrepreneurship articles that had an “age” element to them. Young and old alike will find great nuggets of wisdom among the articles shared here. Leadership, management, and productivity The founder and CEO of BrainGain.co, Troy Erstling, shares how he overcame ADHD and became a productivity “powerhouse.” And if you want even more productivity advice, check out how Brian Rashid “hacked” his sleep to become 10 times more productive. You’ll keep your crew inspired if you go down Gabrielle Pickard-Whitehead’s list of 20 employee recognition ideas. John Brandon makes a good point in his Inc. article when he says that confidence will be the ultimate driver of your success and shares how to make yours “rock solid.” If you’re into e-commerce you’ll really appreciate Shoshanah Posner’s three solutions for fighting fraud. Marketing and sales The envelope please! Joe Escobedo delivers 12 proven tips to put you on the road to winning marketing awards. You’ll want to soak up (and put into practice) Itai Elizur’s five self-branding tips for small biz owners. Polarity brings loyalty (think iPhone vs Android), says Amar Hussain, in “How Marketing Psychology Can Improve Your Bottom Line.” Understand these concepts and you’ll sell more. Nicole Rodrigues makes a strong case that “killer customer service” should be an element of your marketing mix. Entrepreneurship, startups, and innovation You talkin’ to me?! Jim Joseph advises us that entrepreneurs should talk less and listen more in his Entrepreneur article. It’s smart to heed the wisdom of elders and that’s what Tyler Jones does here when he shares three pieces of advice from his grandfather, a life-long entrepreneur. Also related to age is Han Jin’s Forbes article, “When Youth Is Not Your Friend: Excelling As An Entrepreneur Despite Ageist Assumptions.” Moms have mad skills, so it should be no surprise that Jessica Herris achieved success in with her company, Stella & Dot. Thanks to Julie Chomiak for chronicling Jessica’s story. John Rampton discusses how to avoid taking money and losing control of your startup. Priceline, Disney, and Johnson & Johnson are among the examples Keith Speights uses in his article, “5 Entrepreneur Ideas From Tremendously Innovative...
read more4 websites to explore when you need a good business or product idea
Have you ever watched the cable program Bering Sea Gold? Gold prospectors don wetsuits and dive gear to search for gold on the bottom of the ocean off Nome, Alaska. They turn over hundreds of rocks and suck up thousands of cubic yards of material into their dredges before they find a valuable gold streak. It’s pretty much the same when hunting for good business ideas. But, the smart miners know what kind of nooks and crannies are more likely to hold the good gold. Again, it’s pretty much the same when hunting for good business ideas. If you know some better starting points for your search, you can improve your odds, so let me steer you to four places that are definitely fertile ground for idea prospecting. Reddit.com Reddit bills itself as the “front page” of the Internet. People post anything and everything here and then comment until the cows come home. If ever there was a place to take the pulse of John Q. Public Internet User, this is it. It’s unfiltered so you really find out what is on people’s minds. You can search for topics or just check in to see what’s hot. Here are a few business and product ideas I got with just about two minutes of browsing: A woman says her boyfriend built a remote-controlled lawn mower. Hey, anything that makes yard care easier has commercial potential. There are robotic lawn mowers on the market, but they’re quite expensive. Is there any way to bring the price down? Maybe instead of going fully robotic, running with this woman’s boyfriend’s idea of remote control is the way to go – or just starting a lawn care service. There’s a bar in Barcelona that’s gaining international fame for its urinals that are fashioned like a big gaping mouths. If you’re in the restaurant or bar business, the idea here is to do something outrageous to drum up free social media publicity. One guy posted a series of photos showing how he built a chest that had patterns on it like those created in the Minecraft video game. There might be a market for products based on popular video games. This chest turned out to be quite beautiful. Quora.com If Reddit is the front page of the Internet, then Quora is the answer man of the Internet. We always say that successful businesses are built on discovering a problem and then solving it. By examining the questions people are asking, you can uncover a wide range or problems. You start on Quora by selecting the topic you’re interested in; then questions will be recommended to you. You can also use the search feature. I just searched for health and found that someone posed the question, “How can I lose fat as a teenager?” We know that weight loss can be a very lucrative business. This questions suggests finding a weight loss niche: A book on teenage weight loss, A website selling supplements especially formulated for teens, or A Jenny-Craig-like service specifically for teens. Facebook groups You can search Facebook to find groups that are centered around specific interests or concerns. Below is a search I did for weight loss groups. If you have an area where you feel you have some expertise (or would like to...
read moreMark your calendar – June 2 – and play hooky in your small business
National Leave the Office Early Day may sound like something your nine-year-old thought up, but come June 2nd, it’ll be time to celebrate this very special day! While most employers will laugh it off, or perhaps threaten anyone who jokes about calling in, you may want to stop and give it a second thought. Giving your employees the chance to play hooky – just this once – could be a far more positive thing than you realize. Imagine the rush you feel when, at Christmas, someone gives you the perfect unexpected gift. It’s exactly what you’ve been wanting, but there’s no way they could have known that. The gift allows you to enjoy something that really makes you feel alive, guilt-free. The buzz of happiness stays with you for days, if not weeks, right? That is the same feeling your employees will get when you give them the gift of unexpected time off. They’ll come back to the office on June 3rd relaxed, recharged, and grateful they work for you. Spending eight hours a day, or more, at work five days a week used to be the expected norm. But today the work week is often longer and even when it’s not, the stresses can run higher. We can probably all agree that the occasional “mental health day” is a huge stress reliever. Further, one of the things that employees are looking for these days is a better work-life balance. By allowing employees the chance to tip the scales in favor of life for a change, you create more loyal employees who are happier with their jobs and less stressed overall. There’s also a unifying factor to playing hooky all on the same day that brings employees together. When your employees return to the office, you’ll likely see them collaborating better thanks to the shared pleasure of having received this unexpected “secret” day off. Be prepared to swap stories about the adventures that were had on this National Leave the Office Early Day. Don’t forget that you’ll be playing hooky too! Catch up on your reading, get in a nice nap, go for a massage, or head outdoors for some fresh air and sunshine. If you feed the need to do something business related, attend a webinar while eating ice cream in your pajamas (Okay, the ice cream needs to be in a bowl, but you get the idea). Observe National Leave the Office Early Day and your team will come back refreshed and ready to tackle the work week....
read more3 vital benefits of personal branding
If you were a fan of Mad Men, you’ll recall that for many years Don Draper worked without a contract and therefore without a non-compete agreement. This gave Draper enormous bargaining power at crucial times. It’s a fact of business life for founders and virtually every professional that they work hard to create a company but when they leave, most of what they have created stays with the company – the accounts, the good will, the name, and more. Your personal brand is portable However, if you invest some of your time in creating a personal brand, you’re rewarded with something you can take with you – and that’s the first of our three benefits of personal branding. Don’t walk out the door with just a stapler and box of outdated business cards. When you move on to your next project or position, take your well-established personal brand with you. Remember the Rolodex? A personal brand created and cared for in the social media cloud is a critical Internet-age extension of the Rolodex. Although it often doesn’t fully substitute for having people’s addresses and phone numbers, it does greatly enhance that information. Further, if you use LinkedIn to create a major component of your personal brand, you not only enjoy “virtual” benefits, you get the “hard” benefits as well, such as being able to phone and email prospects. It’s about people who need people As much as we talk about “building” a company, that’s not really what we’re usually doing. We’re really building an organization of people who are trained, equipped, and positioned to do business with other people. Another of the major benefits of personal branding is in its ability to establish you as the “go-to” person in your field. As your personal brand gains strength, the name of the company you own or work for becomes less important. I know a gentleman who was an inventor all through his adult life. He’s retired now, but before he retired he developed devices that could precisely locate leaks in pipes or faults in wires that were buried underground. Professionals in this industry called him the “father of underground location.” That was personal branding before the term entered everyday usage. As you can imagine, that “brand” opened a lot of doors for him over the years. To thine own self be true One of the subtle benefits of personal branding has nothing to do with what other people think of you – it has everything to do with what you think about yourself! When you work hard and consistently over an extended period of time to establish your personal brand, you’ll find that it becomes an attribute you strive to protect. For many of us, personal accountability can be a challenge. It’s not that we don’t care about ourselves, it’s just that we tend to get distracted. When you have invested heavily in your personal brand, you’ll discover that it helps guide and motivate you in all the right ways. You’ll start to protect your brand with the same care as Coca-Cola guards its...
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