Are you taking advantage of ‘presales’ in your small business?
The “presale” is a concept that is fairly new in the world of sales and it’s used in a variety of ways. Here are just a few: Kickstarter campaigns “presell” items that are in development. Retail stores – most notably Macy’s – have presale events. Customers buy items before the “actual” sale starts, at the sale price and then pick up their items once the sale starts. Concert tickets often are offered in a presale basis and in this case it’s the opportunity to buy tickets before the “general public.” Services and seminars sell future sessions at presale pricing. Almost anyone who sells something today can find a way to use a “presale” for strategic advantage. You may be able to accomplish some of these objectives: Create an aura of exclusivity, Judge overall demand and order accordingly, Get additional sales when customers return to your brick-and-mortar location to pick up their presale purchases, Obtain an email address or other useful information in exchange for access to notifications of presale events, Get a deadline that motivates you and your team to finish a project, Improve your cash flow, Have the ability to conduct online tests of various price points and marketing materials, and more. You don’t want to cross any ethical or legal boundaries with a presale strategy. For example, you shouldn’t collect money when you don’t really know if you’re going to go ahead with your plans, or you don’t have a concrete delivery date you can give your customers. Sometimes, just having people put their names on a presale list will give you the information you need and also create the demand you’re looking for. Dobie Gray had a hit song with “The ‘In’ Crowd” back in the mid 1960s. He sang, “I’m in with the in-crowd” and that’s a feeling most of us like to have. In many cases, being included in exclusive pre-sale events taps into that psychology. Other times giving access to the lowest pricing levels can be the motivating factor: “When the seminar becomes available to the general public next month it will be $500.” When Macy’s has presale events, the psychological trigger is availability. Customers fear that the items they want will be sold quickly, so to guarantee their purchase, they pay in advance and then return to the store at a later date. Of course, when they return I suspect Macy’s is hoping they find additional items that they would like to buy. In this scenario the retailer wins both “coming and going”! See how tapping into the presale psychology might work with your customers. Maybe you can create a presale club of “approved” customers. They would get advance notice and access to lower prices than others. If you do sales at all, adding the dimension of a “presale” to some of them gives you second way to essentially market and promote the same event. This should allow you to squeeze more sales out of what really amounts to only one...
read moreIs Your Next Small Business or Side Hustle Ecommerce Drop Shipping?
There are a lot of people making money selling products today without ever having to touch the products themselves. Drop shipping and Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) are two popular ways to do this. Drop shipping is the focus today, although we’ll touch on FBA. If you need to know the basic drop ship model, the totally “hands-off” version of drop shipping follows a course like this: Find a supplier for a product you believe you can sell via the Internet. If the supplier will drop ship for you, great, if not, buy the stock and ship it to a fulfillment house. Set up an ecommerce website and create the pipeline that will channel orders to your drop shipper and maintain inventory information. Promote your website and the product you’re selling. Ecommerce packages available I’ve oversimplified a little here, but you get the idea. On the bright side, there are turnkey ecommerce software packages or plugins available that have drop shipper connectivity built into them, so you don’t have to compile that code from scratch. If you can achieve any level of success at this model, it becomes a money machine. However, success doesn’t come easily. There are two basic paths to take if you’re going to be profitable drop shipping. Either one will work and if you can do both, you’re gold: Find a unique product to sell. Be the best in your product niche at SEO and Adwords. The downside of the drop-shipping model is that the barrier to entry is low, so the competition is high. You’ll be going up against some veterans who have mastered the strategies of driving traffic to their websites. Drop shipping profits While a traditional retailer likes to get keystone pricing with its 50 percent markup, the drop-shipping model typically yields a 7-10 percent margin. That’s very slim and even though this is a model that (supposedly) requires little work on your part, it can be time consuming nonetheless. There really is no such thing as cheap drop shipping; the costs add up. Competition in easily sourced products is fierce, to put it mildly. If you scan different sellers of the same products on Amazon, for example, you’ll see how the lowest prices are usually only pennies apart. That gives you an indication of how close they are to not having any margin at all. This means that to be successful you have to be able to drive a lot of traffic to your product page and if you can do it at little or no cost, you’ll be in a much stronger position. Are you an expert at SEO? Have you had success achieving very high organic rankings on Google search engine results pages? And if so, have you had that success in a highly competitive niche? Finally, more headaches that come with the drop-shipping model are customer service, inventory control, and operational control. You’re at the mercy of your fulfillment company. You can’t respond to any issues faster than they want to respond. This can create major customer service problems and those will eventually be reflected in ratings, which have the potential to sink your future sales. (By the way, these issues lessen significantly if you set yourself up with an FBA account. Then you have the professionalism and power...
read moreIt’s Time to Stop Playing Games with the Internet Access Tax Ban
We have been visiting and revisiting the issue taxing access to the Internet almost since the World Wide Web first became a part of our lives and it’s up before Congress again. If there is anything that hurts commerce it’s uncertainty, so it’s high time that Congress acts to make permanent its ban on state and local governments’ ability to tax access to the Internet. This is especially critical for the health of small businesses – both current and future – because the Internet has become vitally important in this area for several reasons: The Internet has proven to be one of the easiest places for an entrepreneur with little money to start a business, Small business owners use their Internet access to provide them with the infrastructure tools and marketing channels to compete successfully with larger enterprises, The Internet has become one of the most effective ways small businesses can communicate with customers to resolve issues, and As mobile devices become even more important, all of the above three points are magnified. Karen Kerrigan, president & CEO of the Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council, has been following the current legislation in Congress and she reports that a few Republican senators have put a bump in the road on its way to passage by attempting to tie it to the unrelated issue of taxing ecommerce. “It does not make sense to tie this measure – which has wide bipartisan support – to a controversial Internet taxation bill. The bill to keep Internet access tax-free has nothing to do with the other issue, despite what its supporters claim,” she says. Currently the issue is included in a conference report that the Senate should act on soon. As Kerrigan points out, the Internet access tax ban has bipartisan support; it would be a very positive step for the Senate and Congress as a whole to enact this legislation. It would help clear the clouds that obscure our vision of what the online future looks like for small businesses and startups. Further, it would be a breath of fresh air to see both houses of Congress and both political parties cooperate to make a single bold move that is in the best interests of our country....
read moreTop LinkedIn Strategies for Small Business Hiring
It’s become a common complaint: Small business hiring is difficult due to a lack of good and readily available talent. At the heart of this issue is the fact that when it comes to good sources of applicants, small business owners are usually at a handicap when compared to bigger employers. However, if you make smart use of LinkedIn, suddenly one of the best sources of applicants opens up to you and you can do a lot to level the playing field with your bigger competitors. The process and reach of small business recruiting grows exponentially when you start to leverage the networking, messaging and search tools that you have through LinkedIn. Let’s start with the basics and then get more specific. Network enables small business recruiting Successful small business hiring through LinkedIn starts with you and your company’s presence on the social media site itself. If you are essentially your business, you may do fine growing your network through your professional connections. However, if your business is somewhat bigger, you absolutely must establish a LinkedIn profile for your business as well. (I would do a business profile in either case, but I can understand how some small businesses would prefer not to be burdened with managing two profiles.) In any case, the standard free LinkedIn profile will not suffice if you are at all serious about building your network and making good use of the tools that LinkedIn provides. For example, messaging is severely limited if you merely have a free profile. Also – and this is very important for small business recruiting – you have far more search filters available with a premium (paid) account. Create a great profile Write and construct your LinkedIn profile like a company brochure. Don’t think of it as an online resume. You aren’t looking for a job; you’re creating a profile that will convince others to look at your business for a job or to do business with. Put together your LinkedIn profile understanding beforehand what you want to achieve with it. Once established on LinkedIn, your next big project should be to grow your network. There are two major steps here: Connecting with all your current industry contacts, and Joining groups – and being active – where your small business recruits will be as well as your prospects. LinkedIn has built-in tools to use your address books to find contacts and it will also suggest people you may know. Tip: When making a request to connect with another LinkedIn member, personalize the message. That helps get your relationship established on the best footing. Once your network has grown, then you can leverage it via the LinkedIn messaging service to let people know about openings you have. Just as important, however, is understanding that a strong LinkedIn profile will help give your small business the kind of reputation it needs to draw in the talent you’ll want on your team. Finally, with a good network in place, you can ask others for recommendations when you have an opening you need to fill. Paid LinkedIn small business hiring services The simplest way to use LinkedIn as a small business recruiting tool is to post a job. The prices vary by geographic location and the postings are active for 30 days. However,...
read moreThis Week in Small Business: How Zoolander uses Instagram for marketing!
Not long ago it was the new Star Wars movie that was teaching us lessons about marketing. This week it’s Zoolander offering some insights about using Instagram. The lessons don’t stop there, however – even the New York Public Library has some recommendations for the small business owner! Marketing and sales Blue Steel or Le Tigre, which is the best Zoolander patented pose? I can’t decide, but I do know that Zoolander created an Instagram marketing model that small business owners can learn from. Have an ecommerce site? Have a blog? If not, here’s why you need one ASAP and ideas to get yours rolling. The competition on social media is ferocious. You need these 15 tips to help you find success. Is SEO still relevant today? How about tomorrow? And how do SEO and SEM differ? Hector E. Cisneros sorts out the answers. Looking for more marketing ideas you can pull off on a limited budget? Here’s some good advice. If you want to control your sales and marketing budget, you need to automate. Here are the critical components of a successful automation solution. And this Marketing Land article by Brian Massey will help you visualize your “marketing machine.” Stay ahead of your competitors by leveraging these six important 2016 content marketing trends. Leadership, management and productivity We took special note of “Fun at Work Day” recently, but I think my readers are convinced that having fun at work is a goal and attitude that should last all year long. Get inspired. If you’re always stuck in the vortex of the tornado, you can’t see which way is up. The three simple leadership and management strategies here will help give you the clarity you need to make the right decisions. The overall customer experience is separating winners and losers today. Here are five key tools to make your small business a customer experience leader. Also, keeping your customer feedback strategy on track will help with this goal. If you’re in a small business rut, these books recommended by the New York Public Library will help you break out. Entrepreneurship, startups and innovation Go inside the Goldman Sachs “10,000 Small Businesses” program in this collection of Forbes “must read” articles. Learn how an Army veteran built a million-dollar business selling electric-assisted bicycles. Want to know how much time and personal funds entrepreneurs and small business owners put into their companies? This article paints the picture. There has been a lot of attention on Uber and the peer-to-peer model in general. One article asks if it will change welfare, another wonders if drivers will organize. Politics, government and the economy Healthcare is probably the biggest concern for small business owners as they plan for their futures. This NFIB infographic captures the picture pretty well. In other NFIB news, Executive Director Karen Harned writes that the Department of Labor is trying to deprive small businesses of legal...
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