When someone calls your office do they reach a real person or an automated voice mail system? Do they have to click through a menu in order to real a live person? If that’s the case, you may find that you’re turning some of your prospects off.
What can you do to encourage prospects to call you back? Here are some of my tried and true methods:
Answer your phone during working hours. Yes, you may take off for the lunch hour, but for the most part if you’re sitting at your desk you should answer you phone.
If someone is calling you, answer the phone with a smile in your voice.
If you’re calling on a prospect, make certain you speak clearly and also make certain you leave your phone number more than once so they don’t have any wonder at what your number was.
If you leave a message, don’t ramble. Get to the point. Write down your points if necessary. Don’t waste a prospect’s time by making him or her listen to a long message before you get to the point.
While you may bring with you an impressive resume, you don’t need to drop every name of every client into your voice mail. There will be time to share that information when you connect.
End the call with a “call to action.” Whether that call to action is, “I will call you back at 2 pm,” or “I’d love to hear from you and I will be in the office until 5 pm to discuss your XYZ need,” you should leave them wanting to call you back with a plan of action in mind.
Before you make your next call to a prospect, listen to your own voice mail to see if it is inviting when a prospect calls you and whether it shares pertinent information.
As business owners we must track and monitor our business efforts so we can tell whether our actual efforts are yielding results. How, though, can you determine what you should be measuring? What are your key performance indicators? That isn’t a trick question, but most businesses have different variables that they want to, or need to, track.
Here are a few items you may want to track for your business:
Determine your business goal. Is it to bring in X number of new clients? Do you want to make X amount of money is sales? Put a number to it then you will know what you’re tracking and whether you’re achieving what you’d hoped.
Break the goal down into achievable steps if necessary. If, for example, you say you want to bring in 50 new clients in December, it might be best to break that down by the week so that you’re not tempted to put off bringing in those new clients until December 31.
Make sure you’re comparing the results with the goals you’d set. If you’re not achieving them, take a step back and determine why. Were the goals too lofty? Did you truly not work hard enough on achieving them? Procrastination can be the death of many-a-goal being met.
Your business success can hinge on whether you’re setting goals. If you don’t know where you’re going and what you consider to be a “successful endeavor” how will you know if you’ve arrived?
Is there a secret to success? The beginning entrepreneur would surely hope so, but it’s not quite the case. Actually, a study performed by the Harvard Business School — The Evergreen Project — found it “doesn’t matter what you do.” The study uncovered that successful companies all employed the same management practices.
These practices included (and I paraphrase):
The development and maintenance of flawless operational strategies
Clearly defined strategies and a thorough understanding of your ideal client
Nurturing employees and holding them to high standards of performance
Simplification of the business management levels aka bureaucracy
Hiring talented employees and helping them develop those talents even further
Being innovative and keeping up with trends
Being a great leader
Check this list and see how many of the practices you’re employing in your business.
When you decided to go into business for yourself, you wanted to be a success — everyone begins with that dream, right? Building momentum toward business greatness can be accomplished in any number of ways. Keep in mind that when you build momentum in any area of your business or personal life, you feel like you’re operating at a higher level than you were in the past.
How can you create momentum? Here are three tips:
Be focused on your goal and its outcome. It’s sometimes easy to lose sight of long-term goals, especially if you’re presented with a bright, new product or service or opportunity. If this happens, you need to look at it with a critical eye and see if it fits into your overall business plan and vision.
Be intense in your ability to get things done. Your passion for your business should help your intensity. If you’re not passionate about what you do, why are you doing it?
Give yourself a timeline and a deadline. Having a vague goal of, “I want more customers” will not propel you toward any achievable goal simply because you haven’t given it anything measurable. Consider this, “I want 10 more customers per month than I did the month previous.” This is a measurable and perhaps achievable goal.
Building momentum is crucial to business success as it helps keep you challenged and motivated toward a specific goal!
Entrepreneurs need to embody many traits — chief among them being, leadership. Whether you’re hiring a staff to help you in your business endeavor or whether you’re a solopreneur, the traits of leadership cover almost all aspects of a business operation. What is leadership? Peter Drucker, a leadership expert, says it’s “someone who had followers.” John Maxwell describers leadership as, “influence.”
Regardless of what definition you have for leadership, there are traits and qualities that most leaders possess and they are:
Decisiveness
Loyalty
Courage
Tenacity
Emotional stamina
Dependability
Competitiveness
Self-confidence
Credibility
Responsibility
Do you see yourself or your strengths listed above? Do you feel you possess some, but maybe not all, of these traits? If you need assistance in strengthening those areas in which you may not excell, we help through our coaching programs. Give us a call and we will help you assess your strengths and develop your weaknesses.
As we prepare to attend Piscine Global in France, we get to thinking about how to make the most of any conference you’re planning to attend, whether it’s one in your own backyard or one on another continent.
Here are our best tips for making the most of your attendance at a conference:
Spend time with the brochure prior to showing up at the conference site. Print out the brochure or conference schedule. Note which sessions you want to attend, why and what you’re hoping to get out of it. Write questions to prompt yourself to either ask them during the session or to ask them after if the speaker doesn’t address them.
Attend the before and after conference events. Many conferences host breakfasts prior to the sessions opening and these are great for getting to know other attendees. After conference events are also great for mixing and mingling and will likely put you in the same room and within chatting distance of the speakers.
Once you get back from the conference, follow up with the people you met there. Send an email, follow up with a phone call, write a blog post. Don’t let the excitement and the information you gleaned from your conference attendance fade away. Keep it alive by after-conference networking.
What will you do to make sure you get a return on your investment from your next conference attendance?
sessions you want to attend, why and what you’re hoping to get out of it. Write questions to prompt yourself to either ask them during the session or to ask them after if the speaker doesn’t address them.