Brad Sugars's "Instant Repeat Business."

It is a known fact that it costs six times more to gain a new customer. In such a scenario, it becomes critical to keep your customers coming back so you get repeat business - over and over again. Here are 3 Steps to Keeping Your Clients Longer: 1- Welcome Your Customers. People are more inclined to engage with a company that makes them feel important and appreciated. Customers can tell whether you're happy to see them through subtle gestures and signals - your tone of voice, your expressions, your posture, the way you are dressed - all these things send potent, often powerful messages to them. 2- Reward Loyalty. If you can retain your customers, your revenues will increase. As discussed earlier, research indicates that it costs six times more to get a new customer versus serving an old one. Therefore, it obviously pays to retain your customers. So the question is, Are you keeping your current clients engaged, involved and interested in returning to you for your products and services?" It does not cost much or take much effort to let someone know you appreciate their patronage and are ready to reward them for coming back to you. 3- Reduce the Risk Factor for them by Providing Superlative Service: Each time a client decides to seek a new business, they are taking a risk in terms of determining whether they will have a good experience. If you can provide them with a good experience, you've greatly enhanced their satisfaction level and reduced their need or desire to go to a newer business where the quality of service or experience is unknown. This will make engaging with you less risky and help you retain your current customers. Keep an open ear and learn to look for any signs that your customers aren't happy with the product or service you are providing customer satisfaction surveys can play an important role here. In the long run, a few simple steps, intended to keep you focused on the needs and wants of your current clients, will be far more cost-effective then spending all that time, energy and money in looking for new clients.

Don't forget your customers!

I just had a recent client who started coaching with me. He was eager to grow his business, and I was able to get him to focus like a laser beam on revenue and client growth. Month after month he applied all of our marketing and business development tools, and generated significant growth and profit. He was swimming in cash and loving every second of it. Then one day he called in a panic. “I’m starting to lose clients, I don’t know what’s going on.” Quickly I had him survey his customers, only to discover that many of them were dissatisfied with his services, and bailing out of their agreements. There were major quality issues that he had never discovered, and his team was so focused on keeping up with the new business that they were ignoring any sort of product quality. What he had built with a flourish came crashing down in a heap of cancelations. As you grow your business, it is easy for you as a business owner to get seduced by the lure of easy money as you bring new customers into your business. However, real success and long-term profits are all about ensuring that your customers are not just satisfied, but delighted with your product or service, and continue doing business with you for a life time. Take a look at where your focus is in your business. If you spend all of your time marketing and selling, and no time ensuring excellent delivery of your services, it’s time to dial back and zero in on creating raving fans out of your current customers. By doing this, you will ensure a base of steady revenue that will allow you to reinvest back into sales and marketing in order to then grow your business in a safe and secure fashion. Remember, real success is not about explosive growth, but rather steady growth that happens for a lifetime.

Leadership

Things to Ponder My mentor said, "Let's go do it," not "You go do it." How powerful when someone says, "Let's"! Leaders must understand that some people will inevitably sell out to the evil side. Don't waste your time wondering why; spend your time discovering who. When dealing with people, I generally take the obvious approach. When someone says, "This always happens to me and that always happens to me. Why do these things always happen to me?" I simply say, "Beats me. I don't know. All I know is that those kinds of things seem to happen to people like you." We could all use a little coaching. When you're playing the game, it's hard to think of everything. A good objective of leadership is to help those who are doing poorly to do well and to help those who are doing well to do even better. As a leader you should always start with where people are before you try to take them to where you want them to go.

Don't Send Your Ducks to Eagle School

by Jim Rohn The first rule of management is this: don’t send your ducks to eagle school. Why? Because it won’t work. Good people are found, not changed. They can change themselves, but you can’t change them. If you want good people, you have to find them. If you want motivated people, you have to find them, not motivate them. I picked up a magazine not long ago in New York that had a full-page ad in it for a hotel chain. The first line of the ad read, “We do not teach our people to be nice.” Now that got my attention. The second line said, “We hire nice people.” I thought, "what a clever shortcut!” Motivation is a mystery. Why are some people motivated and some are not? Why does one salesperson see his first prospect at seven in the morning while the other sees his first prospect at eleven in the morning? Why would one start at seven and the other start at eleven? I don’t know. Call it “mysteries of the mind.” I give lectures to a thousand people at a time. One walks out and says, ‘I’m going to change my life.” Another walks out with a yawn and says, “I’ve heard all this stuff before.” Why is that? The wealthy man says to a thousand people, “I read this book, and it started me on the road to wealth.” Guess how many of the thousand go out and get the book? Answer: very few. Isn’t that incredible? Why wouldn’t everyone go get the book? Mysteries of the mind… To one person, you have to say, “You’d better slow down. You can’t work that many hours, do that many things, go, go, go. You’re going to have a heart attack and die.” And to another person, you have to say, “When are you going to get off the couch?” What is the difference? Why wouldn’t everyone strive to be wealthy and happy? Chalk it up to mysteries of the mind and don’t waste your time trying to turn ducks into eagles. Hire people who already have the motivation and drive to be eagles and then just let them soar.

Closing More Sales - Now!

A critical success factor for all businesses is how good they are at selling. Every business is selling something, a product and/or a service, but very few are actually trained in the art of selling. Here are seven keys to selling to help you on the track to greater business success: 1. Ask More Questions: Questions are the answers in sales. Too many sales people tell their customers the features and benefits of their product or service but never take the time to find out which of the benefits the customer is actually interested in. So, ask them to tell you what they want. 2. Set Daily Targets: A common theme in sales- chase enough customers in the hope that one or more will buy. In reality this leads to sales people only selling to the early adopters or price shoppers who would probably buy from anyone. However by keeping track of how many customers buy on average from a given number of leads and then introducing strategies to convert a higher percentage will ensure your sales team learn how to improve their results. Set daily targets and assess your performance against these targets. 3. Use Sales Scripts: No one likes to hear someone read from a script but customers do expect us to be consistent. So how do you ensure all your interactions with prospects are consistent and that you deal with objections in a professional way? By writing down what it is you say in any given situation and by training your team to use the same questions and language you can bring a lot more productivity to your sales process. 4. Offer / Guarantee: Why should someone buy from you and not a competitor who can provide the same product or service at a lower price? What is it that you offer them or can guarantee them that will differentiate you from your competition? Your offer must generate excitement to get prospects to make a decision to buy now. 5. Ask For The Sale: One of the biggest common failings in sales is not asking the prospect to buy. A fear of rejection, that the sale will be lost, prevents many sales people from actually asking the final question. Just do it and learn from those that say no so you can improve your conversion rate over time. 6. Learning: To be successful in sales there absolutely must be a habit of learning. Learn from other sales experts, learn from books, learn from your best customers and learn from past experience. Both your good and bad experiences can be a huge help in improving your sales success. You must record these experiences and build your knowledge over time. Write it down so you do not keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again. 7. Testimonials: We all need to be reminded of what we are doing right and why our best customers love dealing with us. Sometimes we focus too much on what is going wrong rather than what we are doing right. Focus on the good stuff and we will do more of it! Get your customers to write down their testimonials so you can use it in your marketing and attract even more great customers. Question: When is the best time to make a sale? Answer: Just after you made your last one. Ever hear stories of football players who stop scoring goals and it seems they will never score again? Well generally they change something about themselves; their attitude or a superstition or a habit; and then suddenly they are back in scoring form again and they keep scoring.

Selling to price focused shoppers

The perception in the market place is that people are shopping based on price alone. The only reason your customer asks for the price upfront, is because, that is what we, as business owners, have trained them to do. More often than not, people go into a business not really knowing what model, style, color or features they are looking for and purely ask for the price? At this point should the salesperson come back with the direct response, “That is $29.95” or should they ask the customer some questions about what it is they are looking to use the product/service for? This can be further explained by using a simple example of a kettle. Now in most people’s eyes a kettle is a kettle, but it can have many different features and offer many different benefits. So what if the sales person simply tells the customer, “Just so I can help you better, is it okay if I ask you a couple of questions about the kettle you are looking for?” This is a better response than simply telling the customer how much the kettle costs. Most certainly, the customer would give an affirmative response as he would like to find the kettle that best suits their needs. The sales person may then ask questions like: “Are you looking to replace an existing kettle or is it a gift for someone?” “Do you regularly use your kettle or is it rarely used?” “Have you seen the cordless options that are available?” “Are you looking for something to match your kitchen?” “So what color are you looking for?” “Kettles come in different cup capacity; do you require 10-cup capacity or is five a better size for you?” From these questions, the customer gets the idea that the sales person is genuinely interested in their needs, and that the salesperson is able to offer options in the most suitable kettles based on his needs. The price, is therefore, negated. It is just a matter of now asking the customer to buy the kettle and close the sale. A good salesperson would then ask, “Well, based on what we have just spoken about, there are two options to choose from, model x and model y; which one suits you best?” Finally, he can ask, “Great, would you like to pay for that by cash or on a credit card. This example was based on a kettle- a relatively small dollar item. How does this apply to other businesses? This process works equally well on cars, retail, houses, furniture, service-based businesses and any other product there is, including funeral homes. Every business owner needs to work out what his customers are actually looking for when they ask for the price, and what’s most important to them in their buying decision.

“Five ways to start the new financial year with a bang”

The weekend will see the end of the 2011-12 financial year, one that has seen start-ups under pressure from continued consumer caution and a tricky funding environment, with insolvency figures creeping steadily upwards. However, the picture is not all doom and gloom. Australia’s economic fundamentals are strong and there is – carbon tax aside – some government help on hand for entrepreneurs. So how can you get off to a flying start in 2012-13? Here are five top tips: 1. Tick off last-minute tax time housekeeping We may be in the death throes of financial year 2011-12, but that doesn’t mean you can’t sneak in a bit of last-minute tax time activity to reduce your liabilities. There are three key areas you really should’ve thought of by now: bonuses and directors’ fees, superannuation, and old stock. However, if you act quickly, you might be able to make some headway even if you’ve left it to the last minute. Tax expert Greg Hayes, of Hayes Knight, explains: “If you are planning to pay bonuses or directors’ fees, make sure that these are declared before June 30.” “They don’t have to be paid before June 30 to take the tax deduction, but the company does need to be legally committed.” “This is normally achieved by a director’s resolution approving the bonus or fee. Do this and the company takes the deduction into this year. The recipient does not need to declare it on their personal return until the year of actual receipt.” On super, Hayes says: “Make sure that you make your superannuation payments before June 30. The funds need to be receipted by the super fund to be eligible for current-year deduction.” “Where you have SGC payments for staff for the June quarter, if you can pay these before June 30 you will take a current-year tax deduction.” Meanwhile, any damaged or old stock that you have hanging around your business needs to be scrapped and written off – ASAP. “The written off amount forms an immediate tax deduction,” says Hayes. “Also start to review your stock in terms of the appropriate valuation method.” “While this is often cost price, it doesn’t have to be. You can value stock at the lower end of cost, replacement or net market value.” “You may have stock that you don’t want to scrap but may be worth less than its cost price. The market value approach will give you the tax saving into this year.” 2. Re-think your business’ structure If you are yet to launch, the new financial year is a good time to ponder the business structure that you intend to use for your start-up. Your decision to be a company, partnership, trust or sole trader will have significant tax and other implications that need to be weighed carefully. Business advisory expert Marc Peskett, of MPR Group, says that you need to think about how your business will operate and then consult your accountant about: • How you will be taxed under the structure during the life of the business, as the business earns income and then pays or distributes it to directors or beneficiaries? • How you can use the structure or a group of structures to meet your personal wealth needs and optimise your personal tax position? • How will you be taxed when you come to sell the business? If you don’t have the right structure, you could find yourself paying a lot more tax than you need to. “Your structure can also affect which tax concessions, incentives and grants you can take advantage of as well,” says Peskett. “There are several tax concessions available to small businesses, including the R&D Tax Concession, Small Business Entity Regime and Small Business Capital Gains Tax Concession.” “Each provide cash back to the business when it undertakes specific activities or at certain milestones in the life of the business, such as at sale.” Take your time, do a bit of research and work out which business structure is best for you. 3. Get investing The Federal Government has beefed up the instant asset write-off system for small businesses, with the aim of relieving the pressure on entrepreneurs who wish to invest and grow their enterprises. The budget measures, which will officially come into force on Sunday, will increase the small business instant asset write-off threshold from the current limit of $1,000 to $6,500. The measures will apply to businesses with annual turnover of less than $2 million, allowing them to write off depreciating assets costing less than $6,500 in the income year in which they start to use the asset or have it installed ready for use for a taxable purpose during or before that income year. If you choose to use the capital allowance provisions, you’ll also be able to claim an immediate deduction for additions to existing assets if the assets and the new piece of equipment both cost less than $6,500. So, for example, if you’re spending money on new in-house software for $4,000, as a depreciating asset, you can claim a $4,000 deduction for the 2012-13 financial year. While this change is unlikely to radically alter your investment intentions, it should certainly give you food for thought. Are there any systems or items of equipment that need to be replaced? If so, can you claim a deduction? If so, this could well be the ideal time to start investing sensibly in your start-up. 4. Take advantage of changes to workplace laws The new financial year will see a raft of changes to the ability of small businesses to employ and pay their staff. The minimum wage is going up from Sunday by 2.9% to $606.50, or $15.96 per hour, while unfair dismissal laws are changing too – the high income threshold increases from July 1 from the current level of $118,100 to $123,000, essentially meaning that employees who earn more than the high income threshold, and who aren’t covered by an award, can’t make an unfair dismissal claim. But perhaps the most eye-catching change will be Paid Parental Leave – allowing fathers and other partners earning under $150,000 a year to take two weeks’ leave at minimum wage levels, on top of existing payments. If you are yet to hire, you should be nimble enough to change tack and position yourself as a parent-friendly employer. Tout your flexibility to potential staff and make it clear that you want people who are committed to an innovative, up-and-coming business (that’s you) for the long haul. 5. Don’t let tax become an obsession The end of the financial year places an onus on tax – what you need to pay, how you can reduce that amount and how much you can get back. However, your business’ strategy and business plan shouldn’t be based upon your tax liability. Don’t become so focused on tax in the year ahead that you end up spending money that does nothing to drive sales and growth. “Tax should be a secondary consideration when balancing the tax management approach against the commercial needs of the business, i.e. don’t spend a $1 just to save 30c in tax,” advises Peskett. “A number of tax initiatives have been implemented for small businesses in the last few years that can make it tempting for investment dollars to be directed where costs may be recouped via deductions or write-offs.” Peskett suggests that you should ask yourself a few key questions when you’re about to invest in your business: • What areas of the business are the priorities for investment and growth? • How will this investment help generate leads or new potential clients? • How will it drive greater efficiency? • What other substantial benefit or return will it bring to the business? samthecoach.com