Sales Weakness

In the past week, I have tried to pin point weaknesses that would cause me to fail at succeeding with my own company. I think my biggest weakness will be sales, or rather being a sales person. Even though I have more than enough experience in it; I have never liked it. Let alone liked it enough to rely on it for income.

For this post, I will evaluate this weakness and make a plan to overcome it.

Let's start with my selling experiences and what I learned from each:

• Telemarketing, booking appointments for time shares. This was horrible. I sat in a 1x1 cubicle and was required to make at least 200 calls a day. The good news is that I learned a valuable lesson - Cold calling blows.
  
• Telemarketing, offering online marketing services to realtors. This I was not bad at, I actually was the #2 sales person. However, I hated it. In this position I was still on the phone all day. It was all about being on the phone, no personal touches and all business. Lesson learned: It is a lot harder to get people to buy when they have no idea who you are. Second lesson learned: you can't be #2 without having your heart in it.
  
• Cold called businesses, offering traditional marketing services. This was harder than calling regular people. Many roadblocks to get to the right people. The snag here was my employer wanted me to book his appointments for him. I was doing HIS sales calls. Lesson learned here: If you aren't going to take the time to call your prospects for an appointment, they won't take the time to meet you.
  
• Sold face to face, booking appointments via phone, email, and networking to meet in person with the goal of selling knives (don't ask). This was fun at times but HARD work. At this company I worked entirely on referrals though. At the end of each appointment I asked for at least 5 referenence I could meet with. The next day I called and said, "Susan wanted me to give you a call about...when can we meet?". It worked like a charm. Lesson learned: Always ask for referrals, even if they don't buy.
  

It turns out I actually am not a horrible sales person. In fact, I might actually be able to get really good at it. I just need a little training and a lot of practice. So I took a trip to the book store and picked up the words of experts to help me out. The first book I am reading is "The Sales Bible" by Jeffrey Gitomer. It has all of the basics, and so far is motivational. I bought two other books, which I will post about once I start reading. I've realized that working on this weakness now is going to help me in many other areas as well. For example, thinking from a sales perspective when wrtiting my website copy will cause my website to work better for me.

Here is what I know about Sales so far:

• Cold calling blows.
  
• Get to know your prospects because it is a lot harder for people to buy when they dont know you.
  
• If you aren't going to take the time to call your prospects for an appointment, they won't take the time to meet you.
• Always ask for referrals, even if they don't buy.
  

Day 19: Ideas for Marketing

I have been working on ideas for marketing my consulting services for the last week. Since there are a lot of options I have to narrow down the list to the most cost effective solutions. The great part is, I can do a lot of it myself. That will eliminate a lot of the costs. Here are my ideas so far:

Main Tasks

1. Pay Per Click. I have about $750 saved up to launch a PPC campaign. I'm going to mainly focus on the less expensive keywords and build a custom landing page to go with it. I will run this during the first month I am on my own and see what happens. I don't want to run this just yet because I don't want to get in an awkward situation where I am getting leads and not following up with them because of my regular job. Another problem would be that I land a few deals but not enough to sustain me but too much to hold my regular job. So this is going to launch June 1st.

2. SEO. This is already in play. I took a lot of these factors in while I was building the site. So, out of the box it is already SEO Friendly, now I just need to optimize with keywords. The space is pretty compeitive so I will have to really focus my efforts here.

3. Listing potential targets. I've decided to focus specifically on small business to start. So I am going to start out by finding local businesses who do not have a website or internet presence.This is one task that I am not really good at in any sense. I am also still thinking about how I should approach them once I know that they have a need.

4. Enlisting a sales force. This is an idea that I think will work better once I have obtained a short list of clients. This person can work on a commission basis to bring in new deals.

Other Tasks
These are still important but will be for the longer term.

1. Email Marketing. I have a lot of calls to action that entice visitors to sign up for email newsletter. I think this will be monthly and aside from useful info it will also have calls to action.

2. Blogging. Having an informative blog on the topic will help draw in clients in the long term. I plan to update the blog 2-4 times per month.

3. Word of Mouth/referrals. Doing a good job for clients will bring me more. Simple idea but it goes a long way in this business.

More to come soon.