Successful Marketing Steps + Business Coach
Business Coach Shares Proven Marketing Tips
Business coach provides marketing tips for increasing sales.
Marketing is how you brand your business into the brains and hearts of your ideal and likely buyers. You invest in marketing because marketing is what produces sales leads. You invest in marketing because you want leads who are ready to do business and who already have a favorable impression of you and your business so that your selling processes can easily convert these people into happy clients who are confident about buying from you time and time again.
As a business coach, I know people have a fear of selling, but growing up without money, I have a much bigger fear of not having money. Regardless of the reason why most soon-to-be-unemployed entrepreneurs avoid the topic of sales, they do. The majority of entrepreneurs really hate this aspect of entrepreneurship so they’d better start to love eating ramen noodles (the cheapest food known to modern man). Struggling entrepreneurs are afraid of selling the products and services they create to their family and friends. They are worried about self-promotion and they hesitate to engage in the aggressive marketing needed to actually sell something to another human. This might be you right now, but you need to understand this big concept. Once you have created a product you are confident people will love, your focus as the founder (owner, leader, etc.) must be on selling, then selling, and after that, selling some more. If you are not obsessed with sales, your business will not make it and it will die.
“To me, job titles don’t matter. Everyone is in sales. It’s the only way we stay in business.” -Harvey Mackay (Best-selling author of seven New York Times bestselling books, including three #1 bestsellers)
“Hire sales people who are really smart problem solvers, but lack courage, hunger, and competitiveness, and your company will go out of business.” -Ben Horowitz (Self-made billionaire and founder of Opsware, which he sold to Hewlett-Packard for $1.6 billion cash. He is a high technology entrepreneur and co-founder and general partner along with Marc Andreessen of the venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz)
“I’d be like, alright, I don’t know anything about sales. So I would search for sales on Amazon, get the three top-rated books and just go at it.” -Drew Houston (Founder of Dropbox.com, an online backup and storage service; according to Forbes magazine, he’s now worth over one billion dollars).
My friend, as a business coach, I must emphasize that your one focus must be on sales until your business has grown to the point that you can afford to hire a sales super talent whom you can delegate effectively to without experiencing a massive dip in sales numbers. When you start up a business, you have to make sure that the sales deals get closed, which is why you are going to need to be the person who meets with the clients and closes deals. Once you refine your system that actually closes deals, then you want to shift your focus into creating duplicable processes that will allow other members of your team to sell and sell well, without your direct involvement in each deal.
Business Coach Provides Marshall Marination Moment: Do Not Scale a “Fail”
Until you develop a sales system that operates consistently resulting in closed deals, you cannot expect another, hired salesperson to magically become successful in your system. As a business coach, I have worked with many early-stage companies that try to solve a “lack of sales” problem by hiring a salesperson because the existing staff (including the owner) does not want to make phone calls. I assure you, HIRED SALESPEOPLE DO NOT CARE AS MUCH ABOUT THE SUCCESS OF YOUR BUSINESS AS YOU DO. It is necessary for you, as the business owner, to hear the objections to a sale firsthand in the early stages of your company (and even after that, you need to listen to objections on recorded calls).
We worked with a Thriver who had successfully developed a media service that he had operated at profit himself and he was now ready to scale. He was able to close deals through sheer grit and determination, but operated without a script. Thinking that his success would scale, he hired three sales people to grow the business, which almost killed the business. What he found a month after hiring these three was that there were three different scripts, three different strategies, and three different, unsuccessful ways to do sales for his business. The base salaries he was paying the sales representatives almost sent his business to the grave. Since then, we have worked with him directly to set up a sales script, set up his sales metrics, set up a call recording system, refine how he is talking to customers, and we have coached him through each step of the process. Create a successful, tangible system and workflow for sales, and THEN scale. Not the other way around.
I hate going out to eat and actually just hate going out in general, as I have created an office environment that has everything I need for maximized effectiveness and a man-cave / home-office at my home that strongly resembles a speakeasy. In addition, my wife and I have developed our home (what we call Camp Clark and Chicken Palace) into what we believe to be paradise on earth. We have five kids, 38 chickens, six ducks, two Great Pyrenees dogs and everything else we want, so I really dislike ever going anywhere but my house or the office. However, when we were first launching Thrive15.com, I’d have to go out to dinner with all of the investors. I had to travel to them on occasion and I’m pretty positive that I’ve now eaten at every fine dining restaurant in Tulsa as a result of this. However, it was worth it and I was able to bring in the investment capital we needed to provide you the Thrive15.com experience that you are enjoying today.
Back in the day, when I was starting www.DJConnection.com, I told my team that I was willing to meet with any potential bride, groom, or party planner anywhere and at any time as long as they were a sincerely interested prospect. I did this for exactly four years until we reached profitability. I didn’t like it, but I did what I had to do.
My friend, for every Booming Business Foundational Principle, I am going to provide you with specific and actionable items you must get done for your business to succeed. Although I am going to DEEP DIVE into these Booming Business Foundational Principles (like Jacques Cousteau) later in this book, I want to briefly provide you with an outline of these principles now to warm you up mentally.