Welcome to our April Newsletter!

 

This month is all about sales! Some of you may feel a bit icky about asking for the sale and some of you may feel more comfortable about it. Either way, you will find something guaranteed to help you improve your business.

Make sure you read right to the end to have all of your sales questions answered with a special, (free) The Accounts Department Facebook Live session.

Michelle xx

 

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Have an elevator pitch

You’ve just bumped into a former client at the airport. After exchanging pleasantries, he asks you what your new company does. You open your mouth, and then pause. Where on earth do you start?

An elevator pitch is a brief, persuasive speech that you can use to spark interest in what you do.

It needs to be succinct, while conveying important information.

To craft a great pitch, follow these steps.

• Identify your goal.
• Explain what you do.
• Communicate your USP.
• Engage with a question.
• Put it all together.
• Practice.

Keep a business card with you, which helps the other person remember you and your message. And cut out any information that doesn’t absolutely need to be there.

To craft your elevator speech, click here for some examples.

 

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Know where your income comes from

• Premium customers
  • 80/20 rule. 80% of income comes from 20%
  • Meet face-to-face 4 times a year – minimum
  • Be a key member of their team to advise and plan ahead
  • Give them something for nothing – something small but something that says we appreciate your business.
  • Conduct surveys – get your customer’s opinion to find out what they want and aid your decision making
  • Monthly newsletter
• High-value customers
  • Spend of over $x a year
  • Meet face-to-face 4 times a year – minimum.
  • Conduct surveys – get your customer’s opinion to find out what they want and aid your decision making
  • Monthly newsletter
• Low-value customers
  • Spend of under $x a year
  • Monthly newsletter
  • Engage using automation
    • Give them a little something – twice a year send 2 x coffee vouchers
    • Conduct surveys – get your customer’s opinion to find out what they want and aid your decision making
  • Visit once a year

 

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Understand your customers

 

• What verticals are they in?
• Are they in associated industries (e.g. mechanic and parts shop)?
• Create a target list
  • Ask your existing customers for referrals
  • Look for customers in the same markets as your existing one
  • Look for customers in associated industries
• Use a CRM (customer relationship management) to track your customer activity and next steps
  • Examples include Zoho, Hubspot, Sugar and Salesforce.com
  • Understand where in the sales cycle your customer or prospective customer may sit, Lead, Prospect, Quoting etc.
  • Build a pipeline of future work and track the value in each category
    • When will you secure the work/sale?
  • Grow the premium customers
    • Grow your business around your premium customers and grow the customers that are premium
    • Roadmap your premium and high-value customer’s needs with them – this helps build your pipeline of future work and shows added value to them
  • Integrate and automate
    • We live in a world where you can put information into one service (contact information into CRM for example) and use that for another (Xero for invoicing). This allows you to invest time upfront to make significant savings later on

 

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Tools of Titans by Timothy Ferris

 

The latest groundbreaking tome from Tim Ferriss, the #1 New York Times best-selling author of The 4-Hour Workweek.

From the author:

“This book contains the distilled tools, tactics, and ‘inside baseball’ you won’t find anywhere else. What do these people do in the first sixty minutes of each morning? What do their workout routines look like, and why? What books have they gifted most to other people? What are the biggest wastes of time for novices in their field? What supplements do they take on a daily basis?

“Everything within these pages has been vetted, explored, and applied to my own life in some fashion. I’ve used dozens of the tactics and philosophies in high-stakes negotiations, high-risk environments, or large business dealings. The lessons have made me millions of dollars and saved me years of wasted effort and frustration.

“I created this book, my ultimate notebook of high-leverage tools, for myself. It’s changed my life, and I hope the same for you.”

Check it out here.

 

The Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes

 

Chet Holmes has been called “one of the top 20 change experts.” And his advice starts with one simple concept: focus! Instead of trying to master four thousand strategies to improve your business, zero in on the few essential skill areas that make the big difference.

Too many managers jump at every new trend but don’t stick with any of them. Instead, says Holmes, focus on twelve critical areas of improvement—one at a time—and practice them over and over with pigheaded discipline.

The Ultimate Sales Machine shows you how to tune up and soup up virtually every part of your business by spending just an hour per week on each impact area you want to improve. Like a tennis player who hits nothing but backhands for a few hours a week to perfect his game, you can systematically improve each key area.

Holmes offers proven strategies for:
• Management: Teach your people how to work smarter, not harder
• Marketing: Get more bang from your Web site, advertising, trade shows, and public relations
• Sales: Perfect every sales interaction by working on sales, not just in sales
The Ultimate Sales Machine will put you and your company on a path to success and help you stay there!

Check it out here.

 

 

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Let me introduce you to David of Altena Solutions! David is a sales expert with many years experiences from working with many businesses from large corporations to small businesses. I interviewed him and here are his responses below!

My business, Altena Solutions, works across NZ and Australia consulting to small and medium businesses allowing them to harness technology to simplify processes and increase sales.

What advice would you give to someone just starting out?

Get as much information as you can as to what’s out there for you to use for promoting your business then quickly cull it to 2 things that you WILL use and then FOCUS everything you have on those.

What has been your proudest achievement? 

Teaching my kids (7 & 5) about the world… watching my son be a natural adventurer and my daughter’s work ethic and shrewdness (earns $20 for pocket money over a month, spent $10 on something she wanted, put the rest in her account to have more than her brother).

What do you like to do in your downtime?

I love the outdoors… cycling, hiking, camping and doing those types of activities with groups of people – family and friends.

Tell us something fun that not many people know about you?

Something funny… learned to play the recorder when I was 5, we moved to Tauranga when I was 9 (still playing the recorder) and impressed all the girls (who played recorder at the school) with how good I was at it.

For the record… I stopped playing the recorder when I was about 10 or 11.

What has been your biggest lesson learned? 

Leverage (as in mortgage leverage) gets you into a lot of trouble when property values go backwards… the lesson is to have a substantially larger deposit – 60% or even better 100%

SPECIAL OFFER

David has kindly offered to do a Facebook Live some time in May to answer any sales questions you may still have! To get details and to send your questions, email him here.

Visit Altena Solutions’ website, like their Facebook page or follow on Twitter.

 

 

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PO Box 179
Silverdale