Posts in Best Practice
We Have No Money ... and It's a Lie

Speaking to a friend of mine recently, he lamented that what had seemed like a promising business opportunity a few weeks back was now just a stone wall of “We have no money.” And he went on to say that in this day and age everyone wants everything for free and that less and less people are willing to pay for good services.

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DO NOT DISCOUNT!

Discounting reduces the value in the eyes of your customers. And that is terrible news mid- and long-term. And even worse, it is often meaningless for the short-term. If you are successful in closing a deal by offering a discount, the psychology that is at work when you do has detrimental effects.

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Persistence

Most of your prospective customers will not buy from you instantly. You cannot simply introduce someone to your product or service once and expect that they will go the rest of the way by themselves. Studies have shown that only about 2% of sales will close after the first meeting.

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Empowerment, or the Perception of Feeling Empowered

Empowerment allows a team of people to achieve defined goals without explicit leadership intervention as each individual operates autonomously within their set of skills and responsibilities.

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The Price Question

When someone says, 'Just tell me the price,' I just tell them the price. Someone who says that clearly has their guard up. This person likely doesn't want to be sold. You won't get anywhere trying to dissuade them from jumping right into pricing. They'll likely dig their heels in even further and feel like you're hiding something.

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Moving Beyond the Founder - Scaling Through Sales

If there was a playbook for scaling with a perfect record, it would be legendary and omnipresent. There is not! One of the standard steps, though, seems to be the hire of a VP of Sales. This type of VP stays in place less than a year and in hindsight turns out to be a costly endeavor for a cash-strapped start-up.

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Bringing Together a Disconnected Team – 12 Tools

The cornerstone is “global,” the idea of having a disconnected team spread out around the world. I suggested a few ideas on how to bring the disconnected team together earlier, and in this article, I want to expand on this and provide a broad list of tools. 

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The Power of Asking Questions ... And There Is No Downside!

Try to practice asking more questions in your everyday conversations. Instead of telling someone something, ask them a question. Intelligent questions stimulate, provoke, inform and inspire. Questions help us to teach as well as to learn.

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The Start-up Dilemma - How Much to Spend on Sales & Marketing

I invested all my funds in product development and have nothing left to put towards sales and marketing. As a sales leader and an entrepreneur, those are the last words I want to hear. it is not a chicken-or-egg type dilemma. It is part of the continuous entrepreneurial challenge.

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