Establish Yourself as an Expert inYour Field
(24602)
manage to pull off.
Position Yourself as an Expert
All other things being equal, most people tend to make a decision mainly on the basis of price. To upset that dynamic and move things more in your favor, you need to become the recognized expert in your field. More often than not, this is accomplishes by having some news items and press items available that cite you as an expert.
Basic Methods
In simple terms, becoming recognized as an expert in your field super-charges your sales results because it differentiates you from everyone else. It may sound difficult to become recognized as an expert but in reality, there are three reasonably quick, easy and simple steps involed:
1. Article marleting
2. Press releases
3. New query services
Article marketing: You can write one or more articles and either submit them to the trade magazines that cover your industry or post them to article directories on the Internet. These articles will give you credibility and generate loads of potential new clients. If you post your articles to EzineArticles.com, other website owners and newsletter publishers will include your articles in what they are doing. Make sure you include a source box at the bottom of your articles like this: “John Doe is a full-time Widget expert and marketer in Anytown, USA. To learn more, and to receive John’s free widget newsletter, please visit www.widgets.com. You may also contact John directly at john@widgets.com.”
Press releases: You can issue a press release using a service like PRWeb. com.
For a cost of around $80, your press release will not only be sent to every major
media outlet, but it will also be picked up by Google News and Yahoo! News. You
can then print your press release and hand it to your prospective client as a way
of introducing yourself. Press releases also work exceptionally well in getting your
name out there and listed on the major search engines.
To write a good press release:
News query services: Subscribe to a new query service (like PRLeads.com) and industry. When journalists are researching their stories, they will then contact you and quote what you provide. With a little bit of luck, you may get mentions in major publications or news sources that can become absolute goldmines of future business. Admittedly, the succes of this strategy is at the whim of the reports involved, but this tactic can provide impressive coverage if you succeed.
Once you start doing these things, you’ll soon find that it’s a good idea to have a media kit available that incorporates these different elements and other background information. You can give your media kit to prospective customers as well, and have it available anytime you give a public presentation. Your media kit can link back to your personal website where you can make available samples of your work, articles about yourself and loads more resource material.
Advanced Methods
How to Become Established as an Expert in Your Field
as an industry expert
your employer
Act Like a Powerful Business Leader
(24601)
Don’t act like a saleperson. Think like a business owner, and focus intensely on what they care about. Learn how to speak their language so you can persuade them to buy using the various terms and conceprs they are familiar with.
Your Main Target Is Business Owners
A business owner doesn’t really care whether what you have to sell is tax deductible. Nor does he or she lose any sleep over whether or not you make your sales quota for the month. And you can guarantee anyone you’re trying to sell has alreayd entertained a number of sales hotshots who promised to “help your business,” “save you money” or “make your life easier.” These are all the old and tired cliches high-pressure manipulators have used since the beginning of commerce.
The Three Things Business Owners Care about Most
1. Increasing revenues
2. Decreasing expenses
3. Increasing efficiency
Profit Is the Key
The typical salesperson will come into a business chock full of ideas about how he or she can help the company if they will just buy what is on offer. Business owners have heard this so many times before their eyes will just glaze over. Instead, you should go in and center your discussions on one key area: “profit justification.” In simple terms, this means how much money they will make by using what you have to offer. If you can show them your offering will not only pay for itself withina short time frame, but then also make more money for them in the future, you’ll be sure to have their attention.
Business owners are looking for specifics. That means you have to find out on advance enough information about the company so that what you discuss will already be tailored to their actual needs. Or alternatively, you’ll need to persuade them to buy in a two-step sequence where you gather facts on the first visit and then give them a concrete proposal on the second.
If what you have to offer can genuinely justify itself and then become a future source of revenue once it is paid off, then you don’t really have to do any selling at all. The business owner will be keen to buy because your produce or service will stand on its own merits.
Do Away with Cold Calling
Acting like a business leader also explains why you don’t cold call to try and drum up more sales. In simple terms, cold calling is a very ineffcient use of your time. If you were to invest the same amount of time previously dedicated to cold calling into self-maketing that establishes you as the clear leader in your field, you’ll always come off better.
Cold calling for business is ineffective because:
Many generations of salespeople were brought up on the concept that sales is a numbers game and you simply have to pay your dues by going out and cold calling until you meet someone who will be interaested in buying. That is a complete fallacy. If you’re doing something unproductive, it is sheer madness to increase the amount of time you allocate to that activity. All you end up doing is devoting a larger pro-protion of your time to a nonproductive activity.
How to Think and Act like a Business Owner
Selling Sucks: How to Stop Selling and Start Getting Prospects to Buy
by Frank Rumbauskas Jr. (24600)
Forget about trying to memorize the “fifty power closes of sales champions” or any other canned sles pitches. That’s for people who want to spend their careers figuratively twisting their customer’s arms to make them buy something they don’t really want. Selling that way is difficult, stressful and ultimately manipulative.
Instead of doing that, work only with people who are motivated enough to actually approach you. Partner with prospective customers and help them buy. If you work with those who have approached you to buy rather than the other way around, then instead of being a manipulator all you need to do is become an effective persuader.
To be successful in sales, position yourself so that people who genuinely need what you have to offer approach you to buy because you’re the expert in that field. In other words, get more qualified prospects to come to you and then help them buy rather than going out and drumming up people to sell to. As counterintuitive as it may sound, the real secret to selling more is not to sell at all.
If you develop a workable system for getting enough business to come to you, then you can forget about:
Quite simply the traditional approach to selling sucks. Focus instead on attracting those who want to buy. Set yourself up to create and maintain systems that will generate an ongoing stream of people ready to buy what you have to offer. Achieve that and selling becomes very easy and stress-free.
The key principles involved in moving from the old way of selling to the new:
1. Become a powerful business leader and act that way
2. Establish yourself as an expert in your field
3. Speak competently and powerfully at networking events
4. Build communities of prospects to generate referrals
5. Provide value to everyone who interacts with you
6. Develop your sales system and then automate them
7. Integrate your customers into an exclusive club
Be An Expert in Your Field
“Few things will get you more sales and obliterate your competition faster than being perceived as a recognized expert. When you are perceived as a recognized expert in your field, you are no longer a salesperson as far as your prospect is concerned. You have just become a trusred business adviser. This is what all top sales pros are to their prospects and customers.”
─Frank Rumbauskas Jr.
Equity
February 11, 2008 by admin
Filed under Books, Management
Why Employee Ownership is Good for Business
by Corey Rosen, John Case and Martin Staubus (14900)
Building a successful equity company, however, isn’t just a case of letting employees buy stock and then living happily ever after. To realize the true benefits of this concept, employees have to see themselves as owners and create a different kind of workplace that aligns with that perspective. That means the culture of the organization must change and evolve as well. Furthermore, employees have to learn how to run the business differently if their ownership is to have any practical impact. Unless all three of these elements are present, employee ownership just won’t deliver any tangible benefits.
The three essentials of an employee equity business model:
1. Size: Enough equity that it will impact on the employees’ finances.
2. Culture: Employees must be encouraged to think and act like owners.
3. Understanding: Employees must understand business disciplines and commit.
More than just another option in the human resource department’s kit bag of benefits, employee ownership has the potential to comprehensively transform ordinary companies. When employee ownership is combined with participatory management, businesses often move into and stay in high-growth mode. Employee ownership turns up in a very large number of influential and successful companies. Perhaps this isn’t just a coincidence.