Every business needs to make sales. From responding to leads to actively selling, you must ensure you have the right person in place to secure those essential business wins. LGBA’s international business development expert Lesley Rubenstein outlines the top traits you should look for when hiring for this crucial business role. Trait One - Outgoing Personality – on and off the phone. Having an outgoing personality is probably the no. 1 trait required to be a great business developer. No shrinking violets need apply! Why? Think about it! You will need to contact businesses you may never have been in contact with before, either on behalf of your own company, or someone else’s. You have very little time to convince that business to spend time with you to determine why they should do business with you. Basically, you need to excel at sales pitches – but what are you selling? This is a bit different from selling a product per se – it’s more about why the business you are contacting … [Read more...]
Why your numbers matter
Why keeping your accounts up to date could mean all the difference between running a successful business, limping along, or failing. Would you fly a plane while wearing a blindfold? I ask new clients ‘Would you fly a plane while wearing a blindfold?’. They look at me confused, and always reply ‘No, of course not!’. At this point they are probably wondering why they hired me. Stupid question, right? Wrong! Here’s why: A significant proportion of my clients proffer similar responses when I start to investigate their bookkeeping and accounting methodology. They invariably tell me that they hand over receipts to their bookkeeper and once a year the accounts are resolved and sent to HMRC, usually at the last minute. Many then look confused again when I don’t look happy with their response. Why am I not happy? Because their accounts are typically 17 months out of date or worse. They have been led to believe that the accounts are for tax purposes, rather than as a managerial tool. This … [Read more...]
How to continuously sharpen your company’s competitive edge
The use of the word ‘continuously’ is purposefully placed in the title of this blog article. Why? Because I fully believe that if a company does not continuously sharpen its competitive edge, it won’t be long before they do not have one in today’s ever-increasing pace. I’m sure we can all think of examples of companies who have been market leaders and no longer exist or have had to sell assets and/or shrink in size to survive. Eastman Kodak is a prime example. Kodak began to struggle financially in the 1990s when digital camera technology hit the retail market. Only recently they have emerged from bankruptcy, after selling many of its patents to current giants including Google, Apple, Samsung, Microsoft. Woolworths is another case in point. It used to be one of my favourite stores for spending my pocket-money. A few pence went a long way in Woolworths – a child’s paradise. Several months before they closed their retail outlets in the UK, I recall walking in and out of Woolworths, … [Read more...]
How to build innovation into your business
A great way to building innovation into your business is to be looking for problems to solve and opportunities for improvement in your industry. That’s not to say that inventions haven’t succeeded by accidentally creating an invention and then looking to see what can be solved by that invention (case in point – post-it notes). However, that is not the topic of this article – today’s topic is about actively seeking to build innovation into your business. Create a culture for innovation to flourish First and foremost, if you want to embed innovation into your organisation, create a culture for innovation to flourish. If you forced me to come up with a formula, I would say: Make sure you hire people that are not only smart, they think creatively and are not afraid of change Relinquish control to your managers within a framework Encourage multi-disciplinary teams and internal networking between your sales, marketing and R&D team Make sure your employees understand … [Read more...]
Why chatbots are great for business!
Recently we’ve been seeing in the media how robots/chatbots/AI (artificial intelligence) are transforming how we do things and how robots might one day take over the world and we humans will become superfluous to most tasks. Worries over AI and how robots will become sentient beings has been dramatized in Channel 4’s ‘Humans’. That’s all well and good, but for now, the area that excites me the most is how chatbots will take over the delivery of repeatable knowledge that Tier 1 (lowest level) support technicians/engineers deal with via call centres. Most of us will have been on such a call to a support centre, to fix a software bug or a hardware issue, and been asked questions that are obviously being read from a script. Unfortunately, they need to assume one has zero computer knowledge and the pace is exhaustingly slow and incredibly boring for the likes of me. Indeed, I would be most surprised if that script isn’t in a decision-tree flowchart format whereby if the … [Read more...]
How To Set – and Keep – Your New Year’s Business Resolutions
Make twelve New Year resolutions for business, one for each month! By breaking them down into workable pieces, you’ll actually get them done. Our local Bollywood-style keep-fit class in my local area is led by Nikita, an instructor who has inspired me on more than one occasion. At our recent pre-Christmas dinner celebration, she surprised me with her response when I asked if she had made a New Year Resolution by answering ‘Actually I’ve made twelve!’ It turns out that in 2017, she implemented a different resolution every month. I found myself hanging on to her every word, relishing her answers, and inspired to the core at this extraordinary young woman. As I listened, I got excited thinking about the projects I had let slip and was yearning to get back to. She told me that by having a new resolution each month, it ensured that they actually happened. They didn’t feel onerous. Better yet, she nipped procrastination in the metaphorical bud. She … [Read more...]
How to Define your Unique Selling Points (USPs)
If you came to me and asked me to help you to grow your business, the first thing I would ask is: ‘What are your unique selling points?’, or to put it another way, ‘Why, in your opinion, do your clients purchase your product/service from yourself and not from your nearest competitor’? Jot down 3-4 answers. Now take a good look at those answers – are they unique? Does the competition offer the same? Are you emphasising certain aspects that your competition isn’t? Are you doing things differently? Are you perceived as being different even though you aren’t? Is it the same product/service but the business model is different? The more you analyse your answers, the more you may realise that you have true USPs – or not! If you are struggling, it would be a good idea to call your clients, those that are happy and are repeat purchasers, and ask them why … [Read more...]
5 Ways to Get Past the GateKeeper
New recruits making sales via ‘cold’ sales calls often struggle to take their generic sales training and put it into practice. If they are not trained professionally on how to make the pitch, they will lose calls and burn leads. Worse, they often make their company look bad if they managed to say where they are calling from before the callee hung up and won’t get a second chance for a while. Sometimes the caller may receive abuse, further reducing their will to make more calls, with their confidence dropping at an exponential rate. Here are 5 simple tips to helping your team get past the gatekeepers so they have a chance to convert to sales: Monitor the team, especially new recruits. Within days they may acquire bad habits that are hard to break, if left unchecked. You need to determine if they have an issue about making cold-calls, by listening and monitoring their behaviour whilst on the call: Train – Script – Monitor – Fine Tune – Interview – Retrain – … [Read more...]
10 Top Tips on How to Penetrate a New Industrial Sector
If you’re in a certain industry, or looking to get into a new industrial sector, you need to learn all you can about the industry. Questions you might want to ask include who are the key players? Who are the up-and-coming and on the ‘watch this space’ players? Who has been mentioned in the news, or in leading websites? Who has appeared in leading trade newsletters? What are the industry trends? How fast is the marketplace growing? Who are the leaders? Who are the opinion leaders? What academic research is going on in the field? What patents are being registered? There are a number of ways to research and answer the above questions: Put industry keywords into search engines such as Google and Bing and see which companies come up in the search, learn all you can about them by going onto their websites, read their About Us, News section and research/technical section. Put keywords and hashtags into Twitter. See which white papers and blogs come up in the search, look at … [Read more...]
