May
28
What Is The One Thing Business People Want, That Is Often Overlooked?
Filed Under Year Of Original Content, fundamentals, informed decision, learning, resources, sales, strategy | Leave a Comment
Predictability!
What I’m talking about here is forecasts that are accurate.
Accurate enough to base key decisions on, such as whether to order more materials now, in order to be able to meet potential future orders within your stated delivery or lead times.
Accurate enough to be able to decide if you are going to avoid some short-term cash flow issues, or if you need some short term injection of cash – really critical in the smaller business.
Accurate enough to be able to decide when to let employees – or yourself – have time off for vacation.
Many production and operational processes are predictable enough – you, as the business owner or manager, have sufficient control over what’s going on, under normal circumstances.
But what about the sales operation? I mean, customers are in control, ultimately. You can’t force somebody to buy something – not legally or ethically (these 2 aren’t always the same thing!).
Well, you can reduce the degree of uncertainty, ambiguity and complexity that often reduces the accuracy of forecasts, by employing a solid, proven process-based approach to every aspect of your sales operation, not just to what happens once you’ve closed the order…
It won’t guarantee you sales success, but it will increase your chances of sales success overall. You’ll still lose some. But you should win more – partly because you’re better at selecting opportunities with a better chance of success for you, and partly because you’re better at ‘working’ those opportunities to a successful conclusion. You’ll also more likely be winning business at higher rates of margin or profit. And none of this needs you to have additional sales resources – such as sales people – or having to work extra hours – quite the opposite, potentially.
In future posts I’ll be exploring what these processes look like and how you can implement them.
For the moment, let me leave you with a couple of useful hints…!
- Identifying the key players in a purchase decision, and understanding their position – how they see the need (or not) for the purchase in the first place, and what business results and personal wins they are looking for…
- Connecting your products, services and/or solutions, in the minds of each key player (especially the very influential ones in this sale), to their individual required business results and personal wins.
- Being very aware of what gaps you have in your knowledge (especially relating to points 1 & 2 above), what assumptions you’ve made, and taking steps, by way of an explicit strategy and plan, to reduce the negative impacts of these gaps and other knowledge, and maximise the positive impacts…
That’s a hint at some of the ‘what’ that is to come in future posts. The ‘how’ also comes later!
Mar
16
Evaluating Compensation Plans
Filed Under fundamentals, home based business, mlm, network marketing, resources, strategy | Leave a Comment
I came across this excellent blog post by Randy Gage via a follower on twitter. It’s at http://www.networkmarketingtimes.com/blog/evaluating-compensation-plans/
I think this is an area we can all benefit from giving more thought to. In a nut shell it’s about evaluating the compensation plan from an MLM company – ‘cos what works for somebody else may not necessarily work for you!
Cheers
Martin
Mar
15
Here’s what’s rising from the grave of traditional PR
Filed Under Year Of Original Content, fundamentals, marketing, strategy, web 2.0 | Leave a Comment
I friend of mine forwarded to me an email excerpt of a blog entry on Penelope Trunk’s blog at Brazen Careerist.
It eloquently and succinctly describes the new paradigm that Web 2.0 and social media represent to the PR and advertising/marketing industries.
So many organisations simply don’t get it – they will though – they’ll have to. If you work for a big corporate, you may find your next VP of Marketing is a ’spotty youth under 20 who lives & breathes social media…’ (!).
To put it crudely – the old PR way, where you seek to control the conversation & message is out – you cannot control anything. All you can do is influence it. I recently was telling a good friend of mine who’s spent her entire working life in PR/marketing and is fast approaching 60 yrs old (and moved in quite high places) about Web 2.0 and social media marketing. Her response was interesting: “We’ll just not go to social media marketing then, if we can’t control the message”.
I told her simply – “You have no choice – whether you join in or not, people will talk about the company, its products, services, and what it seems to truly stand for. If you aren’t there to influence the message, your competitors might be, and do you want them influencing the message about you, in your absence?”
She knows this is the future, but as she said, it’s hard to turn the clock back on nearly 4 decades of fighting to be in control…
We live in interesting times!
Judge for yourself, read the blog entry I mentioned, here.
Cheers
Martin
Mar
4
Obstacle #1: Treating MLM More As A Hobby Than A Serious Business
Filed Under Year Of Original Content, manifesto, mlm, resources, strategy | Leave a Comment
The first big obstacle for many to overcome is one of mindset – the need to treat your second income as a business instead of treating it as a hobby. That said, there are aspects of hobbies that make them attractive, and that can be carried forward in to making running a second income more attractive.
When you treat your second income as a hobby instead of a business it means you pick it up and drop it, just like a hobby. It is almost impossible to develop a big enough base of loyal customers on which to have any reasonable sustained income.
I did ‘this’ myself in the very beginning: I said to myself “Martin, this is a second income, you’re going to spend much less time on it than your main job, you’re doing it from home in your spare time. Enjoy it, and don’t think of it as work (that’s your day job!), but more like a hobby…” And I’ve seen stacks of others take the same view as well.
WRONG!! A hobby is a hobby. This means you can pick it up and drop it whenever you like, and the consequences are measured somewhere around the ‘zero’ mark.
You CAN NOT do this with a second income that has any meaning and significance for you. Successful businesses are run like business but this doesn’t mean there is no room for fun and enjoyment. Very successful owner-managed business are usually full of fun and enjoyment – the two seem to go together!
Cheers
Martin
- The 12 Obstacles To MLM / Network Marketing Success
- Obstacle #1: Treating MLM More As A Hobby Than A Serious Business
- Obstacle #2:No ‘Outcome’ Thinking & Inappropriate Expectations
Mar
3
The 12 Obstacles To MLM / Network Marketing Success
Filed Under Year Of Original Content, mindset, mlm struggle business fundamentals, strategy | Leave a Comment
Every day more people stop to consider a second or extra income. They do so usually because they are needing extra income now, or because they’re looking to realise a future dream. Many of these people look at network or multi level marketing (or ‘MLM’) as the route to achieving these aims.
Making the right decision here is usually pretty important for those involved. What is amazing is just how many people are able to make an informed decision about something so important. I’m sorry, what I should have said is, it’s amazing how few people are able to make an informed decision.
There are plenty of myths and lies floating around about this kind of second income activity. Some have bad aspects to them, such as “only failures try multi level marketing”. Some have more positive aspects to them, such as “anybody can do this”. And with the advent of the Internet, it is even easier to find conflicting information and advice.
I had to find out about these things the hard way, as did my wife, when we started in MLM many years ago. Now, as the economies seem to be headed for stormy waters, more people are asking about MLM, and there are more opportunities than ever for them to be ’scammed’. This is a prospect that didn’t sit comfortably with me, and wouldn’t let me be, so I pulled together my own experiences, the experiences of others I’ve worked with, plus plenty of research that I’ve done over the years, especially in the last 2 years, and created the “MLM / Network Marketing Manifesto & Workbook”. My research draws on the work, writings and teachings of a wide variety of people, including Colin Powell, Anthony Robbins, Rich Schefren (who has worked with many big names in Internet Marketing, including Mike Filsaime, Jim Edwards, Hans Johnson, Frank Kern, Dan Kennedy), Robert Middleton, Bernadette Doyle, Jay Arthur and yes, even Albert Einstein!
Anybody considering creating a second income or extra income stream, and looking to do so with any combination of network marketing, multi level marketing (or MLM), and internet marketing, would benefit from downloading the Manifesto & Workbook fromhere and spending some hours working through it before coming to any decision.
The purpose of the “MLM / Network Marketing Manifesto & Workbook” is to help people like you come to an informed decision about
- Whether to create a second or extra income stream at all, and if so
- How to go about doing so with MLM / Network Marketing for maximum success
I’ve split it in to 2 main parts. The first part sets the scene, providing some definitions and giving an overview of the state of multi level marketing or network marketing as a business approach. The second part is structured around detailed descriptions of the 12 big obstacles to success that I’ve seen so many people experience. By the industry’s own data it seems 95-97% of mlm operators as I call them fail to achieve their desired outcomes. That’s just appalling.
These 12 big obstacles are listed below, followed by a brief description. You’ll find more on how to spot and avoid each obstacle in a separate article/lens.
- Treating it as a hobby more than a serious business
- No ‘outcome’ thinking & inappropriate expectations
- The Great Myths of MLM – believing them!
- Lack of strategy, being too opportunistic
- Poor business design
- Following the MLM company’s “Plan”
- Poor decisions about what to outsource, and how
- Not using leverage & scalability
- Not playing to YOUR strengths
- Not managing tasks, workload & processes
- Not using the right metrics to manage business
- Not engaging in Continuous Improvement
In future postings I’ll expand a bit more on each of these – they’re covered in full in my manifesto, which you can get when you sign up.
Cheers
Martin
- The 12 Obstacles To MLM / Network Marketing Success
- Obstacle #1: Treating MLM More As A Hobby Than A Serious Business
- Obstacle #2:No ‘Outcome’ Thinking & Inappropriate Expectations
Jan
18
Tactical Victory Or Strategic Disaster?
Filed Under fundamentals, mindset, strategy | Leave a Comment
Next week I’m facilitating a group of European Sales Managers to develop their sales strategy for the next few months – it’s tough out there and they’re wondering how to bring in nearly $100million in the next quarter. Why would you want to know this? Well, while preparing for this task today it seemed pretty obvious to me that they have the same challenges as so many of the mlm operators I meet.
Jan
11
Automating The Wrong Things In Your MLM Business
Filed Under fundamentals, strategy, systems | Leave a Comment
On one of the forums (http://homebasedbusinessforums.com/forum2/11113.html) I came across a posting from a lady who was frustrated seemingly with the quality of the downline she’d managed to recruit. Various people suggested a variety of things to try out. One of these involved automation of parts of the mlm operation. Read more
Jan
11
Resistant To Attrition
Filed Under fundamentals, mindset, strategy | Leave a Comment
While I was continung my research I came across this blog posting. I like the essence of it, and the term “resistant to attrition” – it seems that 50% + of MLM operators quit inside of 3 months – this quitting is the attrition mentioned in Jacqueline’s term.
Jacqueline’s posting is courtesy of Michael Lemm who also runs http://www.homebasedbusinessforums.com