Categories
Business Growth Strategies

Increase Sales with Followups

One of the single biggest mistakes people make in sales is not following up at all or not following up enough.

Over the years I’ve personally sold over $890 million worth of products and services.

I can only think of a few times out of over 290 projects that I sold to clients where they bought on the first presentation. In almost all cases it took quite a few followups to close a sale.

To drive home this point I was attending a marketing conference several years ago. The conference had about 400 people attending pay around $5,000 per person.

The speaker asked all the attendees to stand.

He then asked how many people responded to his first email. A few raised their hands and he asked them to sit down.

He then asked how many people responded to his second email. A few more people sat down.

This went on until he asked about those who responded to his 7th email.

Then he asked us all to look around and see how many were still standing. There were about 1/2 the group still standing. Had he stopped at 7 emails he would have lost over $400,000 in revenue, which was nearly all profit since the facilities had already been rented for the weekend and there were very few incremental costs with the additional people.

So whether your selling online or over the phone or in person, be sure to follow up at least 15 times before giving up.

Categories
Business Growth Strategies

Business Growth Through Acquisition

The single fastest way to grow your business is to acquire other businesses.

There are many ways to grow a business including:

  • Great marketing
  • Improved sales
  • Compelling offers
  • Plenty of referrals

But growing through acquisition can be the fastest and the greatest.

I’ve helped a number of companies grow very fast through acquisition.

Examples

  • I helped a dentist double his revenues by acquiring other dental practices
  • I helped a service company double by acquiring his largest competitor
  • I helped a high paid executive acquire a company for no money out of pocket and she increased her income 1,000%
  • I helped acquire a company with some great talent to help us develop a new product. It resulted in $1,000% growth within 12 months growing to over $100 million

What kinds of businesses can you acquire?

  • Competitors
  • Suppliers
  • Distribution channels
  • Companies with needed talent
  • Companies with complementary products to cross-sell to each other’s customers

But I/we can’t afford it

How would you like to acquire a business with little or no money out of your pocket?

I helped a service company acquire its largest competitor with just a few thousand dollars out of their pocket for legal fees. It added over $3 million a year to their revenue.

Where can I learn more?

If you would like to pursue acquiring another company or a series of other companies, go to our contact page to ask for help.

Categories
Subject Matter Experts

Having a Subject Matter Experts Can Make You Rich

Several years ago I was talking with one of my mentors about how his company got started. The company was W.R. Grace, a Fortune 500 company. The founder wanted to get into the shipping business. After looking around he decided he wanted to get into the banana shipping business. It was large enough market and didn’t seem to have a dominant player targeting that market.

What he did to go after that business was very smart.

He hired the leading a banana expert.

Why?

He wanted to build custom ships to overcome the problems with shipping bananas.

What were some of those problems?

  • Too many of the bananas would spoil by the time they got to their destination killing their profits.
  • Bananas would sometimes arrive too ripe and sometimes would be too green and those wouldn’t sell well.
  • There also were challenges with bugs, spiders, and rats infesting the bananas in transit, not something a consumer wants to find when they take their bananas home from the store..

So what did they learn from the banana expert?

  • At what stage to pick the bananas so they would ripen perfectly on the journey to the market
  • How to hang the bananas to minimize bruising
  • How to improve the airflow around the bananas on the trip to the market to help them ripen in a predictable manner

The result

They went from 0% market share to 60% market share in just a few years, generating millions of dollars in profits.

Putting this lesson into practice

After learning this lesson, while I was VP of Acquisitions for a telecom company we got word from our salespeople a new kind of phone was needed. 

The problem that needed solving before cellphones came along was retailers like hardware stores and auto supply stores wanted to have a free phone available for customers to call home. But when they put a regular phone on the counter for their customers to use, some customers would dial their friends or family long-distance running up huge phone bills for the store owner. What they wanted was a phone that could provide free local calls but charge the caller for long-distance calls but not require coins.

While I had designed 50 plus products and services by this time I’d never designed a telephone itself. We looked around and found a company that had some programmers and a hardware designer with telephone design experience and decided to acquire the company for the talent.

I led the team to develop two variations of the desired phone. Once we completed the design and outsourced the manufacturing, we were able to sell them through Amway’s sales force. We had done about $12 million the previous year and within a year we exploded to more than $100 million in sales primarily from these two new phones and the services we provided for the phone.

Finding experts will make you money and save you time.

Action Items

  • What are your biggest challenges?
  • Which of those challenges would greatly benefit from having an expert help you solve?
  • Find an expert that can solve your problem by
    • Check out authors
    • Find consulting specialists
    • Find companies dealing with that subject area
    • Grow your own expertise
    • Grow the expertise of one of your employees
    • Get them to solve your problem
    • Implement the solution
    • Enjoy the benefits of solving this problem

Visit https://coachingsmallbusiness.com/services/ if you would like help finding a mentor.

Categories
Raising Money

Should You Raise Capital?

Over the years I’ve raised over $300 million for 22 different projects

My recommendation is to avoid raising money if at all possible.

There are a number of reasons to raise money:

  • If you are in a market where the window of opportunity is going to be quite short and you have a lot of expenses you can’t cover on your own.

    A good example would be when you creating a new product in a competitive market means competitors will be following in your footprints so capturing the market share quickly is important.
  • If you need a lot of expensive equipment to even get your first customers

    A good example is a company I helped go from $0.00 to over $300 million in less than 3.5 years. We needed millions of dollars in capital for some large computers and some expensive central office telephone equipment.

Some of the reasons not to raise money are:

  • The market isn’t very competitive so you can take a slow-growth mode and self-fund yourself.
  • You have a service that doesn’t require much if any, equipment to perform the service.
  • You have a product or a service that has at least an 80% profit margin. You can generally self-fund businesses like that.
  • You have to be prepared for a lot of phone calls from investors asking about how their money is doing. At one company they had to hire a full time person just to answer investor questions.
  • You don’t desperately need it and you can’t find any interested investor that is well connected. It is preferable to get an investor that has some great connections related to your business.

    A good example is a business I was involved with targeted hotels. One of the investors was very well connected. One phone call landed us all of the Trump properties. Another phone call landed us dozens of hotels in Las Vegas. A third phone call landed us a relationship with a large network marketing organization resulting in over $100 million in sales.

Of course, there are exceptions to the above examples so don’t make it a hard and fast rule.

Contact Dan Swanson if you would like help raising money.