Featured – Page 15 – Business Plus Baby

May 14, 2012April 20, 2015

Sales: are we giving it the attention it deserves?

I read a lot of small business blogs. That means I read a lot about marketing, especially marketing online.

But it’s unusual to find much written about sales or selling. Don’t get me wrong, marketing is important – sales is part of the marketing process after all – but I’m surprised how little attention is given to sales compared to how much I read on marketing.

Last week I picked up a copy of Sales On A Beermat from my local library. (Yep, despite being a Kindle fan, I do still read paper books and visit libraries. Mostly for toddler story time, though!)

The Beermat books were written a few years back now, about ‘beermat enterprises’ – that’s the kind of business that starts out with a few mates having a great business idea in a pub.

According to the Beermat business model, three things must be defined straight away:

The elevator pitch – what you intend to do, for whom and why they should buy it.
The mentor – a senior person to give advice and open doors.
Your first customer – start-ups should have a customer in mind from day one, and be actually speaking to this person.

The business then needs a team with specialists in these areas:

Sales
Finance
Innovation
Delivery

As most of us mums with business are ‘solopreneurs’, we don’t usually have a team. But even if you do all these roles yourself, it does show the areas where we need to focus your attention. However, I’d strongly recommend anyone that wants a business to succeed to consider reading up on the subject at a minimum or getting some expert help from a professional sales training provider.

So sales is there, but why is there no mention of marketing?

Authors Mike Southon and Chris West explain:

Note we say ‘sales’, not marketing. The strategic ‘who are we selling to?’ aspects of marketing should be understood at the start and encapsulated in the elevator pitch. Once that has been sorted, the start-up needs relationships and actual customers and these are best created and sustained by good salespeople. Marketers who have a sales instinct are, of course, ideal for this job, but they should call it sales and do it with pride.

So are we just not ‘doing sales’? Are we promoting our products and hoping that the sales part will sort-of-happen at the end of it all? Looking on the positive side, maybe we are ‘doing sales’ but calling it ‘marketing’ instead. If that’s true, wouldn’t we make more sales if we, as the authors say, “call it sales and do it with pride?”

Many of us have a problem with the the concept of sales – it feels pushy, like we’re trying to convince people to buy stuff they don’t need. Maybe we’re letting that squeamishness, fear or whatever it may be get in our way? Perhaps if we face up to it we’ll make more sales and therefore more profit?

What’s your opinion? Please do leave me a comment (better still, leave me a comment AND tweet this!)

Image: Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

May 9, 2012May 9, 2012

Adventures in internet marketing: here’s where I go next

Running a business is all about matching up what you can offer with what the market wants. So as 2012 began, I decided to talk my market and see how I could best help them.

My plan was that I was going to start out as an internet marketing consultant. I wasn’t planning on just offering advice and information, I planned to provide services too. So if a business needed a mailing list setting up and managing, I would do that for them. If they needed a new website complete with copywriting and SEO, I could do that too. I didn’t plan to do everything myself, I would work with a team of freelancers (after all, I know plenty of mums offering these services!)

Back in January I kicked things off by offering a free consultation to one of the members of my mailing list. (I send things to my mailing list that you don’t see on Business Plus Baby, so you might like to sign up here?)

This was the email: Continue reading “Adventures in internet marketing: here’s where I go next”

May 7, 2012

How to stay balanced as a home-based small business owner

When you first started your home-based small business, you probably imagined how great it was going to be to be your own boss, how much freedom you were going to have, and how comfortable it was going to be to work from home. After a few months, you probably came to the realization that it takes a whole lot of work to run a successful, home-based small business, and the stress probably set in. If you’re committed to the success of your business, you’re not only going to have to work hard. You’re also going to have to take care of yourself properly because your business is only going to be healthy if you stay healthy, both mentally and physically. Here are some of the things you can do to stay balanced as a home-based small business owner:

1. Only work in one section of your home.

Ideally, you should be working in some kind of home office, a room with a desk, chair, and a desktop computer. All you should do in that room is work, and you shouldn’t work in any of the other rooms of your house. Why? It’s difficult to separate your home life from your work life if you work in all areas of your house. At the end of the day, you should shut off your computer, and go spend some time with your family. If your laptop’s open on the couch, you’re more likely to get distracted by all the things you need to do for your business. It’s easier to maintain a healthy work/life balance if you don’t associate all areas of your home with work.

2. Stick to a schedule

As previously mentioned, at the end of the day, you should shut your computer off and spend the evening with your loved ones. It’s difficult to do this if you don’t have a set schedule. For instance, you might want to dedicate the hours of 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. to working each day. As a small business owner, you may not be able to just work 8 hours a day, but you do have the power to make room in your schedule in the evening for yourself and your loved ones.

3. Set realistic goals

When you own your own business, you don’t have a boss setting goals for you. You set your own goals. And, if you’re self-motivated, you probably set a lot of goals for yourself. It’s important to step back sometimes when you feel overwhelmed and reassess your goals. You can’t do a million things every day, and you can’t make a million dollars every day. Be realistic about the amount of work you’re able to put in and what type of results you’ll see.

Running your small business from home isn’t always everything you dreamed of, but it can be quite rewarding as long as you take care of yourself and keep your cool!

Author’s Bio: Carolyn is a guest blogger on the subjects of small business management, small business tools, and order management in the ecommerce industry that involves Shopify, 3dcart, and BigCommerce.

Image: zirconicusso / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

May 2, 2012April 28, 2012

Finding training venues on a budget

I love running live, face-to-face training sessions. I love the internet too, but there’s nothing like talking to real people who are in the same room as you!

I’ve been thinking of running a live workshop for a while, and although I haven’t got anything planned (well, it’s just one of the many projects on my list!) I’ve been keeping my ear to the ground for budget training venues. So I thought I’d share my ideas just in case you need to run a session too.

Even if your business is basically home-based, you might find you need a venue to train a your team or to run a promotional event. Many mums are now offering live internet marketing or social media workshops to local business, too. Workshop venues can be quite expensive, but with a little creativity, you can find some for much less.

That said, bear in mind that the venue will affect the people who will attend and the price you can charge for a ticket. For example, if you want to attract people who would normally expect to attend a business event held in a hotel, they probably wouldn’t show up to an event in a village hall, even if the ticket price was a bargain. In fact, a cheap ticket price would probably put them off. Your choice of ticket price and venue are part of your brand (whether you do it intentionally or not), so going for a low-price venue might not be the right option.

So here are some low-cost places you can run training events or workshops:

Village halls or community centres

These can be a really good value option. Some centres have a main hall plus a smaller meeting room suitable for around fifteen people. One of my local community centres even has an IT training suite. Facilities vary widely from one centre to another (as does the decor!) so it’s worth checking what is in your local area.

Sure Start Centres and charity/voluntary organisations

Sure Start Centres are usually very well equipped and happy to make a little extra income by renting out a meeting room.

Business ‘incubators’ and enterprise agency centres

Look at the organisations in your area that help new businesses get off the ground, such as enterprise agencies, as they often have low-cost meeting facilities. If you need a room on a regular basis, virtual office packages sometimes include discount meeting room hire.

Independent coffee shops

I’ve not tried this one personally (yet!) but I think that working in partnership with an independent coffee shop could work really well. You could promote each other (your leaflets could sit on the counter of the coffee shop and their coffee shop’s address will be on your promotional materials) and it could be a really nice venue with great coffee!

Anywhere that has a meeting room that isn’t in use

Get creative and think of any organisation that might have an under-used meeting room. Even your local doctor’s surgery!

Hotels and pubs

OK, this is probably one of the first places that comes to mind, but it’s worth mentioning that a) prices could vary quite a lot depending on the time slot you want, b) it’s worth seeing if you can negotiate the price down from the one advertised and c) make sure you find out the prices of refreshments in advance so you don’t have any surprises.

If you have any other ideas for workshop venues, please do leave me a comment!

If you enjoyed this post, why not make sure you stay in touch by joining my mailing list? I’ll also send you a copy of my e-book Running a business around a family: 9 steps to success.

Photo credit: teaguelabs

April 26, 2012April 26, 2012

Why people struggle to run online shops (and how I’m going to help)

Having a shop on the internet is the holy grail for many mums. It’s a flexible way of earning a living, low cost, you can sell things you love and you can work from home at any time of day or night.

It’s not just mums, though. Plenty of people are looking for a way to cushion their income against the risk of losing their jobs. Plenty more want to have a little project on the side that they can grow and eventually leave their jobs completely.

I wrote this post How to start an online shop over a year ago. I mentioned starting an online store on my Facebook page and a few people replied with “I’d love to do that, where do I start?”. So I wrote down the steps I’d take to start an online shop on a really small budget. It’s been one of my top three posts ever since! When it went live it was shared widely on Twitter and it’s had hits almost every day in the last year.

It’s not that hard to start an online shop, but it can be hard to make money from it. There are plenty of reasons for this, but the big ones are lack of knowledge and not having a proper process. Whenever technology makes something easier or cheaper, the barriers to entry go down. In many ways that’s great, of course. But the problem is that if something is easy and cheap to start, we tend to dive in without much preparation and that increases the chance of failure.

Now it’s fine for me to sit and talk about ‘barriers to entry’ and ‘lack of knowledge’ in a cool and distant way, but the truth is that it’s bitterly disappointing to dip your toe in the world of business and fail. True, being able to deal with failure is a valuable, probably essential, skill.

But people need this income to keep a roof over their families’ heads. One little business success can lead on to much bigger businesses (and our economy SERIOUSLY needs this, doesn’t it?) Plus I knew I had some knowledge that could help people get their first online business off the ground and earning an income.

So what was the answer? I decided to create an e-book and sell it as widely as I possibly can. My plan is that this will expand my ‘how to start an online shop’ post into a lot more depth, but the price won’t be a barrier to anyone who wants to start their own online store from home. I have a feeling that some people might want a little more support than an e-book can provide, and if this turns out to be true, I’ll write an e-course or set up a coaching group based on the same series of ten steps. I’ll still keep this affordable, though.

The e-book is almost finished now and I’m planning to launch it in the next couple of weeks. So if you know anyone who wants to start their own online shop, please do let them know. I’ll be posting the details here at Business Plus Baby, but if you want to make sure you don’t miss anything you might like to sign up for my mailing list.

Right, I’m off to finish that e-book!

Image: David Castillo Dominici / FreeDigitalPhotos.net