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BOOMERS TO Z’ERS

Written by Allan Colman on . Posted in 4 GENERATIONS, Allan Colman, Business Development, Business Strategy, New Business Development.

BOOMERS TO Z’ERS

It goes almost without saying that different groups interpret messages differently. Using the correct message channel requires careful preparation. Encoding a clear message is more complicated today because selling your product or service may be of interest to any of the four major generations currently vital and active in our world.

·       Baby Boomers: Born between 1946 and 1964, Boomers are a group with significant incomes who are looking for solutions in selecting products and services.
·       Gen Xers: Born between 1965 and 1977, Gen X is a smaller group than the Boomers. With their kids no longer their main focus, their tastes for products and services are in flux. Selling to them requires more detailed research on specific needs and concerns.
·       Millennials: Born between 1978 and 1994, Millennials are beginning to collect savings and they work well with technology. Concerned with costs, they spend more time analyzing purchasing options and waiting for sales or specials, and they want to see others successfully using a product or service before committing.
·       Gen Z: Those born since 1995 think and act online. They are “digital natives” and want to hear from you via text, call, Zoom, etc. As this group matures, they will have a greater impact on the economy and be in control of significant purchasing decisions.

Your product or service will require completely different sales approaches depending on which generation you’re marketing to. You may limit your targeting ultimately to only one or two of these groups. Spend time researching the survey data and demographic details of each group and take special note of their differences. These will impact how you tailor the need and use for your product to them.

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BUILD BUSINESS WITH DISTRIBUTION DEALS

Written by Allan Colman on . Posted in Allan Colman, Business Development, Business Strategy, New Business Development.

BUILD BUSINESS WITH DISTRIBUTION DEALS

A major cost for many start-ups that develop physical products is storing and distributing their products. One shortcut to the market is establishing a relationship with a distributor who services your marketplace, otherwise known as a distribution deal. In the beginning, Made for Success was a two-person company operating a book publishing company out of a residential home. Lacking warehouse space and shipping infrastructure, the company didn’t have the essential infrastructure to expand.

The company started to research solutions and identified a distribution company called Ingram Publisher Services, a division of the world’s largest book distributors. Ingram, a multibillion-dollar company representing hundreds of mid-tier book publishers, created this solution to provide distribution and sales infrastructure.

Upon signing the deal, Made for Success instantly had access to five distribution centers domestically and three distribution centers internationally to store and sell books. The company could also print inventory in four countries across the globe, all integrated into complex operational infrastructure for storing, selling, and invoicing. Within a short period of time, Made for Success books were available globally. Otherwise, it would have cost the company millions of dollars to build out. In return for the distribution infrastructure, Ingram Publisher Services receives a percentage of the wholesale revenues from each book sold.

Distribution deals bring numerous advantages, including decreased time to market and access to infrastructure that is beyond the scale of a company like Made for Success. Odds are, if you operate a start-up, there are distributors in your industry who can help provide the ability to scale your business at a fraction of the cost of building it yourself.

Major Book Review

Written by Allan Colman on . Posted in Allan Colman, Business Development, Business Strategy, Entrepreneurial Startups, New Business Development.

BOOK REVIEW
Goodreads.com

The Revenue Accelerator Lib/E: The 21 Boosters to Launch Your Start-Up
by Allan Colman

Alexander’s review
Sep 21, 2022

Dr. Allan Colman knows of what he speaks. There’s a sense of appropriate, professional and self-assuredness with the tonality of his new work, The Revenue Accelerator: The 21 Boosters to Launch Your Startup. “I was never taught how to sell. But by going through the struggles, obstacles, roadblocks, challenges, wrong turns, and searching for real opportunities, my self-education took hold. I wrote 21 Accelerators To Launch Your Start-Up to help you avoid many of the problems start-up entrepreneurs experience in making the leap from building their product or service to selling it,” he writes at the beginning of the book. “…I (craft) my pitch meetings much more carefully, and the 50 speeches I was doing annually for several years focused on problem solving and benefits. These and many other lessons are incorporated into this book to make your transition from building the product/service to successfully selling it.” Fair enough, and the read does just that. The Revenue Accelerator sort of feels like the Ask Jeeves of startup advice manuals, and overall business and leadership advice books in general. It’s clear Dr. Colman wants to create something that is essentially the penultimate guide to success, and he himself succeeds in this endeavor on more than one occasion. The read is broken down into densely detailed chapters, all of which are packed to the brim with information respective to their select subtopics. Each one of these subtopics are called, in titular style, Accelerators. Colman is also not afraid of making things personal. He writes in vivid detail about his own experiences climbing the corporate ladder, unafraid to humbly admit mistakes made in the process.

………………………………….

It’s that mixture of brash, almost tough-talking confidence, along with genuinely objective, knowledgable passages that elevates the book. I felt like I was actually in good hands for once, rather than someone telling me how much I was so.
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Goodreads

Know Thy Client

Written by Allan Colman on . Posted in Allan Colman, Asking for Business, Business Development, Business Strategy, New Business Development, Online Marketing.

Know Thy Client!

Knowing how their business / organization works is critical before pursuing them for new business. You and your colleagues should ask and answer the following questions before you begin to pursue current, recent, or prospective clients.

Who is the decision-maker?
What other firms/companies are they using now?
When was the last time they hired a new firm or purchased a new product?
Do they prefer to communicate by phone or email?
What have you done recently to build a relationship with them?
Have you asked ahead of time who else will be attending the meeting?
Do you offer periodic review meetings regarding budgets, billing, timelines for the engagement process, and report format?
Do you know their pain?
How will financial decisions be made?

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Listen, Listen, Listen

Written by Allan Colman on . Posted in Asking for Business, Business Development, Conversion Rate Optimization, New Business Development.


Next to your “takeaway” message, the art of listening is the most important, effective tool in a pitch meeting. If you combine a frequent, powerful takeaway message along with strong listening skills, you will open up a major passage to gain new business.

IBM recommends letting your customers, clients, and prospects talk 60% of the time. Letting your clients talk more than you gives you the chance to formulate questions that best yield what their needs are. You then have the opportunity to demonstrate how best to address their needs with the benefits and solutions you have to offer.
Here are five key pre-meeting research questions:

Who are their competitors? Look at their industry, their products, or their services. Evaluate tax laws or legislation that might impact them.
What is their business? Understand what your prospect actually produces, how they sell it, what type of marketing they use, their management structure, etc.
What are their buying habits? Who makes the final decisions, and are they “hidden” decision-makers?
What keeps them up at night? What are their pain points?
What benefits and solutions are they looking for?

Building answers to these questions is a necessary skill in order to fully relate and understand their needs and how you address them. Remember: Good questions sell better than good answers.

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Build a Business Relationship With Your Customers or Clients

Written by Allan Colman on . Posted in Allan Colman, Business Development, Business Strategy, Client Retention, New Business Development, Strategic Planning.

Build a Business Relationship With Your Customers or Clients

Allan Colman

Allan Colman

Revenue Accelerator Expert 🚀 | Speaker 🎤 | Professor of Marketing 👨‍🏫 | Author of The Revenue Accelerator 📘
297 articles

  A joint venture usually includes an agreement on how much each invests and what the overall marketing and sales strategy will be. Profit distribution, specific responsibilities, metrics for analyzing progress and growth, and a clarifying legal agreement are musts.

·       Contracting for managing the product or service is another option. Having another organization manufacture and distribute for you can help you remain focused on refreshing and updating your product and working on new versions. Again, legal agreements should always be utilized.

·       Licensing is often used as a way to enter a specific market. It is designed to assign another company to use your trademark, logo, or collateral materials and to actually manufacture and sell your product or service.

·       Financial investment is often the difference between a start-up’s success or failure. Do not become so focused on building your product or service that you ignore thinking ahead and looking at all the tools you will need to access and obtain funding.

·       Become a business partner with your customers or clients. Where you have similar goals, this type of partnership can offer a variety of benefits over many years. Demonstrate to them how you keep costs and fees palatable. Show you are amenable to new ideas and new ways of doing business that help both companies.

ESG – A NEW SCORING SYSTEM

Written by Allan Colman on . Posted in Allan Colman, Business Development, Business Strategy, New Business Development, Online Marketing, Speaking and Workshops.

Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance (ESG) is a relatively new scoring system applying non-financial factors to measure a business’s attention to the environmental and social arenas.

 

ESG is now being used by multiple start-up funding sources. These funding sources evaluate a company’s ESG ethical score in addition to the usual financial investment risks to determine their offers of any loans and grants.

Convert Your USP to Their Reality

Written by Allan Colman on . Posted in Allan Colman, Asking for Business, Business Development, Business Strategy, Conversion Rate Optimization, New Business Development, Online Marketing, Speaking and Workshops.

Convert Your Unique Selling Proposition To Their Reality

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by Dr. Allan Colman, CEO of the Closers Group and author of “The Revenue Accelerator: The 21 Boosters to Launch Your Startup“

Successful sales and marketing require one over-arching element. Your product or service must be seen as a brand. And the brand encompasses your USP, Unique Selling Proposition — the heart of your marketing and sales efforts.

Your USP effectively distinguishes you from competition. It can also be used as a slogan, and can even be expanded into an elevator message. Within a 20-second statement, the benefits of your product/service should be obvious.

At its core, a USP is a written statement that explains why you get new customers/clients, why they keep coming back to you, why they refer new business to you, and how you differ from the competition. It should succinctly capture the essence, strengths, and uniqueness of your product or service.

If you’ve spent any time selling in today’s competitive marketplace, you know it can be uniquely challenging. Many markets are individually idiosyncratic and often resistant. It requires special insights, strategies, and training to successfully penetrate them. This often adds a few twists and turns into your business roadmap but it’s not impossible to navigate with a clear, forceful USP.

When devising your company’s USP, ask whether it positions you as Kleenex or tissue. As plastic storage bags or Ziplocks? Are you known as among the best or simply one of the others?

When the public hears the name of your company or service, what adjectives come to their minds? Building the USP takes time and effort, but it can produce an effective offering of benefits and solutions.

In order to create your USP, look for answers to these questions:

  1. What is it that makes your company/firm stand out from your competitors?
  2. Why do your customers/clients continue doing business with you?
  3. What is it about your company/firm that makes it unique?
  4. Why should customers/clients come to you?
  5. What do you have to offer that they can’t get anywhere else?

Offer up these questions to a wide swath of peers and prospects along with friends and family and note any common themes that emerge. And, if you’ve started a business, how do your clients or any “best” customers respond, or your suppliers, vendors, manufactures, local businesses and others you’ve interacted with in your community. If you’re just opening an operation, ask what level of service should be provided, or what future refinements might be considered. Listen very closely to each answer.

Skilled entrepreneurs will ask themselves the very same questions. Have you studied the market before beginning to build or design your product or system? Do you know what might make you stand out from competitors? Is there an element that’s truly unique? Why should customers/clients come to you? Do you have something not available anywhere else?

Combining your answers and being completely, painfully honest, will allow you to come up with the most powerful quality that will set you apart from your competition or future competition. As you narrow down your feedback to a short list of answers, a few simple, focused statements should arise. Share these with key people. Which would they choose?

In asking for feedback from the people who’ve offered responses, you’re not selling; you’re asking for advice. Yet this is an excellent indirect marketing opportunity (invisible marketing).

A short, concise USP should now become visible that will signify the core message for all of your marketing and sales efforts. And, once you have it, and it becomes your brand, protect it vigilantly. In many ways the future of your business depends on it.

It’s now time to put that USP to work. In meetings and pitches, while reviewing your prospects’ needs and stating your offerings and solutions, remember to repeat that USP two to three times, no more. It should become the single-most takeaway message that they remember.

Convert your USP to their reality.

 

BUILD YOUR BRAND

Written by Allan Colman on . Posted in Allan Colman, Brand, Business Development, Business Strategy, New Business Development.


You will need to lay the foundation for your new business venture with the creation of a unique brand – and then learn to use that brand to its maximum effectiveness. So here are five keys to building your brand: 🔷What are the benefits you are offering to your clients, to your prospects, to your companies? Keep in mind that they’re looking for benefits, both from an individual point of view and from a company’s or service agency’s point of view. 🔷 Are you really offering solutions to problems/issues/concerns that they have, and are these solutions also contributing to possible opportunities that they see in their own market? 🔷 Part of this conversion process is talking about results that you’ve achieved elsewhere. AS they explain their needs in more detail, you will need to address them specifically, not just by comparing them to what you’ve done before. 🔷 Building trust is absolutely critical and is done through references, examples, the professionalism that you present during a meeting or Zoom call, in emails, or whatever the opportunity presents. 🔷 You are, overall, presenting the values that are encompassed in your brand, Those are the values that will stick with these people as they consider purchasing your offerings – the takeaway. #brand #businesstips #startup #valuefirst #foundation
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USP – Make It Work !

Written by Allan Colman on . Posted in Brand, Business Development, New Business Development, Speaking and Workshops, Uncategorized.


Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) is at the heart of all your marketing and sales efforts. It distinguishes you from the competition. You can use it as a slogan, or you can expand it into an elevator speech to succinctly capture the essence, strengths, and uniqueness of your product or service in no more than 20 seconds.Mickey Marraffino, owner of MMMarraffino Marketing, told me in a recent interview, “Make adjustments based on your audience but feed it into your brand.”

To help you build a powerful USP, answer these five questions:

What is it that makes your company, firm, or consultancy stand out from your competitors?
Why do your clients/customers continue doing business with you?
What is it about your company that makes it unique?
Why should customers/clients come to you?
What do you have to offer that they cannot get anywhere else?

When the public hears the name of your company, firm, or product, what adjectives come to mind? How are you and other colleagues known throughout your community? If you don’t know, I strongly suggest you ask… today.

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