Sales and Marketing

How to Build a Powerful Sales Team

Your salespeople need to be the very best you can find, and great salespeople can be hard to find. On any given sales team, a small percentage of the force does a majority of the business, and your goal is to increase the percentage of your team that is making big contributions to your sales totals. Here are a few tips you can follow to build a powerful sales team.

Focus on Key Performance Indicators

Successful people look for the signs. Small business owners are no exception.The signs are reality. It’s true in business the same way that it is true in sports, relationships, or any other part of life. But what does it mean to see the signs in business? What should you be looking for?

Why Giving Is More Powerful than Getting

It’s not about you. That’s the secret that every person needs to learn in business—it’s not about you. It’s about helping others, about putting what other people need ahead of what you want. The secret to business is providing value to your customers, not looking for ways to make money for yourself.

Unique Selling Propositions

When you start your business, you will probably be competing with a number of other companies. Why should customers come to you instead of them? The trick to setting your business apart is creating a Unique Selling Proposition.

Go for the Win-Win

If a business owner were just thinking of himself or herself, then the business would never make it. Sure, things might be ok for a little while, but long-term sustainable success only comes when your business is focused on other people. Going for a win is not enough; you need the win-win.

Pinterest Tips for Small Business

For a small business owner, there’s no marketing like word-of-mouth marketing. When your customers are talking about your business with their friends, and bringing new customers to you, that is the most effective form of advertising—and the cheapest! And social media have the potential to function like word-of-mouth advertising on steroids.

Creating Top of Mind Awareness

As a small business entrepreneur, your goal is always to find more customers. But when you are marketing your company and developing your business’s brand, you can’t just think about the short term and immediate effects; you have to consider the long term, too.

Building a Brand: How Three Successful Sites Did It

At the beginning of the year, AG Beat released a very cool list of 60 brands to watch during 2012. Not all of their predictions were correct—KeepSum, which many thought would be the Groupon of real estate, has been offline for a few months now—but many of them were spot on. Three in particular—OpenCongress, Klout, and Pinterest—did so well during 2012 that they have now become household names. But what did they do differently than the other 57 brands, and how did they do it? What stars aligned to bring these three to the limelight?

3 Simple Steps to Maintaining a Successful Company Blog

Chances are pretty high that if you run your own company, it probably has its own blog that more often than not serves as a reflection of the business itself. A company blog shows readers what sort of business you’re running and gives them an inside look at just how you run things. As such, the company blog develops a voice all on its own that’s often pretty conversational as well as informational, so it’s important that your customers are finding the answers to the questions that they have and keep coming back for more with your blog.

Marketing Help from Your Vendors

You need every marketing edge you can get. An oft-overlooked opportunity is using your vendors to fuel business growth. While you’re already getting services of course, you can get more if you’re willing to pay more and incentivize your vendors to help you.

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