You have developed your product or service, and now it’s time to launch your business. You’ll need to plan your first month carefully, as the initial decisions you make can determine whether you’ll thrive or fail. Use this week-by-week template to tackle the tasks necessary for completing an epic launch.
Begin by focusing on the building blocks of your business.
Verify your business’s name
After some back and forth, you’ve finally come up with the perfect company name—but you may not be alone in the idea. So if you haven’t already, search the US Patent and Trademark online database to ensure that the name you’ve chosen for your company isn’t already trademarked. Even if it hasn’t been, you should still make sure that the website URL and social media handles you intend to use for it are available. After all, you’ll want those to match your name as closely as possible to make it easy for customers to find you online.
Establish your brand
Your brand is your identity and the core of your business, so it’s essential that you focus on building it from day one. Put your values and what you do best front and center in all your marketing and interactions with potential customers. For instance, Paula Anderson, co-owner of New Harvest Coffee Roasters in Providence, Rhode Island, created her business to be “all about connection and educating about coffee in an easily digestible way.” She’s worked to cement her brand identity as a quality coffee provider by teaching others how to make and recognize a tasty brew. Similarly, you should identify the core values of your business and make them the foundation of everything you do from this point forward.
Investigate your market to learn what works and what doesn’t.
Study your craft
Successful entrepreneurs are always striving to learn more and apply that new information to their business. Get to know your market, pinpointing anything that could impact you or your clients. There are several ways you could do this: look at some of the most successful companies in your field and identify what they do best, find a mentor or hire a professional coach, peruse inspiring or motivating reads about the industry, or listen to an instructive podcast. For example, if you are a sales or marketing professional, subscribing to a podcast like Stay Paid could give you access to valuable inside tips and advice from industry professionals that can help you develop the skills you’ll need to grow your business.
Develop a framework for conducting your business and creating an online identity.
Assemble your tools
You’ll need a customer relationship management (CRM) platform to store and manage the information you’ve gathered about your prospective clients. There are many CRMs available, such as Agile, Zoho, and HubSpot, so pick one that’s easy to navigate, can produce custom reports, has live customer support, is affordable, and can grow with your business. Also consider using non-CRM tools, such as Notion for team collaboration, QuickBooks for finances, Microsoft 365 for productivity, Trello for project management, and Zoom for videoconferencing.
Develop your online presence
Given that most consumers rely on the internet to make purchase decisions and evaluate local businesses, developing an effective online strategy will be key to growing yours. Your website should be attractive, easy to navigate, and reflect your branding. Consider hiring a website designer to make sure it looks its best; you could even ask for designer referrals from businesses like yours. You’ll also want to be active on at least one social media platform, such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, or Twitter. Use a tool like Hootsuite to help you schedule posts and keep your profile regularly updated with new content.
Construct your CRM and seek new clients.
Build your list
Begin filling your CRM with phone numbers, email addresses, links to social media accounts, and other useful information about your contacts. A good place to start is with your sphere of influence, which includes your colleagues, family, and friends. For example, when Myoung Kang, an entrepreneur and interim CFO in California’s Silicon Valley, started consulting, she reached out to individuals from both her career and her personal life. “I knew investors and company founders who could either hire me or refer me,” she says. She also contacted friends. “Now some of them use my clients’ products and actively support my career,” she explains. “They are a source of comfort and information for me.”
Find clients
Use the contacts and information you’ve entered in your CRM to find clients, and search for new ones daily. Prospecting can be hard, but it reaps results. Start by letting those in your sphere know you’re in business; ask if they can use your product or service or if they can refer you to someone who can. Cold-calling is a time-honored prospecting tool, but there are plenty of other options too. For example, you could network at sales conferences or community events, find customer leads through Facebook or other social media, distribute your business card to both new and old contacts, reach out to potential clients via email marketing, and get the word out through radio and TV ads. You can also create landing pages on your website that invite visitors to sign up for emails such as new product offerings and newsletters. Try a variety of these methods to find new clients and determine which ones work best for you.
TAKE ACTION:
Start building your business profile on your favorite social media platform today.
Periodic evaluation is crucial to any business’s success, especially when it comes to sales. Not only can reviewing your team’s performance spotlight opportunities to improve techniques, boost sales, and fuel growth, but it can also help avoid the problem of dropping winnable deals.
Check your sales processes against the following list of pitfalls. Could these six common mistakes be interfering with your organization’s sales rates?
Remember that not every lead is a qualified one. Prospects who pursue you may be undereducated about your service areas, what you sell, or even their own budgetary constraints. Therefore, it falls on your sales team to spend time identifying a prospect’s needs.
Ensure that your salespeople are asking questions that qualify leads early in the sales process. For example, a financial planner may ask, “Why don’t you tell me a bit about your financial goals, like budgeting or retirement savings?” Otherwise, they may wind up wasting paid hours chasing dead ends.
A crucial aspect of making a sale is knowing just what you’re selling. This goes beyond being able to recite product specifications. To hook clients and reel in more deals, your entire sales team must understand the value proposition.
Why exactly would a client be interested in—or even need—what you sell? What relevant pain points does your company resolve? Answering these questions is integral to any sales strategy. Many people are actually willing to overpay for products and services if they are emotionally attached to them or if the value exceeds the price in their minds. For example, a real estate agent’s value proposition isn’t just a new house—it’s the pride and happiness of finding a new place to call home.
This may sound counterintuitive, but rigidly adhering to successful techniques can sometimes kill a sale. Many salespeople depend too much on scripts and can end up losing control of conversations as a result. In reality, no sales pitch will follow the same path every single time—regardless of what a sales flowchart indicates. Any experienced salesperson knows that few questions receive a solid “yes” or “no” answer and that they should always be prepared to hear an unusual objection in their next call.
That said, relying on proven phrases like a well-written value proposition isn’t inherently detrimental. In fact, your sales playbook should include a bulleted list of phrases or points your team members need to hit in every conversation. However, nobody enjoys speaking to a robot; a script is best utilized when memorized and adapted to each prospect’s perceived communication style.
Similarly, it’s crucial to give every prospect individualized attention. Remember that productivity apps and automated phone lines don’t accept deals—people do. As sales coach Shiera O’Brien writes for LinkedIn, “If clients feel and believe they have a relationship with you, it’s because of your rapport-building skills. At that point, the trust begins to build, and they will commit time and effort to you.” In other words, people are far more likely to accept deals from people they like, respect, and enjoy talking to.
Strive to connect with prospects early in every conversation (beyond a simple “How’s your day going?”). Listen well to details like upcoming vacations or a new car, then document them in your CRM. Recalling this information in a future conversation can help prospects feel that you have formed a valuable relationship with them, which may motivate them to choose you over a competitor.
Also, remember that stories, not stats, make sales. Communicate with a compelling voice, relate your personal experience with a product, and share client satisfaction testimonies. Providing sensory details can help prospects visualize themselves with your product or service—this is a hook any good salesperson can tug on.
According to the sales consulting firm Marketing Donut, almost half of all salespeople admit defeat after just one attempt at following up with a prospect. However, they also found that 80 percent of sales happen only after the fifth touchpoint. This proves that the best salesperson is often not the most talented but the most persistent. Encourage your team to pursue objections and offer tools to overcome them—for example, they could recommend a payment plan to clients who deem your product beyond their price cap.
Be sure to follow up for referrals as well—these are far more likely to convert to clients than cold calls. In fact, a BNI.com survey found that 73 percent of companies get most of their business from networking and referrals.
A salesperson can deliver an amazing pitch to prospects and still fail to make a crucial leap: asking for their business. Don’t hold back when it’s time to get a payment. If you have kept someone hooked long enough to communicate the price of a product or service, assume that you have earned the right to request an order. The worst that will happen is they will say no.
But remember that “no” isn’t the end of the road. Declined or delayed offers give you the opportunity to uncover and handle any objections you may have missed throughout the sales process. And even if you deem a sale unwinnable, you can always transition into a referral request.
TAKE ACTION:
Review these six common mistakes with your team to boost your sales rates and promote growth in your organization.
Virtual webinars should be a tool in every business’s customer acquisition arsenal for one key reason—these sessions put you face-to-face with prospects who are genuinely interested in your products or services. After all, they’re signing into these sessions to get educated about your business and weigh how they may benefit from closing a deal with you. When implemented and led effectively, webinars can help you establish credibility with these valuable individuals, engage their attention, and build relationships that ultimately convert into bookings.
However, investing your time and finances into these marketing sessions necessitates a positive return, meaning that underperforming webinars can be a detriment to your organization. Brad Swineheart, host of the Be Advised podcast and chief marketing officer at Oxford Advisory Group, offers several ways webinar leaders can hold more impactful sessions. Whether you’re tracking low conversion rates from certain sessions or want to polish your skills as a host, adopt his nine consistently proven methods to help better fill your pipeline after webinars.
According to a study by Microsoft, the average person has an attention span of only eight seconds. So if you’re hosting a webinar, you need to employ an engaging hook like a story or statistic to immediately nab your attendees’ interest. Once you’ve done so, you can explain who you are and what your organization does. This information will be more meaningful and memorable after you capture their attention.
At various points in your webinar, you should offer a postwebinar consultation as a call to action. Invite attendees to meet with you one-on-one (these conversations can turn into deals), and provide a calendar link that allows them to book sessions with you at any point during the presentation. Webinar hosts who get the most appointment requests are the ones who mention their calendars three to four times throughout their webinars.
Using a poll during your event encourages attendees to weigh in on a concept or question. This increases engagement, which not only retains their interest but also makes them feel like active participants in the presentation. Once you can get attendees to lean forward and connect with the subject matter, the subsequent booking process will feel more natural. You can even review poll responses to help you qualify leads.
Before displaying your calendar link a second time, perform the embedding technique by sharing a personal story. Here’s a solid example: “I was wrapping up a webinar a month ago when an attendee followed this link to book a call with us. We uncovered a few strategies that would go on to save her thousands of dollars in taxes this year alone.”
Encourage attendees to follow your social media pages; even if some don’t immediately convert, convincing them to connect may keep those leads warm. Simply drop your links in the chat window to make them easily accessible. But before you do, ensure these pages have engaging, informative, and valuable content—links to your blog and seasonal greetings, for example. Post a solid balance of copy, images, links, and videos to maximize their appeal to a variety of audiences and preferences.
Deliver a closing statement that briefly summarizes what you covered throughout the webinar. Be skillful with your verbiage; don’t just restate concepts, as repetitive language can reduce attendees’ engagement. Instead, review what you went over compellingly and connect information with overarching themes. At this point, plug your calendar link again. Acknowledge the action-takers who’ve already booked, then reference that some people haven’t yet and encourage them to do so.
Webinars allow for immediate reengagement. Aim to reach out right away to all attendees who did not book an appointment with you. You may need to follow up multiple times via different avenues, like an email one week out and a phone call the next, before you convert them. It’s natural for consumers to weigh major purchases before handing over their payment information, but it’s your duty to ensure they don’t forget about you or court your competitor in the meantime.
Send your attendees a follow-up video instead of a plain email. You don’t need fancy equipment—your smartphone should do the trick. Simply record your message and upload it to a video-sharing site like YouTube or Instagram. Embed a link in the body of the email, and conclude with a call to action.
Those who lack confidence in their public speaking skills often stifle their ability to convey information to consumers, especially on an impersonal virtual platform. But even advisors who are rock stars in person can struggle to deliver a dynamic virtual presentation. If you are determined to master the webinar medium, pursue coaching and training opportunities to help you develop the necessary skills. Hosting high-converting sessions is a muscle, so the more you train, the better your results will be.
TAKE ACTION:
Implement these tips in your next webinar, and train your team to follow suit.
Picture this: you sit in a meeting for thirty minutes to an hour only to walk out of the room or hang up the call with zero valuable takeaways or an action plan for what to do next. Unfortunately, this is all too common in business. While the amount of time Americans spend in meetings has been steadily increasing, productivity hasn’t. In fact, a report from the project management company TeamStage revealed that the majority of employees surveyed said their meetings are a waste of time.
Meetings can be an enormously valuable way to connect with your people, solve problems, and set new goals—but they can also be a huge time suck and drain on resources if you’re not careful. The tips that follow can help you identify and reduce common pain points in your meetings, making your teams and your business more efficient and successful.
Before you hit Send on your meeting invite, ask yourself one simple question: Could your goal be accomplished without a meeting? If the answer is yes, develop a plan with action points and delivery dates, and send your team the important details via email. Include a note at the bottom explaining how they should follow up with you or another point person regarding any questions they may have.
If a meeting is necessary, you’ll want to follow a similar process and establish an agenda before sending any invites. The purpose of this is twofold: to set the stage and help participants prepare before the meeting and to keep everyone on track during it. Here are some best practices for creating an effective meeting agenda:
It’s important to be respectful of everyone’s time. A meeting that begins five minutes after the set start time or lasts ten minutes longer than intended is guaranteed to put people off, increase distraction, and reduce productivity. Set a clear start time and end time, and stick to them as much as possible. As the host, you should plan to arrive at or sign on to the meeting a few minutes in advance to ensure you and your team are ready to start on time.
There’s also no reason why a well-planned meeting would need to last longer than an hour. According to the American Psychological Association, the engagement of participants starts to dramatically decrease the longer any meeting goes on. That means every minute of your meeting should be put to good use. Creating an agenda can help with this, but only if you stick to it. It’s also beneficial to foster engagement by allowing participants to ask questions and encouraging those who don’t often speak up to do so. However, be mindful about reining in the conversation if it moves away from the points outlined in your agenda. The longer you allow it to go off topic, the harder it will be to bring it back to the main talking points.
Every person at your meeting should come away from it with a task to accomplish, and it’s even better if you can give them an idea of what that will be ahead of time. Break down your meeting goals into smaller pieces that can then be delegated, asking yourself how each participant can contribute in a way that is actionable and measurable. For example, if you’re meeting to discuss a sales target for the next quarter, you could give your marketing lead a game plan for how many new leads they will need to acquire and deliver to the sales team over the next few months. Your creative lead could then have an action item to develop a set amount of new lead magnets to bring in those leads, while your sales lead could get a quota for how many calls their team needs to make to bring in the necessary number of sales per day to reach the quarterly goal.
Of course, not every meeting will have a groundbreaking objective, and that’s OK. Regardless of the size of your goal, everyone at your meeting should walk away with a clear understanding of exactly what they need to do next, how to follow up with you on their progress, and when they need to have the task completed. Be sure to encourage participants to revisit their action items shortly after the meeting is over so they can think critically about the next steps while the meeting’s discussion is still fresh in their minds.
Running meetings is an essential component of being a leader, but, like all other aspects of your role, it might take some time to get it right. If you’ve been holding the same meeting every week for three months and have very little progress to show for it, talk with your employees about what is and isn’t working. And don’t be afraid to cancel or switch up the format of your meetings, either by having them occur less frequently or by including different team members. You and your team will be better off for it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Luke Acree is an authority on leadership, a lead-generation specialist, and a referral expert who has helped more than 100,000 entrepreneurs and small businesses grow their companies. He hosts Stay Paid, a sales and marketing podcast, and has been featured in Entrepreneur, Forbes, and Foundr.com.
TAKE ACTION:
Review the upcoming meetings on your calendar. Create agendas for each, and remove any you no longer deem necessary.
