The topic was entitled: Raising Money for your business? It’s easy if you know how!

Looking around the room of 150+ business owners I was not alone in my quest for knowledge on Venture Capital, Angel Investments, and the process to achieve the perfect win-win outcome. Finding capital for any startup is essential for your company to launch and grow. Experts predict that lack of cash closes half of all startups within 5 years. I would suggest it is overspending that kills your business. Find the critical aspects that keep your business afloat and pinch your pennies.

Investing is the least understood topic when talking “business.” Unless of course you live in Silicon Valley where million dollar investments are passed around like peanuts at the bar. For the rest of us it’s a mystery, and our first experience is often across the table negotiating terms of an investment. Here are 5 points that I left with from Basil Peters topic.

• Investments are just as much about the business owner as the possibilities their business presents. Angel Investors seek owners who are charismatic, enthusiastic, and passionate. The business will get you in the door, your personality will sign the cheque.
• For the investment to make cents for the investor (yes cents) your business should have 10x return potential. 80% of all returns will come from 10% of the investments. Without 10x return to cover the failed investments that are expected your investor will be less likely to risk their money. This may not seem fair, but consider your business. If you have a retail shop your markup on products include theft, or damaged products. Investors are simply playing the numbers.
• Most large companies like Yahoo, or Google are constantly on the look out for 20 million dollar purchases. Their growth depends on it, and their shareholders demand it. Unlike small businesses, cash reserves are a liability that generate little interest.
• Popular news headlines include 100+ million dollar deals weekly; this is exceptionally rare. The majority of purchases are under 15 million dollars with the odd exemption being sold for more then 100 million.

The last point describes the truth about available capital for entrepreneurs seeking investment. 20 years ago it would cost millions of dollars to launch your business. Without the internet you would have to create custom software, produce ad campaigns and spend millions on marketing.

Todays entrepreneurs can bootstrap companies for as little as 10,000. The news outlets are accurate when describing the decrease in available capital yet forget to point out the reduced cost for startups. Angel Investors, and Venture Capitalists are constantly looking for new opportunities.

Leap of the Week:
Find an angel investor in your community and be clear about your opportunity. The best advice Peters gave: Utilize all personal financial avenues prior to finding professional investors.

For more information on Basil Peters:   Twitter |   Blog |   Book |   Website

Twitter will not triple your Web traffic overnight.

A press release will not get journalists banging down your door.

Harsh truths, I know, but ones you need to hear. The problem with small businesses and marketing is they want instant pudding. They want to see a spike in sales or Web traffic instantly, and that simply doesn’t happen unless you’re Old Spice. Freshly showered men aside, all your marketing efforts should lead to one thing: trust.

Why Trust Is Important

Is trust necessary? Not really. You could sell a thousand widgets to a thousand people and never see them again. Or you could work to build trust with these customers, and rely on them to become your brand evangelists, to let them tell others how great you are because you’re a trustworthy company. Let them blog, tweet and share their love on Facebook.

Trust keeps customers coming back. If what you sell costs a lot of money, it gives them the confidence to drop the $100, $1,000 or $10,000 on your product.

How to Build Trust

Every component of marketing is about trust-building, if done properly.

• Social Media. Face it: You probably haven’t bought much from brands on Twitter just because they’re there. If a brand you’re following is having a promotion, you might click the link and buy. But that’s promotion. Not marketing. So your role in social media is to use it as a channel to build trust. Create conversations, whether they’re related to your industry or not. Share relevant links, even if they’re not from your own blog. Interact. Give people a reason to seek your brand out on Facebook or Twitter. A great example of a brand that does this is Mabel’s Labels. Under @mabelhood, the brand shares bloggers’ links and rallies behind its supportive followers. They’ve created a community that translates into trust, and then into sales.
• Press Releases. Sometimes trust is just about being there consistently. Putting out a press release each month can go a long way to say, “Hey! We’re still here doing awesome things.” And while journalists may not be clamoring to publish your news, searching for keywords that lead them to one press release after another from your brand certainly shows that you’re consistent. And consistency is one of the cornerstones of a healthy relationship, is it not?
• Blogger Relations. If you’re smart enough to be working with bloggers to spread the word about your products, kudos. But how you work with them can have just as much impact on your brand as what they think of the product. First off, pay your bloggers. Their time is as valuable as yours. But be there for them too. Make sure they know you’re partners in the blogger outreach campaign you’re working on, and make sure to address any questions or concerns they have before they post. If you build that trust, they’ll go beyond the call of duty for the campaign and talk about your brand on all the social channels, resulting in bonus play for you.

Leap of the Week: Where to Go From Here

If I’ve put you into a tailspin, don’t worry. Keep doing what you’re doing in marketing, but shift your thinking.  Don’t focus on how many (or few) website visitors that last Facebook contest netted. Instead look at how you built the trust of hundreds of loyal fans. If they are engaged in what you’re doing, you’re successfully building that trust. Keep it up, and those relationships will come to fruition.

To view this video online, click here:

To view this video online, click here:

Prepare Before Each Call

If you are going to call someone out of the blue its important to be professional, and on topic. Research your target, find out if they are hiring, how big the company is, and what their philosophy is. Its amazing how much information you can gather using tools like Linkedin, jigsaw, and Google. You should have a basic understanding of each company before you pick up the receiver. Quality is far more important then Quantity. Take notes of your research and have them handy during your telephone call. Also have main points of conversation written out, it keeps you on track.

Develop a Professional Greeting

Its important to distance yourself from the typical sales call “Hello, are you interested in my product.” Set the tone of the conversation with a professional greeting. This is not the time to sell your product, you have no idea if they need or want it. Start with something simple like: “Hello, I’m Rupert and I’m calling to introduce myself, and my company.” Keep conversation light, and simple. Make it an enjoyable conversation, show them you’re interested in them, and connecting. “We’ve had huge growth in your area and I wanted to connect and say hello.”

State Your Purpose

Respect your prospects time, don’t spend 10 minutes on pleasantries. Its important to lay a foundation of rapport before discussing your product but be mindful of time spent. Within 30 seconds they should have a clear understanding of your product. Without going into full details provide an overview of your products features and benefits. Touch on 3 main points maximum, give opportunities for questions to arise, this involves them in the conversation and confirms interest. You can even joke with them saying “I know you must receive countless calls, and I understand my product is not for everyone. This call is about discovering if I can help your business.”

Take Time and Thank Them

Its so important to thank people for their time. If you’ve got a low margin, low cost item a simple “Thank you for your time” will suffice. If you’ve got a large product that costs thousands of dollars I would recommend stepping up with a hand written note sent to them. This is a great opportunity to stand apart from the rest of the competition. How many times do you receive hand written notes from companies looking to do business with you? Take 5 minutes and make an impression. If sending mail is not within your budget, use Social Media. Is the prospect on Twitter? Publicly thank them.

Ask for Follow Up

You should always leave each meeting or telephone call with follow up. This creates movement for the sales cycle. When you contact someone you should follow up with an email for contact information if they seem un-interested, or a future telephone call if interest is present. Avoid a standard follow up and customize for each client. If they showed concerns with value, provide case studies, if they were concerned with quality, provide client testimonials. Tailor the follow up experience for a smooth sales process. Remember, if you don’t schedule a follow up, you’re not building rapport.

Leap of the Week:

Remember people hate being sold, but love buying. Empower the potential client and move the deal forward.

Penelope makes a really important distinction between appearances and reality. What’s really behind these internet success stories? Read on…

People make money online, for sure. But it’s not the people you are thinking of.

Most small businesses are using the Internet in their business model, but in general, the Internet is a way to market products and a way to connect with people; it’s not a get-rich-quick scheme.

Internet marketing requires all the same tools as old-media markets. For example, you need great visuals, you need a great story, you need some sort of connection to the gatekeepers of big audiences. You also need a great designer — or a Web design firm that has a client list you like.

But most of the success you see online is a great looking front-end that disguises the real business going on behind the scenes. Here are the real ways that people are making money on the Internet.

1. Being great at SEO.

When the Huffington Post sold for millions of dollars, AOL bought not so much a news organization, but an SEO organization. It’s not that Huffington Post doesn’t have news, but the news is simply a way to give their SEO people something to work with. Huffington Post doesn’t have the best news, but they have the news most closely tailored to the keywords that people type into Google, so people feel that the news at HuffPo is the most relevant to them.

2. Write blog posts all day, nonstop.

The sweatshop labor of the 21st century is writing blog posts. Gawker Media, for example, has insightful, timely, non-stop commentary about popular topics online. But the type of person you need on staff in order to generate that type of content is a smart, organized, editorialist, with the ability to be on-call all day long. This is why profits are high at Gawker, but turnover is high as well.

3. Aggregate content.

Sugar Inc. doesn’t write content. The company aggregates it. Sugar is a set of sophisticated tools to move traffic around in a way that generates more traffic. Some people get traffic once, and they never see it again. Take a look, for example, at SavvySugar. The site is fine-tuned from a traffic management point of view — viewers will always click more than once.

4. Sell your family.

Rhee Drummond might be the person making the most money on the Internet right now, with her site The Pioneer Woman. That is, she is a privately held company, without investors, and she is one of the highest trafficked sites online. How does she do it? She markets her own family. Their lifestyle. Their dinners. She has made a celebrity of herself and her kids, and while it seems appealing to be Internet famous, few people would actually enjoy that on a daily basis, and probably the only reason she can stomach it is that she lives on a ranch so far from civilization that they have their own landing strip.

5. Make great landing pages.

Let’s say you don’t want to devote your life to generating online content. Let’s say you have some sort of widget you want to sell. In that case, it’s not really about how good the product is, but rather how good the landing page is.

You can only really sell something that people search for on Google. Because how else would they ever find you? So they search for your type of product on Google and then land on your page and then what? You have to make them want to buy. So you are actually building a business that relies more on your landing page than on your product.

What’s Next?

With the old model of the Internet in 1994, people paid the biggest salaries to the developers. I earned $100 an hour in the Fortune 500 writing HTML by hand. Coding was a mystery to most people back then, and I used to <nostalgia>dream in tags</nostalgia>.

Then, at the end of the millennium, content was king. The writers were making top-dollar online. That was when I pretty much canceled my syndicated print column, even though it had run in about 200 newspapers, because Yahoo Finance was paying me $2,500 a week to write one single blog post. More than all those newspapers were paying combined.

Today there is out-of-the-box software to replace everyday coding needs. And payment for content online has calibrated itself to where newspapers were 20 years ago.

So what’s next? All the business models working today have one thing in common: developing markets around keywords. Your business possibilities are not whatever you can dream up in your head. The business models today revolve around what other people dream up and type into Google.

Leap of the Week:

So think in terms of undervalued keywords, low-cost content, and traffic arbitrage. These are the ways people really make money online. The rest is just marketing offline businesses.

1) They don’t know your industry.
Hire someone who has a similar industry background, ask them industry related questions and test their knowledge. Having someone who does not understand your industry can be more damaging then not having a Social Media presence to begin with.

2) Your accounts are automated.
Social Media must be organic conversation, if a firm offers you a “too good to be true” price, its because its automated. Stay away from this practice, it will destroy your reputation.

3) Twitter, and Facebook are connected.
Sounds like a great idea, two birds with one stone. Wrong! Twitter and Facebook are very different; if the firm, or freelancer suggests linking the accounts, find someone new pronto!

4) No goals, or targets are set.
Would you hire a sales person without goals, or targets? Create specific goals for both Twitter, and Facebook. This can be engagement, new fans/followers, and mentions.  Otherwise you’re just wasting money.

5) Zero owner interaction.
Social Media is about personal connections. As an owner you absolutely must spend 5 minutes each day to make connections, find vendors, and clients. Insist on training from your contractor on the use of Social Media. Don’t miss any opportunities presented from Social Media connections.

Leap of the Week:

Find a freelance contractor who is comfortable with your industry, someone that shows an interest in your field, and will stay connected. It’s also very important to find someone who insists on explaining the process, and involving you in each step. When setting goals and targets ensure its written down in a contract, providing a roadmap for success. Request monthly in-depth reports that provide insight, and result metrics. Social Media is about providing value to the market place; focus on the needs of your customers, not your products. Last but not least; Remember, you cannot automate Social Media.

Video is such a strong emotional connector. So strong, that it is capable of establishing brand awareness in ways no other communication tool can. Check out this video series for Honda as an example (http://dreams.honda.com/). Honda calls this a documentary series focusing on huge dreamers and how they make their big dreams happen.

Before this web series, you may have assumed Honda’s brand was all about reliable vehicles, built with exceptional quality. Reliability and quality are great brand identifiers for Honda, but Honda is also about dreaming huge dreams and they’ve done a lot of “Big Dream” research and technical work, well beyond the automobile. They wanted that part of who they are to be known across the world, so they made this series to help share this part of their brand.

This video series is a clear demonstration that Honda understands how to harness the power of online video to educate the public about its brand… If only that were true for every business! Many businesses, particularly small businesses, often don’t take the time to work on the content of their video, ensuring that it represents their business and its brand the way they want it to.  This is such a disastrous mistake, because just as quickly as video encourages an emotional loyalty to a brand, it can easily fall flat and miss the mark entirely.

When video is used wisely, it is the most powerful brand identifying tool out there. When used hastily and with little thought as to how you want the public to identify your brand, it can dry up your marketing budget with little to no results.

Leap of the Week: While making your own videos, keep this in mind… Whether the videos are homemade or professionally produced, it is essential that you always, ALWAYS keep your brand identity in the forefront of your mind while creating video content, because if you don’t, your videos might actually dilute your marketing efforts, and work against you in the end!

Have fun with your videos,

Danielle
The “Chick In Charge” at Velvet Pumpkin Productions

“I use to be really good at selling other people’s products and services, but now that I am selling my own, I feel like I am begging for work.”

This one is popular too:

“I always end up reducing my price, otherwise I don’t get the job.”

Well here is what “sales machine” Geoffrey James and I have to say about that! Below are 8 very important rules to help all of you sales people and small business owners out there increase your sales while creating strong brand equity.

Selling for a small firm or a small business definitely presents challenges even for top sales professionals. Why? Because your company is small, your prospects probably don’t know much about it. Money is tight, which means that you don’t have the luxury of spending lavishly to promote your products or services. Your business probably lacks the sales support that reps in big firms take for granted. And so on, and so forth…

That being said, there are tremendous advantages to selling for a small business, if you know the rules. Whether you are a sales person for a small business or the owner/sales person of your own business, these rules can play an important part in your success.

• RULE #1: Never Apologize.
  Sales people and small business owners shrink their credibility by taking on an apologetic air, trying to explain away the inexperience or the size of their firm, and then energetically go into “fear mode”. Customers smell that kind of fear from a mile away and are often more than willing to use it to their advantage by demanding steep discounts or even amusing themselves by making you jump through meaningless hoops. Don’t let that happen to you. You are much more than you think, no matter what size business you have.

• RULE #2: Consider Yourself the Customer’s Equal.
  Rather than being apologetic, you must convince yourself and reflect the value of what you and your business have to offer. Rather than dwelling on your inexperience or small size, constantly emphasize the unique value of a truly new approach to the customer’s problems. And rather than “begging for business”, be hard-nosed and ready to walk out the door. Being passionate but not attached to the outcome is key. And as for jumping through hoops, your company is a business, not a dog and pony show.

• RULE #3: Treat “Weaknesses” as Strengths.
  Customers may not know anything about your small business, but they don’t have any negative preconceptions either. Support may be scarce in your small business, but that’s an opportunity to get creative and more independent.  A small company can pivot and adapt much faster than a bigger one. Remember, many decision-makers who won’t talk to cookie-cutter sales reps from established firms, will take the time to talk with somebody with original ideas and a new approach to solving their problems.

• RULE #4: YOU Are the Brand.
  It’s a fact that customers buy from people they know and trust. When you’re selling for a small business, YOU are the brand name, the reputation, the trust-ability, and the reliability that the customer is buying into.  A sales rep working for, say IBM, needs only the label on a business card to create credibility. With a smaller business, that trust and credibility must come from YOU and the way YOU present yourself to the consumer.

• RULE #5: Be an Entrepreneur.
  Because your small business lacks the support infrastructure of a larger one, in most cases the only person you can really count on to get things done is yourself.  You’ll need to be extremely careful about your time and resources, and constantly find creative ways to get things done quickly and easily. Remember, activity multiplied by hours spent must equal sales results. Make certain that everything you do leads toward the results that you seek.

• RULE #6: Match Each Request with a Counter-Request.
  Insist that anything the customer asks you to do, gives you the right to ask the customer to do something comparable in return. That policy not only ensures that you’ll not be taken advantage of, but also gives you frequent opportunities to strengthen your competitive position and move the sales process forward. For example, if a customer asks you to provide them with an RFP based upon 35 pages of detailed questions, explain that you’ll only do so if you’re guaranteed a meeting with decision-makers to present your solution.

• RULE #7: Be Willing to Say No.
  Never give in to a customer who’s being unreasonable or demanding things that don’t make sense for your company. Your larger competitor can perhaps afford to kowtow to get the business. You, however, don’t have the luxury of being anything less than the best – and the best in any industry NEVER truckle. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be cooperative, but in all your dealings be aware of your worth and the worth of your company to the customer.

• RULE #8: Never be afraid to bail.
  Don’t let wishful thinking propel you into wasted effort. If it becomes clear that the deal doesn’t make sense for your company or will take too much time and effort to close, it’s not worth pursuing. For example, if you’re being told you can’t meet with the decision-maker, you aren’t going to get the business. Period. So move on, without regrets.

Leap of the Week:
What’s one thing that you connected with from this blog post and can start implementing this week? Remember, YOU have something of value to offer. Get out of your own way, STOP being the best kept secret. Start viewing your own business as if it belonged to someone else so you can feel more comfortable talking about the solutions that it has to offer. After all, that’s what selling is all about!

Good luck and let me know how it goes.
Isabelle

To view this video online, click here:

To view this video, click here:

Meanwhile, “It Costs Too Much” is the single most common objection to a sales pitch. When that phrase (or something like it) comes up, it means that you haven’t yet shown the prospect that your offering is valuable enough to justify the price.  Your next move should be to ask for clarification, so that you know how to adjust the cost/value equation.

Below are thirteen questions you can ask when you receive the “it costs too much” response. These questions will move the conversation forward and get you the information you’ll need to reposition your product. When using any of these questions, you should preface them with a phrase that confirms that you’ve heard and understood the objection.  (Examples: No problem, Just out of curiosity…, I understand that cost is always an issue.., etc…)

Here are the questions:

1. When you say it costs too much, what do you mean?”
2. What has been your past experience with solutions like ours?”
3. How do you know that it costs too much?”
4. What do you know about us or our industry?”
5. What has been your past experience with companies like ours?”
6. What are some of your priorities around _________?”
7. What if our solutions weren’t really expensive at all?”
8. What if it turned out that we didn’t really cost as much as you thought?”
9. What if we really could solve the problem of __________?”
10. What if we really could generate a measurable business value?”
11. What if we could help you create a competitive advantage?”
12. What if we could show you how our solution would actually save money?”
13. How do you plan to handle this problem or opportunity without our offering?”

What’s important is that it not seem as if you’re questioning the validity of the objection, but rather to change the way that the prospect views the cost issue. The “no problem” and the “just out of curiosity”, provide the bridge to keep the conversation going and give you the opportunity to show that your offering has value that more than offsets the cost.

Leap of the Week:
If and when the excuse is about money, let me assure you that it’s NOT. It’s about the perceived lack of value for the amount of money asked. So, re-read the above questions carefully and keep them close by when reviewing a proposal with a client. Digging deeper always pays off. Give it a try and you’ll see, it’s much easier than you think.

Let me know how it goes!
Isabelle