A Guide to Growing Your Business

A Guide to

Growing Your Business

Proven Methods

for Entrepreneurs, Marketers

and Sales People with No Time to Waste

William D. Hughes

with Aastha Verma and Michael Hughes

Copyright 2020 © by William D. Hughes

All rights reserved under the Pan-American and International Copyright Conventions. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or hereinafter invented, without written permission of the publisher, Armin Lear Press.

Cover Design by C.S. Fritz

Armin Lear Press

825 Wildlife

Estes Park, CO 80517

ISBN 978-1-7356174-0-4

INTRODUCTION 1

GETTING STARTED 3

Chapter 1: Getting Started 4

Chapter 2: Assessment: 9

Where are you? 9

Chapter 3: Goals 12

PRODUCTS 16

Chapter 4: Products 17

Chapter 5: Customers 24

Chapter 6: Positioning 28

Chapter 7: Your Story 30

Chapter 8: Competition 32

Chapter 9: Rolling Out Something New 34

MARKETS 41

Chapter 10: Markets 42

Chapter 11: Government 49

Chapter 12: Going International 53

DECISION MAKING 60

Chapter 13: Behavioral Economics 61

MARKETNG COMMUNICATIONS 71

Chapter 14: MARCOM (Marketing Communications) 72

Chapter 15: Advertising 77

Chapter 16: Direct Response Marketing 86

Chapter 17: Telemarketing 98

Chapter 18: Media Releases 101

Chapter 19: Broadcast Media 108

Chapter 20: Trade Shows 113

Chapter 21: Sales Collateral 118

Chapter 22: Database Marketing 121

SELLING 124

Chapter 23: The Sales Process 125

Chapter 24: The Sales Plan 128

Chapter 25: The Sales Call 135

Chapter 26: Influencers 141

Chapter 27: Bonding with Prospects 144

Chapter 28: Closing 156

Chapter 29: Repeat Business 159

Chapter 30: Sales Management 162

Chapter 31: Sales Forecasting 168

Chapter 32: Post Sales 171

TECHNOLOGY 175

Chapter 33: Technology 176

Chapter 34: Search Engine Marketing 190

Chapter 35: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) 197

Chapter 36: Google Analytics 204

Chapter 37: Customer Relationship

Management (CRM) 207

Chapter 38: Big Data 210

Chapter 39: Amazon and Alibaba 216

Chapter 40: Beyond Your Website 220

WRAP UP 223

Chapter 41: Contingencies 224

Chapter 42: Fast-Pass Worksheet 227

AUTHOR BIOS 229

Introduction

From the moment we wake up, we’re surrounded and inundated with marketing promises and claims. A big reason for the relentless messaging is that we carry myriad vendors with us in our smartphones. They push information at us, and we pull in what we want—hour after hour.

If your business has serious sales goals and you’re in a hurry, you need to drive faster than the competing traffic. With no time to waste, this book narrows its focus on what matters, makes sense and makes money. This translates into targeting the right customers with products that solve important problems and makes people feel smart and good about becoming your customer.

With that, you can transform your business plans and vision into the rapid-response business you promised your customers, investors, family, and yourself. Chapters focus sharply on the need-to-know instead of the nice-to-know.

If you are an entrepreneur in a start-up, statistics suggest your chances of succeeding aren’t great. This book will help you avoid the new-business cemetery. You do that with tight market focus, product differentiation, and by building relationships with your target customers.

As ex-heavyweight champion turned mass-market BBQ grill salesman George Foreman says, Learn how to sell. You’ll never starve.

The chapter on behavioral economics explains why so many customer decisions are puzzling and irrational. That doesn’t stop people from making them, of course, so understanding customer motivation gives you a distinct advantage in the marketplace.

In addition, the Internet has become the most powerful marketing weapon in history and the COVID-19 pandemic made it a mandatory component of our business life. Technology has changed how we live, how we communicate, sell, buy, research, learn, and play.

Google unveils sellers’ costs and secrets. Armed with high-powered computers (aka smart phones), today’s customers know more about what they are buying than they did back in the twentieth century. Alibaba presents your products to prospects all over the world and describes them in the buyer’s native language. And it’s only just beginning as Cloud Computing, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Big Data, Block Chain, and more become more commonplace.

The technology section will help you become tech savvy and give you the firepower to leverage technology and make most everything work better and happen faster. Both of my co-authors have extraordinary technical business credentials and know better than most anyone how to use the Internet to gain a competitive advantage. Michael is a nationally known search engine and Internet marketing expert. He’s been in the on-line marketing business for twenty years and worked with thousands of businesses and web owners. Aastha is the ultimate technical program manager and is currently managing one of our nation’s most critical cyber-security and critical infrastructure projects.

In all, this book is for business professionals with lots at stake and no time to waste. Time to start making changes and start making money!

GETTING STARTED

Chapter 1: Getting Started

One way to get started is to quit talking and start doing.

- Walt Disney

Walt Disney Company Founder

Start by doing what’s necessary; then do what’s possible,

and suddenly you are doing the impossible.

- St. Francis of Assisi

Patron Saint of Italy in 1228

Marketing makes change. Sales make money.

Many people think of marketing as advertising. Others think of marketing as a fancy word for selling. Still others view it as having something to do with market research. Then there is the street-smart view that really does capture what marketing is and does, namely: You stand a good chance of succeeding if you figure out what people want in the first place.

Marketing

Marketing is the matchmaker between what your business is selling and what customers desire and buy. To that end, marketing makes change happen.

Marketing begins with an idea about a product or customer need. Marketers conduct research to uncover actual needs, trends, and opportunities. They analyze the competition, determine price and packaging, establish distribution channels, and create/execute promotions to stimulate demand.

Actually, marketing is more encompassing than that. It’s everything you do that involves the public. It’s how your people answer the phone, the way you present your invoices, your returns policy, and how you treat everyone who encounters your business. Marketing is not a part time or emergency measure: It must be planned, budgeted, and measured.

Done right, marketing creates awareness, uncovers the best prospects, and stimulates them to want what you sell; that is, marketing creates demand for your product or service. Sales picks up where marketing leaves off. It starts with marketing and moves into selling.

Sales

When selling to other businesses (B2B), relationships are your priority. Here, the story behind the product is often more important than the product. When selling to consumers (B2C), it’s about traffic.

Selling begins when people become aware of you and your product. They become prospects if they are interested enough to allow you to try and convince them you can solve their problem. Next, they start thinking seriously about your product; then they begin to imagine themselves owning it and start to want it. Ultimately, they buy.

Making a sale is not the end. A sale is just the beginning—the beginning of what can be a long and prosperous relationship for both parties.

Activities that shorten the sales cycle, that cause orders to occur faster, have the biggest payoffs. But aren’t most sales and marketing activities supposed to make sales happen faster? The answer is Yes, but some address the challenge much more directly than others.

That’s why direct response advertising is more effective than indirect, awareness advertising. It’s why demonstrations and samples work better than brochures. (Those people giving away bits of sausage at Costco whenever we don’t have a virus pandemic are worth their weight in dollar bills for the manufacturer.) It’s why asking for the order in person always works better than asking over the phone.

When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor.

- Elon Musk

CEO Tesla and SpaceX

Mistakes

When companies struggle to meet their business goals, here are six of the most common and costly reasons why.

Distribution Channels

Recently someone asked me to name the most critical part of a sales and marketing plan, that is, what matters most? Advertising? Quality products? Good service? Prompt delivery? Plenty of cash?

All of them matter, of course, but I would not identify any of them as mandatory. I was tempted to answer, A great product, but I thought about all the successful companies whose products are just ordinary.

Providing a path for prospective customers to do business with you may be the most important thing you can do. If you do not have a convenient way for customers to buy what you sell, everything else is futile. This can be a store, a sales force, a distributor, the Internet, mail, television, radio, or drone. Somehow, you must give customers access to your products.

Good salespeople in the right places, a quality network of dealers or distributors, an online e-commerce presence—they all work. With the right sales infrastructure you can overcome just about any obstacle to generating revenue. Invest in your sales organization, both the people and the infrastructure that allows them to reach customers.

And never stop recruiting. You always need good salespeople. Hire the right ones—those with strong interpersonal skills, a healthy sense of risk, and a grasp of what motivates your target customers—and you can turn a mediocre business into a real winner.

Some people talk about a dream but don’t follow through. Others make it happen.

What’s the difference? HUNGER. Hunger gives you drive—not talent, not skill.

With enough hunger you’ll find a way.

- Tony Robbins

Author, Motivational Speaker

Wrap Up

Pick a target market that is small enough for you to afford to make a splash and where the competition is not entrenched.

Hire superstar sales professionals; you’ll sleep better at night.

Chapter 2: Assessment:

Where are you?

Change before you have to.

- Jack Welch

Former Chairman and CEO of General Electric

How would you describe your current business situation? Where are the gaps? The opportunities? Where will change pay off? If your business isn’t growing, it’s dying.

Note to start-ups: Considering the uncertainty of a start-up business, you can waste valuable energy and time in refining a detailed business or sales plan. You need a plan, but you do not need to get into the weeds of detailed planning. You are better off relying on proven tools such as a Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats (SWOT) analysis and then following it with an action plan outline. Try the Fast-Pass Worksheet near the end of this book as the SWOT follow up. The reason for proceeding this way is that entrepreneurs’ initial ideas and actions almost always need tweaking and changing. Expect to make changes on the fly and be prepared to do that.

Failing to Plan equals Planning to Fail

First the big picture. Start with a SWOT analysis, an organized list of your business’s greatest strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Recognize that whatever got you to where you are today is probably no longer sufficient to keep you there.

Strengths and weaknesses are internal to the company (think: reputation, patents, location). You can change them over time but not without some work. Opportunities and threats are external (think: suppliers, competitors, prices)—they are out there in the market, happening whether you like it or not. You can’t change them.

Existing businesses can use a SWOT analysis, at any time, to assess a changing environment and respond proactively. New businesses should use a SWOT analysis as a part of their planning process. Your chart will look like the one below:

Situation Today

Next, take a closer look at your situation today.

Business Model

Before we go any further, let’s make sure this business can make money. You’ll need what’s known as a Proforma Income Statement (P&L), which is analogous to a monthly budget. It looks like this:

Pay attention to the Gross Profit. It is the number that drives the business. And watch the overhead. Keep it at the planned rate.

Wrap Up

Create your business model and SWOT analysis. Get going. What needs to get done now?

Chapter 3: Goals

"There ain’t a horse that can’t be rode.

And there ain’t a cowboy that can’t be throwed."

- Texas Ranch Wisdom

Goals should be quantitative so that progress is measurable. Measurements should be under your control and verifiable. Instead of having a goal of 10 percent market share (something you really can’t count), translate that into selling a specific number of units at a certain price in a defined period of time.

Goal setting is always a valuable exercise, even if you don’t have enough time to validate every assumption. At least you’ll be thinking about the right subjects—like sales, margins, expenses, and profit.

Action

Doing what you’ve been doing is going to get you what you’ve been getting. Where are your best chances for growth and improved business results? Don’t worry about the future—shape it. Plan on what you know, can predict and what customers will crave. Make it simple and doable. Start with just a few action items that can be executed in a month or two.

High expectations are the key to everything.

- Sam Walton

Walmart Founder

Business Culture (Soul)

Successful businesses have an intangible energy that inspires enthusiasm and mutual purpose. Researchers have determined there are three major factors affecting this. Winning businesses have:

A loftier reason for existing other than revenue growth and profits.

Powerful and ongoing customer connections.

Employee autonomy and creativity.

Mission Statement

Mission statements are grand proclamations and not typically found in sales and marketing plans. However, at their best, they do capture the corporate soul.

I’ve never found a universally accepted definition of what a mission statement should be or even its purpose. Some think it should paint a picture of the future. Others think a mission statement is how you differentiate your business from the rest. Others think of it as a slogan.

I’ve even heard smart