You can reduce your business expenses significantly if you do not have a formal office in a prime commercial area. A work at home opportunity which is mainly online allows you the flexibility to choose your own time and place of work.
Hiring a sales force to get leads for your business usually helps it to grow, but managing the sales force can be a very cumbersome task. Today, lead generation can be outsourced to specialised firms who can verify the information, before passing it to the relevant salesperson to close the sale. www.customleads.net is one of the specialized lead generation websites for home based businesses.
When I started out, my business was very small, I did not face any problem. In the last one year, I faced harassment in different forms. I read this article and found it very interesting.
SAILBOATS, YACHTS,AND TALL-MASTED SHIPS (Part III)
The Winds that Move Your Boat - Sales
by Chuck Violand
The second source of wind that moves your boat is sales. Your sales are influenced by three different factors: selling, good fortune, competitors. of these last two factors, it is critical that you manage your financial resources carefully.Selling: A client of mine beautifully illustrated the impact of selling on your business when he commented, “When you’re
sailing around in a small boat you can often grow your business just by showing up and doing good work. But when your business gets larger, that’s not enough.” He’s right.
Referrals might allow you to grow at a safe, comfortable pace when you’re smaller. But to successfully compete when you’re sailing a yacht or tall-masted ship, you’ll need an aggressive and sustained sales program. It is only with this program that you can have any kind of predictability over future sales.
Good Fortune: You don’t have to be in business very long before you recognize the role serendipity plays in any company’s success. Even Sergy Brin and Larry Page, the founders of Google, recognize the role it played in their success. But, too much good fortune can create real problems for a small business. Take, for example, situations where an overwhelming amount of work comes to your company unexpectedly. It can be in
the form of a single large contract, or in the form of a weather surge. These situations are similar to having strong winds catch your sails and threaten to capsize or swamp your boat. You can be caught without enough cash to finance the work, or without enough equipment or trained people to handle the jobs.
Unexpected sales like this can also blow your boat into unfamiliar waters.
Suddenly your small sailboat can find itself in heavy seas where you’re competing with larger opponents (which leads to the next sales factor).
Competition: Most small businesses compete with companies that are similar in size to themselves. For the most part, you’re not even affected by the competitors who are significantly bigger or smaller than you. When your company is smaller, you don’t always take big competitors
seriously because you don’t think you really compete with them,
and you’re probably right. Your company may be no more than a blip on their radar screen. Sometimes just running into them on the same job makes you feel like you’ve gained a moral victory. And they might be viewing you as no more than a mild irritation.
When you move to a larger boat, your competitors change, too. Now you might suddenly find yourself competing with the seasoned crew of a racing yacht, or staring down the gun barrels of a tall-masted ship. While the companies you competed with when you were smaller might have been happy sharing the water with you, now your larger competitors are very serious about shooting your boat out of the water. So you need to
prepare yourself mentally for these new, larger competitors. After all, they’re more experienced sailing their schooner than you are. They know how to navigate these waters. They know how to use their customer relationships and their financial muscle to undercut your reputation, or even to get you kicked off jobs. Although you might view their captain as ruthless for callously wanting to destroy your boat, he’s just viewing it as doing his job.
C.
Violand Management Associates is dedicated to helping owners
in the cleaning and restoration industry become the most
successful and profitable businesses they can be. If you
are interested in learning more about how Violand can help
your business, contact Darcie Bues today by email at
dbues@violand.com, or by phone at (800) 360-3513.
C.
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