PRESENTED BY

WHAT SMBS ARE NELGLECTING

Ian Brodie

Ian Brodie helps consultants, coaches and other professionals to

attract and win more clients. He writes the award winning More

Clients blog, and recently released his Pain Free Marketing

approach to getting more clients without the pain and expense of

traditional marketing.

2

Follow-up.Chances are, when you first contact or meet a potential client

they’re not going to be ready to buy right now. Partly it’s timing – probably

the issue or need isn’t big enough for them yet. And partially it’s because

you haven’t built up enough credibility and trust yet for them to feel

comfortable hiring you.It may be 3 months, 6 months, 9 months or more

before they’re ready to buy. And when they are, if you haven’t followed up,

if you haven’t kept in touch and built your credibility and trust – then it

won’t be you they reach out to.But if you keep in touch. if you keep adding

value – doing useful stuff for them (rather than just nagging to see if

they’re ready to buy) then when they’re ready, they’ll turn to

you.Unfortunately, most SMBs don’t do this. They give up if someone isn’t

ready to buy straight away. As a result, they’re always chasing new hot

leads – rather than closing the big deals that have warmed up over time.

Julie Steelman

Julie Steelman’s former clients read like a Who’s Who of big-name

corporate giants with Apple, Microsoft, Toyota, CBS, Sony Studios

and Universal Pictures in her rolodex. She generated more than

$100+ million in sales during her 30-year sales career. Julie is the

author of The Effortless Yes! and is known as The Sales, Success

& Bankability Mentor.

3

In a tight economy, it’s important to “skeptic-proof” your business. I think

SMB’s need to re-fine their sweet spot and get more clear about their

specialties and unique offerings. Make sure the salesforce knows exactly

how to tell the story and get busy elevating customer relationships with it.

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Carol Roth

Carol Roth is a business strategist, deal maker and author of the

New York Times bestselling book, The Entrepreneur Equation. She

has helped her clients, ranging from solopreneurs to multinational

corporations, raise more than $1 billion in capital, complete more

than $750 million worth of M&A transactions, secure high-profile

licensing and partnership deals and create million dollar brand

loyalty programs.

4

Financial Statements: One of the top areas of neglect for entrepreneurs is

in financial statements. Many small business owners don’t pay attention

to financial statements or worse yet, don’t even do them on a regular

basis. In fact, a lot of business owners think credit card and checking

account statements qualify as financial statements (or worse, don’t know

the difference between a 401k plan and a 5K run). Being lazy or ignorant

in this area can spell ruin for business owners. Financial statements can

show you what is working and what isn’t, where expenses are running

amok and even cash flow issues. If you don’t understand the financial

statements, hire someone else to do them and to teach you what to look

for. Ignoring your financial statements can put your business in serious

jeopardy.

Liz Strauss

Liz Strauss is a Brand Strategist, Community Builder, Founder of

SOBCon. She blogs at LizStrauss.com and Successful-Blog.com

5

Most businesses today are neglecting the importance of knowing their

own values. Values define how we make our decisions. If we know our

values, we can identify our ideal employees and our ideal customers. An

extreme example, if my highest value is simply growing the bottom line, I

want to people who share that value, because then I can trust that their

decisions will be based on making money. When our values are aligned

we don’t have to explain why we’re doing things. Values drive the mission

that keeps all of a business going in the same direction. Steve Jobs

valued different thinking that brought art to technology and held that

expectation to every product, partner, and employee. In turn that attracted

customers who shared those values. Your values are the key to customer

loyalty.

Bob Urichuck

Bob Urichuck is an International Professional Speaker, Trainer and

Author of two best selling books “Up Your Bottom Line” and

“Disciplined for Life: You are the Author of Your Future.” Bob has

been recognized as Consummate Speaker of the year and ranked

#7 in the World’s top 30 Sales Gurus.

6

Focusing on buyers who would give them the best return on time

invested. They spend 80% of their time of buyers who give them 20% of

their revenues, instead of 80% of their time on buyers who give them 80%

of their revenues. Targeting for R.O.T.I.

Elinor Stutz

Elinor Stutz, CEO of Smooth Sale, LLC authored the International

Best-Selling book, “Nice Girls DO Get the Sale: Relationship

Building That Gets Results”, Sourcebooks and the best selling

career book, “HIRED! How to Use Sales Techniques to Sell Yourself

On Interviews”, Career Press. She provides team sales training,

private coaching and highly acclaimed inspirational keynotes for

conferences.

7

It is the combination of ROI and helping others (building community too)

that builds a truly dynamic business. My observation is that most men

primarily focus on their own ROI, while women primarily focus on their

passion and how to make this a better world. Perfection would be the

meeting of the male and female minds! Having interviewed a number of

entrepreneurs who faced devastating circumstances that would have

caused most to quit, they instead chose to build up communities as they

built themselves up from literally nothing. By helping others as they

advanced and remaining true to their belief in success not only did they

see incredible advancement and ROI but very loyal communities further

helping to advance their business.

Jacques Werth

Jacques Werth is President of High Probability Selling, Inc – a

sales consulting and training company founded in 1989 . The

company specializes in sales process improvement. They have

trained salespeople, sales managers, consultants, and business

owners in over 70 industries.

8

Customer satisfaction should be their most important issue.Time and

resources, for everything else, should be systematically allocated on daily

and weekly bases depending on their importance, i.e. sales and

marketing, design, production, administration, shipping, record keeping

and profitability analysis, etc.

Ken Thoreson

Ken Thoreson, Acumen Management Group, Ltd. president, is a

sales leadership professional who “operationalizes” sales

management systems and processes to pull sales results out of

thedoldrums into the fresh zone of predictable revenue. His blog,

Your Sales Management Guru, has been rated in the top 10 sales

blogs in the United States

9

I have seen SMB businesses fail on many fronts, but the ONE thing I

often see is the failure to create a “prescriptive approach” to their

business. Each aspect of your business must be documented and each

action by each employee should be clearly defined. This would not only

include the purpose of their job, but also a documented approach as to

how to do their particular job.When SMB owners and their employees

“wing it”, we see lost dollars, rework, and customer dissatisfaction. As you

add employees or hire new ones, this documentation will make it easier to

train them and in many situations, when we do this, we will find better

ways to improve the process.

Dan Waldschmid

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Dan Waldschmidt is at war with conventional sales thinking. His

Edgy Conversations have turned hundreds of companies into rock-

star businesses and the Wall Street Journal calls his blog one of

the” Top 7 sales blogs” anywhere in the world. He’s on a mission to

empower millions of high-performers all over the globe. You might

call him “an ordinary dude with an outrageous vision”.

10

SMB’s make the mistake of not nurturing their employees. Coincidentally,

uninspired talent is the single biggest reason why small businesses fail.

Keeping an agile team of flexible workers mentally healthy is key to them

stay motivated and high performers — and you growing your business

fast and profitably. It might seem “kooky” to provide therapy for your team,

but it’s the best benefit you could ever deliver.

Harlan Goerger

Harlan Goerger has spent the last 25 years leading hundreds of his

client’s companies to expansive revenue growth. He is the author of

“The Selling Gap” and “Bypassing NO in Business” and spent 20

years as a sales leader with Dale Carnegie Associates.

11

Selecting, building and developing the right people. The reason seems to

be a short sighted view of addressing short term needs rather than long

term growth needs. Lets hire someone who costs less and see if they

stick around. So many times I’ve seen this happen and the outcomes

were not pretty. Poor performance, increased cost, costly errors and short

term employment.

Lori Richardson

Veteran Sales Detective Lori Richardson sifts through sales clues

and business practices to uncover hidden problems and assets,

then delivers creative tactics with a fresh approach so you can

Score More Sales. She is a sought after speaker, prolific blogger,

sales trainer and multi-million dollar producer, and President of

Score More Sales – a sales strategy firm.

12

Small businesses tend to (not always, but quite often) have poor or no

processes in place to track potential customers and set next actions with

them. They nearly never have a surefire system in place to track strategic

partners – those individuals and companies who can refer multiple

opportunities their way. This is crazy because in the case of tracking

potential customers (prospects), it takes multiple impressions and

connections to build trust to bring business to closure. Therefore, just by

setting next actions and following up more, a company can grow business

in a most simple manner. In the case of being proactive with strategic

referrers, well this is the best type of business to get – referral business.

When someone refers a potential client your way, they are already more

qualified because a trusted person or company that they know

recommended you and your business. This means a shorter sale cycle,

and even more referrals when you do a good job.

Diane Helbig

Diane Helbig is an internationally recognized business and

leadership development coach, author, speaker, and radio show

host. She is the author of Lemonade Stand Selling and founder of

Seize This Day Coaching.

13

SMBs are neglecting building deeper client relationships. This is terribly

dangerous and stems from any one of a couple of places. Some SMBs

think that their clients know everything the SMB offers and will call if they

need anything. Others are so focused on bringing in new clients that they

neglect current clients. And still others think their clients are happy and

will call when they need something.Why is this so dangerous? For

starters, SMBs need to know what’s going on with their clients. Do they

need anything? How are things going? Are they growing? Shrinking?

Implementing new initiatives? Knowledge is power. When you know

what’s going on with your clients you can help them, thereby increasing

your value. Secondly, you can’t assume that your clients know all you do.

Chances are good that they only thing your clients heard was the solution

to their current problem. It’s your job to continue building the relationship

and uncovering opportunities. And possibly most importantly, your clients

want to know that you value their business. If you aren’t staying in contact

with them, how will they know that? So, SMBs owe it to themselves to

continuously nurture the relationships with their current clients. That’s a

place where more business easily occurs – fulfilling the need for more

revenue.

Sean McPheat

Managing Director of MTD Sales Training, Sean McPheat is

regarded as a thought leader on modern day selling. Sean has

been featured on CNN, ITV, BBC, SKY, Forbes, Arena Magazine

and has over 250 other media credits to his name. Sean’s latest

book “eselling® – How to use the internet & social media for

prospecting, personal branding, networking and for engaging the c-

suite decision maker” is a #1 Amazon bestseller.

14

Many are not harnessing the true power of the internet social media.

More and more decision makers are turning to the internet and social

media to complete their research as they like to be in control of their

purchasing decisions more now than they have done in the past and

that’s down to the availability of information via the internet. They can

research information on the products and services that they are

interested in, they can find out about your company, they can even

download your company accounts! They can look at review sites and then

they can go on over to your competitors website and do exactly the same

thing.So you need to be using the internet yourself to even up the odds.

For B2B sales there is no better decision making database in the world

than LinkedIn. You should also be using Twitter, Facebook pages and a

blog for distributing information and content. Companies like to deal with

experts so the more you can position yourself as an expert and trusted

advisor via the internet, the better.

Alyssa Gregory

Alyssa Gregory is a small business collaborator and the founder of

the Small Business Bonfire, a social, educational and collaborative

community that provides small business help to entrepreneurs.

15

Many small business owners don’t spend enough time networking. While

finding the time necessary to attend networking events, conferences and

meetings is an undeniable challenge for most of us, investing time in

networking is almost always worth it. Those who make networking a

priority are able to expand their networks faster, find more productive

collaboration opportunities, learn more about the competition and the

industry, and think more strategically and objectively about their

businesses.

Sue Watkins

Sue Watkins has spent the last 20+ years developing marketing

strategies and campaigns. She also founded SMBmarketer.com

and authors the blog Smart Marketing Basics and tweets regularly

about small business marketing topics at @SMB_marketer

16

SMB’s feel that they can relegate Marketing to the bottom of their list,

especially during hard times. This is a myth, as marketing your business

is key to long-term, sustainable growth. Just as you must continually

invest in new products and services, you should invest in acquiring new

customer prospects, nurturing them over time, and eventually converting

them into customers.

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