What Are Your Top 3 Goals This Year? - Without clear goals, its hard to achieve as you don’t know where you are headed. There are many ways to get there. I like writing your top 3. Research shows if you DON’T write them down, odds of achieving them drops 90%. What are your top 3 goals for this year? Write them down NOW!
Tool #1 - Sell more! Remember the cookie mix story and how that doubled my revenue. Here are some good resources
How to sell more during the meltdown
Tips to Sell more online
More online tips, how Customers Help You Sell More
Tool #2 – Open New Relationships – Who could really benefit from your product or service? Write down 10 possible relationships, new channels that can directly be a customer or indirectly bring you customers. If you are all direct sales, what channel or partner could you leverage? If you sell direct online, there are many opportunities for affiliate networks to help you sell more. Just think differently.
Oh and don’t forget to Upsell Your EXISTING Customers and see what KISS’ Gene Simmons says about a being a rockstar and an entrepreneur
Tool #3 – Reduce Costs, NOW! This list of 51 Cost Cutting tips is 15 years old yet still very relevant.
Tool #4 – Increase your marketing budget – How much should you spend? Here are some examples and ratios
I’m biased towards the Internet given my background however I think there are huge opportunities to use social media to profile yourself, company and solutions to the market for free.
Social Media is a vital tool you MUST use today. We’ve all heard so much about Twitter lately. If you don’t know about it see this get started NYT article Once you’re on board you may want a tool to manage your activities. TweetSum is good as is Tweetdeck. Another tool to manage your followers (and follow other people’s followers) is ReFollow – really cool, check it out.
Also Check out this SlideShare Presentation:
2) Grow your social media database and network
3) Create a Facebook Fan page (A little confused? See the different between a Group and a FanPage here )
3) Repurpose your aticles, info and opinions. Here’s how to do it.
Tool #5 – Get FREE publicity. Why? It makes you an expert, gives you and your product credibility, gets you leverage to speak at trade events (see Tool #6), oh yeh, and its FREE!! Check out your press release and see how effective it is – for free. Check out this tool Press Release Grader.
Here are some of my examples of how I took a simple product – a family guide for video games – got 2 primetime TV spots on NBC, by solving a problem.
What does free publicity look like? Check these out:
NBC11 San Francisco Bay Area Morning Show Interview With Laura Garcia Cannon
Interview with Silicon Valley Business’ Brian Banmiller
Tool #6 – Attend an industry conference or trade show. Go find one now. Look for opportunities to speak at an event, offer specific experience you can share with the group and leave the company pitch at home. You will get plenty of feedback and leads if your content is useful.
As an example, I met a guy from AOL when we were both on the same panel. We struck up a conversation that turned into a growing relationship. He was the person who spear headed AOL’s acquistion of GameDaily 2 years later. Enough said!
Tool #7 - Prepare for an acquisition NOW! Here is my story on how I sold GameDaily to AOL
Tool #8 - Become An Expert -You ARE a Content Company. Even if you are a real estate firm, technology company, moving company or beauty products company you have original content in your business. Offer free tips, how to’s and newsletters to your audience. It can make money.
Do you want to increase traffic to your website using articles? YES! Here is a good overview of How to create effective content for your website.
A client built his entire lead generation business on this free education guide and its bringing in customers at an amazing pace. At GameDaily, we offered a free survey of gamers’ habits as an abstract and our partner, a polling company, sold the complete survey. It was a win-win for both of us, got us attention, credibility and a non-sales item for our sales team to discuss with clients.
See what XtremeLashes of Houston did with their Facebook Fan Page
Tool #9 - How do you get great sales people? You grow and train them. Everyone needs training and coaching – even Tiger Woods does – and he has 3 coaches! . Your team WILL benefit.
I like these guys:
1) Jack Daly – frequent EO speaker
2) Hutwaithe – the folks behind Spin Selling
3) Our SF EO colleague Tom Batchelder’s firm Perficency
4) Jim Collins – The man behind “Good to Great.” One of the top management gurus. This is a good diagnostics tool that’s free to print out.
5) Marcus Buckingham – I really like Discover Your Strengths. We did that program while I was at AOL and it was great.
Tool #10 - Get Healthy! Big take away, diet matters. The wrong stuff gets you sick, the right stuff makes you clear, focused and healthy. A great health, diet and information resource in one place I personally like Dr Mark Hyman’s books especially UltraMetabolism and the companion cookbook and the UltraSimple Diet. (I lost 10 pounds on it in a week).
Family time is a HUGE benefit for you and your loved ones. TURN OFF the Blackberry, close the laptop and BECOME Present. If you haven’t read it, I strongly suggest The Power of Now. It helps us all, especially entrepreneurs, get some perspective and literally smell the roses.
You can also see my article in LOGIN BEAT that is focused towards the online and games industry.
Finally, thank you for inviting me to speak to the group.
If your company or other groups would be interested in having me come to speak as a keynote or do a half day seminar with them, please contact me Here you can see my highlight video from the “10 Tools” half day seminar
