OUR BLOG

There are a thousand and one reasons not to do it.

What’s that? Take on something big, challenging, scary, and all-encompassing in your life or your business.

You know, there’s nothing wrong with settling into a routine and getting comfortable, but when you feel called to do something BIG, you feel called to do something BIG.

I knew better. My intuition was saying, “Don’t go there.”

But, I wanted so badly to help … to be of service … and I let my heart override my gut.

Just last month, I have this likeable prospective client come to me wanting to build his fairly new consulting business. He wants to do it via the strategy of speaking. That’s my specialty, so he seemed heaven sent.

It can be really hard when you’re starting a business. You have to learn all kinds of new stuff. And, you don’t even know what you don’t know. It can be overwhelming.

You may feel reasonably confident in your ability to provide quality professional services, but what about the running-the-business side of things? Are you an expert in operations, management, and logistics? Few of us are.

So, you could wrack your brain and try to come up with a list of what you need to do. But you might miss something important.

Or you could just use the Business Start-up Checklist we’ve created to help you manage the process.

The 4 A’s Transform the Sales Process

You want to know what the biggest difference is when it comes to being a service-oriented facilitator vs. a “salesperson?”

I’ll give you a hint: It starts with an A. That’s because we’re into Part 2 of revealing the key practices that transform the sales experience … the 4 A’s.

We talked about the first two, Ask for Permission and Acknowledge in Part I. Ready for the next two? Drumroll please.

The 4 A’s Transform the Sales Process 

The bitter truth?

You can be excellent at what you do, and if you aren’t adept at sales and marketing, you’re left with the equivalent of a lot of unsold inventory. Your time and talents are going to waste, sitting on the shelf. You’re not making the kind of living you should, and the people who need you aren’t being served.

That’s downright tragic.

To be successful, you need to possess two distinct skills beyond your professional qualifications … the ability to market … and sell.

You’re a professional service provider. So, what’s the number one problem you’re having in building or expanding your business?

The answer’s likely to be different if you’re a more seasoned professional vs. someone who’s not fully established, so I’ve divided this newsletter into two parts. Scroll down to the heading that best describes where you are and use this as a way to diagnose what you need to do to move forward!

“In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”

I like that quotation. And the message here is simple as it applies to marketing your business.

You don’t have to know everything there is to know about marketing and do it perfectly to be successful at it. You just have to do a couple of things others aren’t doing to make yourself more attractive to potential clients and give yourself a competitive edge. That’s because advantage is a relative thing.

You just have to be able to see what others don’t see and translate those insights into results.

When it comes to marketing yourself, here are two big things so many people are blind to that I want you to see clearly.

The following is a great little article from my friend, Suzie Price, of Priceless Professional Consulting … pricelessprofessionalconsulting.com It shows you the incredible impact the small, but important, things you do consistently … every day … can have on the results you achieve in your life and business. Thanks Suzie.

Denise was pleased to be a guest on the SkillBites show recently. To listen to the interview, click here. What follows are the take-aways from that interview.

Speaking is a great way to get in front of your target market, share your expertise, and gain new clients, but how do you get the speaking engagements, and how do you translate being in front of new people into generating new clients? These questions and more were answered by Denise Hedges, business development coach, speaker coach, and guest on this month’s SkillBites Show.

If you were a young artist looking to establish yourself, what would you do?

Put together a portfolio and contact galleries to see if they’d show your work? Put your pictures on your website to display what you’ve done? Enter art shows? That would be the standard approach. And what if that really wasn’t working all that well? Say you’d done all that and still had only a few contacts and clients, a short resume, and your work hung in just one gallery in a small city.

You’re the stereotypical starving artist and everyone and his cousin is telling you how hard it is to make a living selling art. What do you do?

You play a bigger game. You get creative. You get bold.