Academically speaking I am well qualified in business. A degree, a foundation degree, A-levels, a couple of other bits of paper… But I’ve noticed that formal education lacks a number of the key lessons that we need to learn on our paths through entrepreneurship.
So school’s out, let’s learn some of the stuff that’ll kick start us at the beginning… We’re going to talk about 3 key areas and I’ll give you a simple plan to get started on each.
Copywriting
Copywriting = writing to sell! You have a few choices
A) Get good
B) Pay someone good
C) Fail
If you want to quickly determine the best option, you first need to gauge your personal ability to write in this way:
1) Ask around for a good swipe file of sales letters in your niche that worked – you ideally want at least 5-10 particularly awesome letters/ads
2) Hand write them out – 1 letter a day
3) Repeat until you’ve completed 30 days
4) Revisit these letters and hand write 1 each month until you’re noticing changes to your writing
Selling
Formal education seems to completely neglect teaching students to sell. A lot of companies have a similar approach.
What I mistook for being chucked in at the deep end by my first company was actually something I later discovered was just a sign of faith that I’d be proactive in sorting out my own training plan and luckily they were right…
So if you want to learn to sell here is another simple process to learn and learn fast.
– Get the most challenging sales job you can i.e. charity collector, double glazing or telesales
– Do that job for at least a month
– Be grateful you don’t have to sell anything that hard to sell!
– Read Chet Holmes- the ultimate sales machine
– Test at least 2 of the ideas you find in the book.
– Find someone’s whose sales technique you admire. Go through their whole process… and yes that means buying their stuff, using it and seeing how they deal with aftersales!
That is almost three processes in one, but you’ll learn how to make your business a more effective, efficient and profitable offering by working through this.
Marketing
No you can’t just do a few tweets and a Facebook post once a week and then sit back and watch your passive income flood into your bank account. So what do you do? Well maybe here’s your first ever marketing plan:
– Get a basic CRM – Capsule is good for this and free
– Find 10 people who are your ideal customers
– Find out everything you can about them, hobbies, the kind of people they spend their free time with, where they hang out… you want to see patterns
– Find their watering holes – where they hang out
– Become part of the furniture in these places and don’t sell them anything or even mention that you will be selling your product/service.
– Using your CRM – track the patterns and the things they say, the words they use etc.
– Don’t sell to anyone till you can easily identify who is a strong prospect and who isn’t.
If you complete all three areas, as discussed, you will find yourself learning new things, new ideas and new approaches to running your business. The lessons you learn can help you to shape your decisions and ensure that you are always growing, always learning and always improving.
My name is Dan G Rice and I am the founder of Leading From Anywhere.com. I help people build communities that are fun, add value to their members and create business opportunities for their leaders.
Dan G Rice – Leading From Anywhere
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