Archive for September, 2008

Our Sep. 26 meeting will be held at Thai Senses Restaurant, on Lakeshore and Bronte. Click here for map.

New members are to join us at 9:00, not 8:30 as previously announced. It seems we could not get the restaurant that early.

Please remember:

• Keep your infomercial short and to the point
• Try to give us an idea who your ideal client/customer is.
• Meetings are to run not more than 90 minutes. Infomercials 2-5 min.
• We’re still looking for a new venue for our meetings. If you know of a suitable restaurant, bakery or similar, please let us know. Ideally, it would be located near the QEW for easy access for our Burlington-based members.
• Other membership issues are still being discussed, please contribute your views. If you have any questions, please post them as comments under this blog entry.

Please subscribe to our RSS feed to stay in touch with the latest developments. If you’re not familiar with RSS, you can get updates via email. Simply enter your email address in the form at the top right of the ABOUT page and click the SUBMIT button. Follow the prompts and instructions to confirm your request.

At our last meeting, Sept. 12, 2008 the members of the OakvilleNetworking.com group welcomed a number of guest, in the following categories:

1. bookkeeper
2. caregiver
3. business coach
4. patent attorney
5. framing studio
6. promotional items advertising
7. management consultant

We’re hoping that they will all consider applying for membership.

In other news:

• Our webmaster has created a group on Linkedin.com. All members are invited to join. If you are not yet a member of this world-wide professional community, ask Boris for more info.
• Membership in other referral networking organizations is under review.
• Members are free to join non-exclusive business-building groups, such as the Oakville Chamber of Commerce, women’s groups, professional organizations, etc.
• Meetings are to run not more than 90 minutes. Infomercials 2-5 min.
• Next meeting September 26, at 9 am.
• We’re looking for a new venue for our meetings. If you know of a suitable restaurant, bakery or similar, please let us know.
• Other membership issues are still being discussed, please contribute your views. If you have any questions, please post them as comments under this blog entry.

Please subscribe to our RSS feed to stay in touch with the latest developments. If you’re not familiar with RSS, you can get updates via email. Simply enter your email address in the form at the top right of the ABOUT page and click the SUBMIT button. Follow the prompts and instructions to confirm your request.

Profile

Manuela is a full-time real estate professional whose nearly 30 years experience, knowledge and negotiating savvy help her in doing everything possible to help her clients achieve their real estate and home ownership goals.

Manuela started her real estate career in Europe. She has been selling real estate in the Oakville area since 1991, and has consistently achieved award winning results. She is in the top 3% of all Prudential Real Estate Professionals in North America.

Manuela’s passion to succeed and commitment to her client’s needs, combined with sharp negotiation skills, drive her to constantly exceed client’s expectations, bringing them to wholeheartedly referring Manuela to their family and friends.

Website: www.manuela.ca www.alexx.ca

Direct: 416.464.8624
Office: 905.338.6550
Prudential Town Centre Realty Inc, Brokerage
280 North Service Road West, Oakville ON L6M 2S2

It is said that in order to become a successful individual in whatever endeavour you wish to take, you must have the right attitude and characteristics. This is also true with an entrepreneur. Not everyone can become an entrepreneur. But before anything else, what is an entrepreneur?

According to one definition, an entrepreneur is someone who finances or initiates a certain business undertaking. If you too would want to become a businessperson, you have to possess the characteristics of an entrepreneur.

What are the characteristics of an entrepreneur? Are they really important? Well, of course the characteristics are important because if you don’t possess them, you will have lower chances in terms of business success.

The characteristics are:

1. Risk taker – this is a very important characteristic of an entrepreneur. If you’re not willing to take any risk, then you will not succeed as a businessperson. In the everyday course of the business, you will encounter a lot of problems and challenges which you need to decide the soonest.
   Some risks are worth taking after careful evaluation especially if it’s for the good of the business. If you’re not a risk taker, then you’re not an effective entrepreneur and you’re bound to fail in your business undertaking.
2. Smart – being smart is another characteristic of an entrepreneur. You have to be clever, keen, and witty in all your business dealings. You have to show mental alertness and intelligence so that you can win the respect and trust of customers and other clients.
3. A leader – leadership is a characteristic that is hard to find among individuals. Not many individuals have the nerve to take the lead. To become a good entrepreneur, you must be a leader. Some say that this is a born characteristic but if you don’t possess it, you can also learn to become a leader.
   You’re quite lucky if you’re a born leader because you only have to develop your other qualities and use them when you choose to become an entrepreneur. As a leader, you should be able to guide, influence, and direct people. This way, you can handle all your business activities with ease and fewer worries.
4. Inner passion for business – another important characteristic is having the right passion for business. You have to maintain your enthusiasm and interest in the business. As long as you have the right drive and passion, you can run the business for a long time.
5. Honest and trustworthy – some say that eighty percent of an entrepreneur’s time is dedicated to pooling and attracting customers. This may be true because without the customers, the business will not exist. You have to be honest and trustworthy so that you can develop good will.

There are other characteristics that an entrepreneur should possess. These characteristics help him or her do all the business responsibilities and obligations that need to be done.

These are also the keys to business success. If you want to finance a certain business venture and run the business yourself, you should develop these characteristics. Without them, your business will soon fail and you will suffer the losses.

Be thankful if you already have the characteristics of an entrepreneur. All you need to do now is to study the market carefully, think of a good business venture, and provide for the capital and you’re all set.

Facilitating the buying process can be very straightforward and fairly uncomplicated. Yet most professionals have no idea what it takes to guide a potential client through a decision-making process. They are completely lost when it comes to effective follow-up and are unsure how to best get prospects to take the “next step”.

If they are lucky to get to a face-to-face meeting, they “show-up and throw-up.” They spew all there is to know about their product or service and leave the meeting hoping for a favorable decision sometime in the near future.

Their follow-up consists of a few phone-calls that go somewhat like this: “Hi, remember me? We met last week? Anyway, I just wanted to know if you’ve made a decision yet? No? Oh, OK, I’ll call again…” Soon they discover their prospect got stuck in a “12-month meeting” (every time they call over the next 12 months the prospect is in a meeting). Sounds familiar?

What’s missing is a clear, consistent and easy-to-duplicate sales process. In a nutshell a sales process is a sequence of steps that predictably moves potential clients along the decision-making path.

While your unique process will be based on the type of product or service you are selling and who the buyer is, here is a simple five step model that’s guaranteed to help you close more deals.

STEP ONE: Generate Leads

The number one reason most promotional efforts don’t get the desired results is trying to make a sale too soon. Advertising should be designed to generate leads – enquiries about your product or service from qualified prospects – not to get an order!

Generating leads is relatively easy – there are hundreds (if not thousands) of ways to get potential clients to contact you. Speaking, publishing articles, referral systems, press releases, internet marketing, networking, print ads and direct mail are just a few ways that work well for attracting prospects interested in your professional services.

STEP TWO: Pre-qualify Prospects

Your promotional efforts are bound to create some responses from tire-kickers. Unless you have unlimited resources (namely money and time) to follow-up with people that will never make a purchase or create a referral – you want to eliminate the least ideal “prospects” right from the get-go.

The best way to separate lookie-loos from genuine prospects is to ask them to invest a small amount of effort or money before they can receive more information. Have prospects fill-out a short questionnaire or request a small fee to cover your expenses of giving them additional information and only the serious candidates will move to the next step.

STEP THREE: Send Positioning Materials

Depending on how you generated the lead in the first place you may need to send out “fulfilment package” – the information promised in your advertising efforts.

You can’t give someone a “test drive” of your service – but you can illustrate your expertise through the materials you send out. White papers, special reports, articles, audio CDs and videos can give prospects a good insight into your level of expertise and “whet their appetites” – compelling them to ask how you can help them.

This is a critical step but professionals often skip it altogether. I recommend that you never meet with a prospect unless he or she had a chance to read a special report or an article you wrote, listen to an audio-program you created, participated in a teleclass you facilitated, or had a chance to “experience you” in some other form.

This gives you a chance to demonstrate your understanding of their problems, prove that you have the know-how needed to provide an effective solution, and position you as the expert who will not waste their time.

STEP FOUR: Get an Appointment

If you’ve done a good job in the first three steps – this will be easy. Your best prospects will actually look forward to meeting with you and exploring ways you can help them.

While scheduling an appointment you can further qualify the prospect’s level of interest and determine if you want to invest your time in getting together with them. However, avoid the pitfall of giving away too much information at this point. Remember your goal as this point is just to get the prospect to meet with you.

STEP FIVE: Face-to-Face Meeting

The content of your in-person meeting depends on the service or product you are selling and your target market. It could be a simple consultation that results in closing the sale or an elaborate presentation designed to moved the prospect to the next step in the process – like an “exploration meeting” with the purchasing committee or an “in-depth needs assessment”.

This is obviously a simplified model, but it identifies the five critical elements of the selling process. There are countless variations and tactics you could employ in each step, but each of those elements has only one objective – to move prospect to the next step!

(c) 2004 Adam M. Urbanski

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Adam Urbanski, the Marketing Mentor, helps Independent Service Professionals and Small Business Owners attract more clients. For more promotional tips and a FREE 32-page marketing guide go to http://www.themarketingmentors.com