Without the Right Training You Will Fail!

It’s the sad truth but the majority of individuals that start a business will fail.  The failure rates of small businesses are astronomical.  As someone that has been involved with running their own business for over 10 years I can assure you that it’s not the economy’s fault.  There are some fantastic opportunities out there for anyone to start a business and grow it to be a successful company. 

So why is there such a high failure rate amongst small businesses?  I blame some of it on the people with expectations that they are going to be rich overnight.  For some reason they expect to start a home based business and then a week later their checking account will be exploding.

Early Training is Critical

I think one of the biggest mistakes that people make in any industry is not learning as much as they possibly can right at the outset for both themslevs and their employees.  They don’t offer any support or training to their new employs, who can  feel completely lost.  As a business owner, it is your responsibility to properly train your staff.  First and foremost, you need to teach them about the business, leadership, products and services.  As a leader, you should not expect them to figure everything out on their own.

After they have a good understanding on how the business operates, you should begin to share with them the methods that you have used to build your business.  Why?  Do you want your business to grow?  Share everything you know with your new “business partners” and help them to get out of the gate as fast as possible.  I believe that another reason why people fail in business is because they don’t see results quickly enough and they don’t think that they can build a truly successful business.

Rinse & Repeat

As you take on new employees and help them to build on earlier successes you shouldn’t stop there!  Set goals for each of your team members.  Have them right down their goals and follow up with them on a weekly basis to see where they are at.  Provide training and mentoring where needed and help them grow their carfeers with you and hence your business.  This type of training should go all the way through your organization.  Don’t just train your first employees and stop.  You should talk to every single new employee in your business.

I would also recommend that you try and automate your training process.  If you can set up a webpage that has training “how-to” videos you will save yourself a lot of time and headaches.  It will take some time to get it set up but once you have it running it will be completely automated.

If you want to build a big business with enough income to change your lifestyle you need to focus a lot of time and energy on proper training for your team.  You will be amazed at how successful you can become if you just learn to spend some time properly mentoring your team.

The Importance of Training

The majority of small businesses (95%) fail because the owners do not have the proper Training.  After they start their company the first thing they try to do is sell their product or service to friends and family.

But this is basing success on a limited supply of referrals – setting yourself up for failure from the get-go. Yet the step beyond that into the world of networking is far from guaranteed to succes either. After all everyone at networking events has something to sell. What you really want to attract are targetted buyers who will approach you. That’s where online marketing comes in to play – a technique that has seen training providers such as Parallel Project Training achieve such great success.

Unfortunately, this type of “marketing” will only work for so long.  The referral list will soon dry up and then the person is left with a crushed dream and mis-understanding of how marketing works.  One of the biggest mistakes small business owners make is not learning how to properly market themselves and not their opportunity.

If you are planning on building a successful business you need to study and learn about building relationships.  After you have a clear understanding of how this philosophy works you need to train your employees.

Training and The Relationship Funnel Outlined

Instead of harassing your friends and family members wouldn’t it be nice if you actually had targeted qualified leads contacting you?  Wouldn’t it be nice to receive 50-100 leads in your email inbox every single week?

Would your business change if you had this amount of leads coming in each and every week?  I bet you didn’t expect that leads could be contacting you.

The entire relationship funnel can be defined as such:  a philosophy and methodology that is used to drive targeted traffic to a capture page on your website where you gather leads.  You then build a relationship with these leads with follow up emails and phone calls.

You provide these leads with a lot of value on your blog, Youtube, Facebook, twitter etc.  You DO NOT discuss your opportunity with these leads until they ask you about your business.

Step 1 in the relationship funnel is to target the market that you are going after.  You do not want people that are interested in “cake decorating” coming to your blog about network marketing.  You can use a variety of methods to drive targeted traffic towards your blog including paid advertising, content marketing, social media and SEO.  The goal is to send this traffic to a lead capture page where you gather their name, email address and phone number.

Step 2 involves capturing their information.  You want to offer something of value in return for their information (name and email).  The offer could include free training, ebook etc.

Step 3 involves setting up an email autoresponder.  There are plenty of great email autoresponders that you can use.  Once you capture a lead, send an automated response with a welcome message that you have created.

Step 4 is probably the most critical step in the relationship funnel and should be a large part of your focus.  You now need to focus on building a relationship.  People trust those that they know and those that are leaders

Step 5 – You need to provide a tremendous amount of value to your list of individuals that you build and you will begin to see a paradigm shift.  They will start to ask YOU about your opportunity.  You can provide value through platforms such as your blog, Youtube, Facebook and Twitter.

Conclusion

If you want to grow your business in the 21st Century you definitely need to be using the relationship funnel to build and grow your business.  Use the steps outlined above and implement them into your business today.

So, remember start finding targeted leads and leave your friends and family members alone!

Looks pretty busy in the sales department right? Lots of phone calls going on, plenty of email traffic and face-to-face meetings being set up? Sounds great? So why do you need to worry about how productive they’re being if they’re clearly working hard?

The problem lies in whether your sales department is working productively or just working! Productivity is measured as the ratio of output effectiveness (value of sales made) to input effort (the sales budget).  Maximising productivity means the least you can per pound earned and clearly, that will have a knock-on effect on the success of your sales process as well as your balance sheet at the end of the year.

Invest in training

You can’t sell a product you don’t know. Even your best sales rep needs to keep up to date with market, with evolving buying processes, and changing best practice methodology. Scheduling in regular sales training time for the whole team will give them the opportunity to attend strategic sales workshops, learn new aspects of your CRM or simply catch up the latest innovations from your competitors.

Use your CRM

Far too many CRM systems are used as nothing more than fancy contact databases. That’s rather like buying an iPhone and only ever making phone calls on it. Train your sales department to actually use the CRM to record and then to influence the sales process. Use it track what it takes to clinch deals and use it to influence future sales cycles.

Implement robust sales processes

Of course, in order to improve your sales processes you actually need to have some! Your staff should be following the same steps for the same type of contracts each time. This is another area your CRM can manage if you let it. Automated tools can set up templates with customer contacts, notify salespeople when they need to make a contact, who else is involved and allow them to identify good leads faster enabling them to concentrate their resources on the sales cycles that are most likely to lead to a successful conclusion. Not wasting your time is key to improving productivity.

Listen to your analytics

Your CRM should be a goldmine of customer data and, when you use it effectively it will produce analysis (i.e. keyword analysis) that can be used to point you in the direction of better processes and more likely new customers. But that can only happen if you are prepared to listen to what the data is telling you. It might come as a shock to see a sales graph dropping but instead of ignoring the message take it as a call to action. Use your CRM to tell you where you’re struggling and allow it to help you redesign your processes to target the areas where you’re not performing as well as you could. And then use some of your training time to disseminate the findings to the whole sales team ensuring that they all know what they should be focussing on and what they need to do to improve.

I’m not sure if you’ve heard or not but WordPress  is kind of a big deal.  After hearing a tremendous amount of buzz in the industry about it I just had to check it out for myself. I was a bit skeptical as I’ve had my fingers and my wallet burned with other products but I figured I would find out what all the fuss was about. After all I’d seen great looking blogs such as projectmanagementworks.co.uk created quickly and easily by people I knew with no tech know-how at all so it had to be worth a shot to help develop my own project management and business training blog.

Have your friends ever hyped up a movie so much that you couldn’t wait to see it? Halfway through the movie you start to get a little upset because the movie is the worst thing that you have ever seen? At the end of the movie you feel completely deflated because you just wasted two hours of your life watching an over-hyped movie.

Trust me, this online industry is full of over-hyped products that do not deliver what they promise. I proceeded with caution…

What Makes WordPress such a Big Deal?

Once I had completed an online training course I wanted to test drive how quickly and easily I could set up a WordPress site – both as a website and as a blogging platform.  The great thing about WordPress themes is that you can create a well-designed looking website in minutes with a well-chosen theme but you  can also customize them and make them your own.

They also have hosting so that you can set up a custom domain for your site.  I was beginning to see why WordPress was creating such buzz in the industry.

After setting up my site I ventured into the area of plugins and I was beyond shocked at how many additional features were there – all at the click of a button.  In the past, folks would take weeks to get websites up and running but they wouldn’t have any traffic going to their websites.  It’s like opening a restaurant and not having any customers walk through the front door.  But with WordPress you are given a plethora of tools that you can use to get targeted traffic to your site.

Whether you want to upload Images, Articles, Videos, Training Podcasts or Blogs there is an easy way to do so.

The Final Verdict

After using several systems in the past I can honestly say that WordPress under promises and over delivers.  I could easily write a 100 page eBook on WordPress and everything that it has to offer the small business owner of blogger.  It is an incredible system that allows you to build your business’s online presence quickly and easily.