Business Strategist & Conversion Expert
First you have to understand what STYLE of selling you're looking for. A book for one style may be great for me, but you'll think it's weak and ineffective. Two main distinctions are the "hardcore closer" (traditional) approach versus the "consultative" (more modern) approach. One appeals to an individual while the other does not. Many people are unaware of anything under than the fast-talking, bombastic style of selling made popular by movies and television, however; it took me 10 years in the professional world to even figure out the right question to ask ("IS there another style of selling?"). Once you understand which style of selling you want to learn or expand on, then you can choose appropriate books or courses. There is little point in giving SPIN Selling to a Hopkins devotee. And The Challenger Sale will fall on deaf ears to those who are desperate to not be seen as "pushy."
Fractional CTO
You can't verify anything, unless they give you their tax returns. You can do revenue share deals, where gurus are paid a percentage of profits they generate. Tip: True Gurus (upper 'G', rather than lower 'g') are busy generating cash. You'll rarely meet them + hardly anyone knows them. To meet real Gurus, traffic places like Meetup Groups with very tight topics, which relate to what you're trying to accomplish. When you meet a real Guru, likely you'll know it by the way they talk about their area of expertise... which you'll likely have to tease out of them. Anyone making massive cash... tends to keep their techniques to themselves.
Creative Financing
6
Answers
Fractional CTO
First hire a credit cleaning company. This will cost you roughly $200 USD. I ignore my credit till I require it, then use a credit cleaner, because the entire credit report industry is pretty much a racket. All manner of junk shows up on credit reports over the years. You can clean all this yourself + likely paying $200 will be far more profitable, than spending many hours/day for months to do this yourself. Last time I did this my mid score was 618 + after a month of my credit cleaner's work, my mid score as 796. You'll still require much more than a high credit score to get this type of loan + having a high credit score will ease all your steps.
Fractional CTO
This is very tricky, as many countries participate in the Eurozone food requirements or other equally oddball rule sets. Your first step will be to pick a jurisdiction, like Europe + then ensure your ingredients list matches their rule set. If for example, you have Kava Kava on your label, you won't be able to ship to England or any EU country. Start with this first. Then generate content (YouTube + blog), related to uses for your product. This will be a long haul venture. Having done this myself before, you'll invest years (plan on at least 10 years) + have a 7-8 figure business. This all imagines you control the entire ingredient acquisition + manufacturing chain. I'm unsure what you mean by registered member of a company. If this means you're working with an MLM or other company where you have no say in the supply chain... Don't even start. You'll invest a huge amount of time + to many things can go wrong, if anyone else is controlling any part of this process.
Entrepreneurship
3
Answers
SEO Expert and Strategist
Great question! I believe that Hootsuite might be one of your best solutions. It is a free tool and you can publish through several social media platforms at once. For a free account, however, they limit you to 3 accounts I believe: https://hootsuite.com/plans/free There is also Buffer as well which I believe has similar functionality: https://buffer.com Here are some additional helpful resources for you: https://blog.capterra.com/top-free-social-media-management-software/ https://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/5-social-media-management-tools-to-save-time/
SEO Expert and Strategist
Great question! 1) You can use "pre-selling" to offer an upcoming service or product to existing customers which they will effectively fund by paying for it (while you create it) so that they are also buy it as your customer: https://thefoundation.com/podcast/episode21 https://thefoundation.com/podcast/episode61 2) You can use a crowd funding platform like Kickstarter or IndieGogo. 3) You can ask customers if they'd like to become an investor in your business and offer them to become more like a partner with benefits and compelling reasons to join you. 4) You can ask customers directly what it would take or would interest them in becoming your investor. Hope that helps! Tom
Fractional CTO
This is really a question for you NC tax preparer + NC attorney. There may be NC tax implications. Likely no legal implications. Only your local professionals will likely be up to complete speed about all this. Also I'd suggest you stick with H&R Block for your taxes, as they have an intense training program all their preparers must continually go through. Many years, they must go through multiple times. This will be essential with the new tax bill being floated, as answers to your questions today, may change after new tax bill goes through.
Business planning
14
Answers
I help you buy, sell, plan, value a business
Making sales and figuring out what potential customers want. Really, everything else can be done after you've proven that there really is a business opportunity. www.DavidCBarnett.com
UX Design and Business Branding
Cost of customer acquisition will depend a lot on what type of course you're looking to sell and your target audience. No one will be able to give you a straight up answer here. If you're able to provide more details, I could give some more nuanced advice :)
UX Design and Business Branding
Before you consider selling your patented product, here are some questions you should consider. 1. Do I have a viable market? 2. Do I have sales/orders that show this demand 3. What sort of competitive advantage do I explicitly have over my competitors. It's important to get as much leverage as possible over whoever you plan to sell your product too. The best way to do this is to get hard data you can use to back up your claims and to find clear distinct competitive advantages which will cement a strong market position for years to come. If you have any further questions, drop me a message and I'll be more than happy to answer them :)
Business Strategist & Conversion Expert
Next time, get this stuff figured out at the start and written down in your Operating Agreement. The OA tells everyone what the agreements are on how things like this will be done. You may be able to do that now, but it's going to be more challenging to get to consensus today. You're pretty much guaranteed someone is going to be unhappy with the results and that's going to cause trouble. Minority shareholders have rights. Learn what those are. You need to talk to an attorney and an accountant now and get their "professional advice." I am neither of those and this is not "professional advice."
Fractional CTO
Your question is very general. I'd suggest you locate people in Clarify which seem to provide useful advice + book calls with several of them. How you approach Marketing depends on many factors. Whether you're an introvert or extrovert, to me, is the most important starting point, because if you're an introvert + try to do extrovert-esque marketing, you'll fail. Extroverts trying to do introvert-esque marketing will also fail. Also targeting results, to me, is next on the list. For example, I'm an introvert, able to masquerade as an extrovert for short periods. So I bootstrap all my new projects using platform speaking at Meetup groups + conferences. I target acquiring my first 100+ clients for a project via nose-to-nose selling... well... very soft selling... Having these core users, I then train them... again, so softly, they never notice... to send me referrals. 100 clients will to pay anything, to me, is worth far more than 1,000,000 of random people on email lists. I'll take profit over numbers of people, any day.
Author, Speaker, CEO
Depends on the state. Some states are known to be more business friendly than others. Better protections, etc. You need to your research to see which states are better for the industry you're in.
Business Strategist & Conversion Expert
Did either landlords or tenants ask you for it? Did they say they had a problem this solution can fix? Are they willing to pay for it--or is someone willing to pay for it? Possibly a third party advertiser? Have you figured out your business model? How do you protect the app from being "gamed" with fake reviews, positive and negative?
Helping you plan/execute tech & sales strategies
Purely from a blogging perspective, there is no question WP has the better CMS and overall controls/backend for non-programmers. Shopify is recommended more for expanding your ecommerce options with plugins, promo offers etc. Obviously would need more context here as far as feature scope and what your site needs were, but I'd lean more towards WP just based on what you've described. there are a checklist of factors you can go through in order to figure out which open source platform would be most advisable. Happy to connect and offer any insights or guidance I can to get you on the right platform.
Content Marketing Advisor & Agency Consultant
Please don't share your message on Facebook like this. It is spam. Contribute the the conversation and you won't have to worry about getting blocked.
Business and career coaching, startup mentoring
The answer really depends on who you are targeting. I am assuming here that it is primarily SMEs in which case I would probably focus on sales and productivity tools. There are a number of tools like Pipedrive (Sales CRM) and Trello (List organizer) that I cannot live without. Whatever you develop I think it is key also to focus on plug-ins and integrations with other tools, that can increase stickiness as well as attract users of existing tools.
SEO Expert and Strategist
Unless an e-commerce company is transparent in sharing their sales details (this is probably very rare or unusual), you won't know the metrics needed in order to calculate it. I would think that the 2nd best thing is to hire a scraper or data entry person to collect the average item prices to try to build an idea for it. Sorry, that is the best idea or help that I can offer. Perhaps this is an opportunity for an entrepreneur to build this. :)
Management Consulting
3
Answers
CEO, social entrepreneur and author
Enterprise companies approach sales for B2B a little different. There's a (1) structure and there's (2) talent. They can scale just because they can but they are also very wary of focusing their resources to the right people. On the other hand, companies who are at SME stage may need more effort in tapping into different audiences to get a higher chance of closed deals. However, ABM (account-based marketing) is a good way for both enterprise companies and SMEs to tackle the balance of resources and lead generation. If you need more help in structuring this for your company, you can book a call with me here on Clarify.
CEO of ClutchPR. I get you press.
Hi - we have worked with a number of subscription box services. I have over 15 years helping startups in various industries and spaces. In terms of best channels it depends on the company. How long have you been in business? I would need more detail to give a proper answer but here are some avenues that might work. 1) I would do a big launch announcement and use a key influencer in the space to host it 2) I would send the launch news to the top tier media outlets in your market and in national markets 3) Put resources towards a great short shareable video that explains what the UVP of your service is 4) Find a journalists or writer friend and take them for coffee and brainstorm 20 different press angles for your business -- earned media is one of the best ways to acquire customers 5) Put effort into your content marketing strategy and specifically instagram -that's a great place to market to women. In short you need a combo of: 1)Earned media 2) Owned media (social channels) 3) Paid media - sponsored posts, boosting FB ads,etc If you're limited on resources focus on the first two as they don't cost you anything but your time. If you have the money consider bringing on a consultant or agency to help manage and execute some of your strategies. There are no 'best' channels - every service, ecomm and business is different so requires a different approach Good luck and if you want more info I'm happy to hop on a call.
The Lady Engineer
I have to ask: Did you already develop your product? The best advice, which I love, is from Seth Godin. He said something along the lines of "Don't find customers for your product, find products for your customers." Always start with a customer you want to be in service to, and look to solve their problems.
Fractional CTO
Easy starting point. Run Adsense on your site for a month. After a month, find top 3 pages (most traffic + on page time). For each page, visit the page + hit reload 10 times, recording the Ad Google runs on these pages. Then once you have the most prevalent Ad for each page, trace the Ad back to the originating site. The replace Adsense on each page with the native Ad, which will pay you far more than Adsense. Check your numbers for a month + if your numbers (income/Ad) begins to drop, this means the Ad has saturated. At this point, turn on Adsense again + let it run for 30 days, then repeat the process. This is a dirt simple way to monetize your content at optimal levels. Be sure not to click on the Ad on your site, as this breaks the Adsense TOS + will get you banned from Google's Ad networks.
Entrepreneurship
4
Answers
I help you buy, sell, plan, value a business
You can do whatever you wish with shares as long as the parties agree. If you have voting and non-voting classes of shares you can issue these for the cash investment. The question is... why would he? Normally non-voting shares have certain other characteristics like fixed rates of return or preference in the case of company dissolution. Other things you may consider would be issuing a debenture for the new money. This is a debt instrument so there would be no shares sold. You could issue a convertible debenture whereby the debt becomes equity at a certain share price in certain events, such as the sale of the company. It's up to your imagination as long as the other party agrees. Here are two videos I made that touch on this topic, one about how to use shares in deal making and another about using shares to raise capital. https://youtu.be/1EjKjSAd1F8 https://youtu.be/5h_ouZ-sUoU Just arrange a call if you'd like to discuss your specific situation. dave
Mobile applications
4
Answers
Clarity Expert
I developed and published mobile apps as an individual for several years, and only formed a corporation later as things grew and it made sense. As far as Apple's App Store and Google Play are concerned, you can register as an individual developer without having a corporation. I'd be happy to help further over a call if you have any additional questions. Best of luck with your mobile app!
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
3
Answers
SEO Expert and Strategist
Well, when you have viral marketing, then it helps to spread the word about your business like wildfire on it's own. It's a self-perpetuating loop. So rather than you paying for advertisements, people will share your content or tool or something else because it's so cool or does something valuable for them. Imagine if Nike creates a Facebook video about some cool new sneakers they just released. If 10,000 people share that Facebook video on their newsfeed, then their friends will see it. It may be said to have effectively "gone viral" -- and can drive Nike's sales, leading to business expansion. In other words, if 1,000 people buys those shoes that wouldn't have otherwise, then this viral marketing just led to "business expansion" for Nike because they are making more sales that they would not have otherwise.