With news on falling business confidence, it’s easy to assume that growth isn’t possible in the age of austerity. Wrong. Last year more than 500,000 people started their own business. Some of the largest and most profitable companies in the world are recession start-ups – having taken advantage of a time when many organisations were cutting back to look at things differently and invest in their people.

Often the size and sector of business isn’t the factor that holds it back. More often that not, it’s a case of changing the attitude and approach. Just look at Apple, which turned its fortunes around in the midst of the dot.com boom. Whatever your business, it is possible to buck the trend and take control in 2012. By starting the year with the right approach to sales and by implementing the best techniques, the opportunities to win business are endless.

Here are some tips for winning new business in 2012:

• Putting together a prospecting plan. It’s imperative to get the foundation right, to define the sales focus and agree best practice – as well as breaking the large annual sales down into manageable bite sized pieces. Gear the plan towards getting in front of your ideal prospect – it’s a lot easier to go out to find clients when you know exactly what you’re looking for.

• Learn from lessons. Debriefing is imperative, whether a sale goes well or not. If it goes well, analyse why so that lessons can be implemented across the board. If it doesn’t go well, identify what could have done better so that you can practice it thoroughly.

• The ‘people element’. If you sound, smell, look and act like every other salesperson your prospect has ever seen, this is how you will be treated. So from the beginning, it’s imperative you personalise the whole experience. Focus every meeting on listening to them and their problems. Talking about you and the feature benefits of your product is a one-way track to protracted sales, stalling and objections and ultimately, failure. The number of sales you make is proportional to the amount of information you gather, not the information you give.

• Be picky. Unfortunately some people cannot be pleased – and to boot they can take up huge amounts of your time and resources and then pay you very little in return. Sometimes, it pays to be discerning. In the business world, there will always be time wasters; the trick is to spot them early and not let them waste your most valuable resource – your time.

• Relax and enjoy. The sales meeting or the sales calls do not have to be a gritty, hard-won, exhausting experience. You may need to be gutsy for a few seconds at a time, but learn to relax and bring some humour into things. If you enjoy what you are doing, it comes across in your speech, body language and your whole persona.

Believe in your business and your product. We are all human at the end of the day and the whole process is infinitely more enjoyable when the buyer and the seller treat each other with equal business stature. The best sales strategy has a screening process whereby the fit between your prospect’s needs and your solution is a ‘win win’ for both parties.

SmallBusiness.co.uk Blogs

Times of technological and structural economic change can throw up the chance to start a business, argues Sara Williams, founder of Vitesse Media plc.

A year ago, when I met up with friends who are business owners or self-employed, all the talk was of investment and some new recruitment. The mood among them this year is much more downbeat. Now the conversation is about building cash reserves and looking to reduce staff. Also, of course, there is quite a lot of anger at the cynicism of US politicians and the incompetence of their European counterparts, which have conspired to conjure up a potential downturn from the teeth of a reasonable recovery.

This downturn, apart from being deeper than usual because of the financial disconnects, has been accompanied by major waves of technological and structural economic change. Waves have been caused by innovation or disruption to sectors that are in the throes of major disturbances, such as retail or the media sector (courtesy of the internet and Twitter sphere) or education and health sectors (courtesy of the government).

But the encouraging aspect about disturbances and technological change is that they can throw up winners as well as losers – and these sectors in the midst of turbulence can provide healthy opportunities for new businesses to be founded and to flourish.

The decisions of individual business owners, multiplied thousands of times, and the announcements of global business leaders imply that unemployment will continue to rise over the next year. But many new, innovative businesses can be founded by people who experience redundancy. While a very important factor for success in a small business is previous knowledge of the sector and business that you start, turbulent sectors can be another fruitful searching ground for opportunities that could provide the kernel of your idea for a business.

As someone who was last employed by the Consumers’ Association as a financial researcher more than 30 years ago, I can tell you that I don’t regret for a minute the decision to turn my back on ‘secure’ employment. If you’re currently faced with unemployment, let the extensive team at SmallBusiness.co.uk hold your hand to help you make a success of a new business venture in 2012.

I’ll be writing regularly on SmallBusiness.co.uk from now on, so please let me have your comments and views on what you’d like me to cover.

Sara Williams is executive chairman and founder of SmallBusiness.co.uk parent company Vitesse Media plc, which she started in 1997.

SmallBusiness.co.uk Blogs

In the current difficult economic times we must all put our best foot forward to try and sell our products and services. So in the name of service, I offer up some ideas to assist in closing the sale.

We all understand the Golden Rule. “He who has the gold, rules.” It is the money person who is central to the sales process. No matter how much we discuss the idea of champions or other sales strategies, it all boils down to the Golden Rule. In the end the person with the money has the responsibility and ability to buy your product or service. Ignore the Golden Rule at your peril because no one ever gets the sale by forgetting the Golden Rule!

The Golden Rule also works great in life and gives us other ways to view sales cycles. There are slight variations to the Golden Rule; one of these variations is the Rule of Compromise. This works best with a spouse concerned with finances and family budgets. It is simple to implement. On any decision, you discuss and discuss all of the issues, and then your spouse makes the decision. This is the Rule of Compromise. In the end, the correct decision will usually get made and harmony remains. How does this fit with the Golden Rule? Well, the sales cycle is the same. You can discuss and discuss, but in the end the customers’ wishes always will prevail because the customer controls the gold. The easiest way to extract the gold is to create a unique and compelling product. Technology may allow you to do this, but you still have to convince the customer that they can not live without your new product. You must have a compelling argument or product and then convince them that the purchase is really “their” idea.

Another strategy is what I call the Rule of Two. It is like managing children. When faced with a difficult child, an easy strategy is to give the child a choice of two alternatives, both of which are acceptable to you. The child can then make a decision and will feel good about the situation, but you will control the process and get a solution that is acceptable to you. It’s pretty amazing the number of sales situations that call out for this strategy. Many sales people see this as providing the customer with options; actually in this case instead of a child it is the customer who you get to a position that is acceptable to the sales person. In any organisation (including a family unit), if the champion has a detractor they must overcome the detractor’s objections. The Rule of Two allows the champion to offer the detractor a feeling of self-esteem and ownership by letting them make a choice. So the Rule of Two allows you to position your product to the customer in such a way that they can select one of two options. For example, do they want a leased solution or do they want to buy using the special sales price that you have available on the product this month? In my business, the software business, we ask them if they want a crippleware test product or would they like to buy the product with a 90 day satisfaction guarantee? You really want to give the customer an easy choice! And the customer sees these as choices with little or no risk. In their mind low risk is affordable.

If it seems like we’re herding cats, it’s because we are! The sales process for all products in this economic climate is difficult. But, for a new high technology product, service or process, it is very much like herding cats. The best sales people can herd cats and manage more than one herd at a time. There are some recent applications where the cats herd themselves; e.g., tablet computers such as the iPad. In some areas like social networking, companies just spring out of nowhere; seemingly on buzz alone they go from zero to infinity in a single leap. This is because technology changes quickly and most of the time the people with the best technology can win the race almost every time. But, the race and the life span of the company may be short.

Whether you are selling a high tech product or the latest and greatest gadget at your local store you need to find the sales strategy that works best for you. Thinking about your sales strategy in abstract terms lets you refine and hone your ideas so that you are prepared when you see a need to tailor a sales strategy to a specific customer concern!

Kenneth J. Thurber, PhD, President and Founder of Architecture Technology Corp. Author – Big Wave Surfing: Extreme Technology Development, Management, Marketing and Investing www.bigwavesurfingbook.com

SmallBusiness.co.uk Blogs

Jamie Lyons, co-founder of FundedApps, Adi Gaskell, editor for the CMI’s management blog, and Nigel Botterill, founder of Entrepreneur’s Circle, offer their views on Wednesday’s The Apprentice, in which the teams had to produce and market a new brand of biscuit.

Jamie Lyons

Zoe, this week’s project manager for Team Logic, immediately started to show the weaknesses in her business approach from the start of the planning process. Teamed with another strong character, Melody, the pair’s emotions often caused an obstacle in a task where a clear decisive strategy was key.

The personal feud that ensued for the subsequent three days culminated in Logic’s ultimate downfall – they received zero supermarket orders for ‘Bixmix’ – despite super-aide Nick’s observation that they had fulfilled Lord Sugar’s brief.

Team Venture, on the other hand, were harmoniously led by Helen, a candidate who week-on-week delivers concise business pitches and acts in a professional manner. Following faultless planning, she led her team to victory after receiving an offer of exclusivity for ‘Special Stars’ from Asda.

In contrast to their counterparts, Team Venture had a clear strategy that was followed throughout the task, despite Karen Brady’s concerns that their branding gave out mixed messages.

So how did Team Logic lose the task, considering their product concept was seemingly a stronger proposition than Team Venture’s?

Well, it was a combination of poor leadership, bad communication, no clear target market, and a lack of understanding about the competitive landscape.

The lesson to be learnt here is that however strong your offering, failure won’t be far away if your strategy isn’t implemented in the right way – and that’s just the way the cookie crumbles.

Adi Gaskell

The workplace is seldom a social nirvana, so figuring out how to both get on with people and also to get the most out of them is a key skill for managers to master.

Sadly it’s one that Zoe never really got to grips with during her tenure on The Apprentice. Time after time she would let her emotions bubble to the surface, venting her frustrations either directly or indirectly at her colleagues. Last night we had such pearls as her not giving a ‘shiny shit about Melody’ and that Natasha ‘is everywhere, she gets where dirt can’t’.

All of which is perhaps amusing as an outsider looking in, but is probably not the best way to get the best out of the people you work with. Anyway, as mentioned earlier, it’s one thing to dislike the people you work with, but quite another to let that affect your performances. Here’s a few things Zoe should have kept in mind to help manage those difficult relationships a bit better.

1. Talk to them, not at them. Zoe was cracking at talking at people. Her style was authoritarian rather than collegiate, and it’s a style that tends to rub people up, especially younger ‘Generation Y’ employees.

2. Don’t run from trouble. No one really likes conflict, but it won’t get better if you avoid it. Much better to take a frank and candid approach to get things sorted earlier rather than later.

3. Don’t focus on mistakes. The past is the past. If you’re always focusing on the mistakes people made in the past then it won’t help you or them move on and improve.

4. Concentrate on issues, not personalities. Zoe got kind of hung up on some of the personalities competing against her. Once you do that and make issues personal it’s hard to find constructive solutions. Much better to focus on the issues and take personalities out of the equation.

5. Have a thick skin. If you take criticism personally then any feedback will instigate a defensive response from you. Not the best way of improving yourself or your team.

6. Avoid giving people labels. Zoe quickly branded people as ‘the enemy’ in her mind. Once someone has that kind of label attached then you often only see behaviours that confirm that label.

7. Focus on the positives in people. Similarly, if you focus on the negative traits in people you will only see bad things. By contrast, if you focus on their strengths then you are much more likely to get the best out of those proverbial pains in the backside.

8. Invest time in them. If you like someone then building connections with them is a piece of cake. Doing likewise with difficult people is much harder but equally important. Don’t shirk the extra effort.

9. Look at yourself. We all like to think that we’re great, but research suggests that our self perceptions are often wide of the mark. Try to look at yourself in a critical light, or get feedback from someone not afraid to tell you a warts and all appraisal of how you’re behaving. It might well be you that’s the problem, not the ‘pain in the backside’.

Nigel Botterill

Some of the comments this week coming from the candidates who were supposed to be working together will make company bosses up and down the country shudder. For example, Susan’s narrative into the bathroom mirror: ‘When it comes to biscuits, Zoe and I are on a similar level. On a personal level, she is one of the bitchiest and most back stabbing people I’ve ever met!’

Tom is the nicest guy remaining in the series, but surely can’t win it as he doesn’t have the chutzpah to work for Lord Sugar. I feel that in the end, Melody will be considered a bit too aggressive to win the whole thing, as this characteristic can be a big no-no for company bosses.

The strong point of both biscuit brands was the packaging, put together with branding agency, ‘1HQ,’ in Windsor which was sharp, crisp, refreshing and something that would stand out off the shelf. The problem for ‘Bix Mix’ was that the quality of the actual biscuit really let them down.

Jim pulled off an amazing coup when he gained 800,000 orders and effectively won the task. It does give a slightly dubious business lesson though when the message is, ‘When in doubt, make it up,’ as Jim did when he started talking about a £30 million marketing campaign!

In the end, the right person was sent home I think, although Tom and Susan will feel fortunate to have survived. As regards a potential winner, it’s difficult to look past Helen as her winning streak makes her the outstanding candidate.

SmallBusiness.co.uk Blogs

By Peter Ewen, chairman of The International Factors Group

The last few years have left many SMEs feeling like ‘rabbits in the headlights’. A lack of confidence in the economy and a perceived lack of available funding means many businesses are static and afraid to grow or seek out new opportunities.

SMEs could be the engine of UK growth, but not if so many are left at the starting line. Small businesses are understandably nervous but rather than waiting for a second recession that may never come, companies need to kick-start growth by getting their finances in order and exploring the increasing opportunities that recovery presents.

Four major trends for businesses to consider are refinancing, M&As, exporting, and of course securing cashflow.

Refinancing
As the economy picks up, managers are shifting their focus from the day-to-day realities of keeping their company viable to the future, refinancing to put themselves in the best possible position for growth.

This can only be a good thing. No one can blame businesses for battening down the hatches during hard times, but today’s ‘progressive’ refinancing is just as likely to be triggered by market opportunities or a forward-looking assessment of cashflow, costs and economic conditions. In other words, businesses are beginning to look at their financial requirements proactively rather than reactively.

M&A
Many businesses have come through a difficult two to three years in reasonably good shape given the battles they have faced. These companies should be looking to the future and, in particular, at some of their competitors who are not doing so well.

There are certainly M&A bargains to be had and, now that a few green shoots are starting to show, an increasing number of business owners will be looking to sell. To make the most of this opportunity, acquisitive businesses need to organise their finances so they are ready to move when the opportunity arises. They need to look beyond the traditional forms of funding by understanding the assets they possess that could help structure a merger or acquisition – without sacrificing cashflow at the crucial post deal stage.

Exporting
As well as growing at home, many companies are looking for opportunities outside of the UK. Emerging nations continued to power ahead throughout the ‘global’ recession, while countries closer to home like Germany and France seem ahead of the UK in terms of economic recovery.

This demand from abroad, along with the downward trend of the pound, has created new opportunities for companies that have never exported before. Those that are already selling abroad are now exploring markets even further afield. This said, selling overseas can create as many challenges as it does opportunities. Arguably the greatest concern for businesses entering new markets is uncertainty surrounding payment.

On the face of it, the process of collecting money from an overseas customer is similar to a domestic transaction. However, there can be significant differences, particularly in terms of debtor days. In some European countries, the norm is typically 90 days from the date of the invoice. This will have clear cashflow implications for UK companies that are more accustomed to a 30 to 40-day turnaround.

Ensuring cash flow via outsourced credit control or maintaining a cash buffer is vital when selling abroad. With the right finance, and guidance, exporting could provide a real boost to UK businesses.

Cultural and business differences must also be considered especially if venturing beyond Western Europe. The government is keen on fuelling this kind of growth and is providing very useful advice for those that care to look.

Securing cash flow
Above all, businesses need confidence and sustainable finance in order to grow. Small businesses continue to face tough times because cashflow remains a serious issue and they are still struggling to access the financial confidence needed to move from a survival mentality to one of growth.

For whatever reason, traditional financing methods are not meeting today’s business needs and it is essential SMEs understand the full repertoire of funding they can access. The banks have been singled out as the obvious ‘villains’ for continuing business difficulties, but to lay all the blame on them is wrong. The missing part of the puzzle is education from all involved. Businesses need to know about the support and other forms of finance available, to help them handle this new business environment.

In the last few years, businesses have adopted a defensive formation as their survival instincts have kicked in. Now, many are recognising opportunities for growth. Having the confidence, and funding, to invest in success is not only crucial for individual businesses but also for the wider UK economic recovery.

SmallBusiness.co.uk Blogs