Insights to Turn Your Passion into Success

Identifying your target market and your ideal customer is essential to creating a sales and marketing approach that gives you the best chance of success. If you don’t know who that target market is, and what your ideal customer wants and needs, it is hard to develop both the products and services that meets those needs as well as the sales and marketing approaches that are likely to succeed. You have to know what your customers want, need, love and hate, trust and distrust and why. If you want your messaging to be effective and your brand to be enticing, you need to know your customers.

Entrepreneurs with a flawed perspective let the pressure, passion, pleasure and pain overcome their judgment, and the judgment of others, to ignore the facts in front of them. There is nothing wrong with being excited, but don’t let your need or desire (or panic) about the necessity of capital cloud the details of the meeting, terms, or relationship that is actually occurring.

Entrepreneurs dream of having their company appear on the front page of a major publication or doing an interview on a major network. Public relations can certainly create breakthrough moments, but in most cases it is simply an important part of an overall marketing strategy.

Successfully marketing and selling to businesses requires a specialised set of skills and strategies. Because small and medium sized business owners and managers are generally incredibly busy and cost-conscious, a poorly tailored marketing message or ill informed sales pitch will quickly put them off

You can select a CRM system that is accessible via the Internet and many have free or low cost options. While not all CRM solutions are created equally, here are some of the most common features.

When you focus on overall risk and big picture concerns, it can be debilitating. If you focus on your present to-do list, you offer yourself the remarkably satisfying and motivating experience of completing the tasks before you. When so much is out of your control, the chance to finish something each day is priceless. And if you continue to prioritize each day’s list, your sense of accomplishment will grow exponentially. After all, each day’s work is a piece of the puzzle that will eventually become your “big picture.” But if you worry about the big picture first, you’ll never assemble its parts and reach your ultimate goal.

How do you validate your idea to determine whether it can be a business success and help you achieve your personal and professional goals as an entrepreneur? There is no magic formula, but there are certainly ways that you can have a better sense of whether your idea has legs.

Keeping your business organized and structured is key to managing your most valuable asset - time. Selecting a few basic software packages that can do this work for you can save you tons of time and effort. This software is easily available via the internet and often has free or very low cost options for small businesses.

It’s not easy to compile an accurate profile which combines reality with your sales and marketing goals. Failing to bring conversations with your customers into the equation is a fundamental mistake. Here are a few more mistakes to avoid in creating your persona.

Attracting the type of talent that understands the entrepreneurial venture and can bring expertise to that journey is essential to success. Doing so requires a great deal of your talent and creative thinking. Try some of these techniques to see if you can help others see why working for your company will be the best move of their life.

As entrepreneurs, we almost always have to be the chief salesperson until you are able to hire sales team members. So what makes successful salespeople? What so few of us are willing to accept is this fundamental truth: Great salespeople, like great athletes, simply do the basics very well. Some of us would like to believe that there’s a shortcut around the basics; that there’s a secret formula out there for just sitting back and letting the money roll in. The sooner you get rid of that illusion, the sooner you can get on with reaching the heights you want to reach through effective use of the basics.

How you bring the value of your product or service to your target audience is a function of how well you market it. In this age of clutter, you must be able to cut through that clutter using the variety of strategies and tactics at your disposal.

When you get started, you will start to enter into contracts with customers. When you do so, it is important to have a standard form contract that puts you in a position to protect your company.

The financial performance of a business is reflected in a series of what they call "financial statements." While every entrepreneur does not need to be a financial expert, we all need to have at least a basic understanding of these statements and how they show us the financial performance of your business.

Knowing your current and potential customers is a foundational piece of information for you to create your unique offering. In the process, not only do you see where you stack up, you learn how competition acts, whether it be how they approach a market or communicate a message. A competitive analysis is a key step to understanding how you can win in an increasingly competitive world.

Entrepreneurs are not always aware of the various financing structures that may be available to them when raising new capital to finance their growth.And, even if they are, they are not always sure what fair terms look like when receiving term sheets from investors.

How often do you think to yourself - no one can understand our challenges because they are so unique to your business. People say they have been through our problems but what we are doing is unique. We can't possibly have the same problems. This is what happens when we confuse our passion for their business with the notion that these problems exist for virtually all entrepreneurs.

Who has time for training? That's what many entrepreneurs think. But a little training can go a long way. Whether it is making employees more productive, or providing clarity or improving quality, training can help team members contribute more effectively. Properly run start-ups place a great deal of emphasis on recruiting and the interview process in order to build their talent base. Unfortunately, often the investment in people stops there.

Stock Option Plans are an extremely popular method of attracting, motivating, and retaining employees, especially when the company is unable to pay high salaries. A Stock Option Plan gives the company the flexibility to award stock options to employees, officers, directors, advisors, and consultants, allowing these people to buy stock in the company when they exercise the option.

It doesn't necessarily take a lot of money to make a lot of money, but it does take some. To beat the odds and avoid running out of money, successful entrepreneurs prepare by developing rigorous financial plans that forecast essential information such as how much money it'll take to get off the ground and what to expect in the first few years so they can best allocate resources. Smart financial planning is crucial, but actually developing a reliable plan can feel impossible.

What does your brand stand for? When we are starting out, we have no brand. So setting down what you want your brand to stand for is a foundation to how you will be perceived by employees, customers, investors and all others that your company touches. I know you don't see how brand pays the bills, but setting out who you are in the eyes of your constituents can set the tone for the things that do pay the bills.

You’re an entrepreneur with a big idea and you’re poised to disrupt your target industry. Intellectual property is key to your success. To get your company moving, you may bring in others such as co-founders, employees, consultants, advisors, developers and creative talent. Founders, employees, developers, suppliers, and other contractors should all be bound by a written agreement stating that all intellectual property created in connection with the services performed for the startup is assigned to the startup. Absent a written agreement, the individual or entity providing the services will generally have ownership rights in such intellectual property, which will cause problems for the startup when it is looking to raise capital or be acquired. You have to set yourself up for the future by making sure that all of the intellectual property developed along the journey belongs to the company.