Business Resources Archives - Page 2 of 9

Presentation Skills 101-2 The Personal Elevator Pitch

We are asked to introduce ourselves many times each day. This should be done in a short sharp 10-15 word sentence. Accompany this with your business card and a smile and you are already in the top 10% of people in the room.

So let’s look at the anatomy of a personal introduction. It needs to include the following information:

Your name
Your interest
Your job function
The business you work for
Call to action

Write these out in point form and then just string them together to make a sentence. Keep it witty and easy to understand. Drop any long syllable words and technical words and it should be done.

Remember that people want to do business with people before doing business with your business, so be a person first. Be interesting and show yourself, step out from behind the business mask and be the real you.

If you are stuck with this try some of the following techniques;

Mention your favorite sports team
Tell people of a recent accomplishment
Tell people about a book you are reading
Share a good bit about your family

The more you practice this the better you will become. Practice, practice, practice, until you are confident.

By nbmedia|2016-11-01T10:20:31+02:00August 12th, 2014|Business Resources, EI Clients, Entrepreneurship|0 Comments

Presentation Skills 101-1 Introduction to Presenting

Public Speaking is one of the most feared and avoided tasks among modern civilizations. Apparently people would rather run naked through a crowded room or die of drowning than speak in front of a group of people. The good news is that unlike drowning, speaking does get better and easier the more you prepare and practice, not sure about the being naked part.

We are going to look at some simple techniques and tools that will set you apart from others and get you to a point where you can walk into a room with confidence knowing that you are confident, capable and prepared to handle whatever is requested from you. Winston Churchill said, “The best unprepared speech I ever did, was the one I prepared the night before.”

As an Entrepreneur you will be required to be prepared to pitch yourself, your business and your ideas to people at the drop of a hat. This week we will take you through the preparation of the following presentations;

Personal Elevator pitch
Business Elevator pitch
Tips on Visual Aids
More tips on presenting

The rules of any presentation are simple: Keep it simple. Unless you are presenting a scientific notation to a bunch of PhD graduates at MIT, keep it simple. People do not enjoy getting bogged down by detail. They are never impressed by your ability to show off how clever you think you are by using big words and techno jargon. Simple wins every time.

At the end of your pitch there are six questions that, if you could ask your audience, would grade the success of your presentation;

Can they repeat your main points?
Could they visualise what you were saying?
Will they remember this tomorrow?
Could they relate it to their own lives?
Did they respect what you were saying?
Do they want to talk to you afterwards?

Wow, heavy questions, but worthy of keeping in mind as you prepare your presentation.

Let us know of some of your presentation ‘YES’ and ‘OH NO’ experiences.

By nbmedia|2014-08-11T11:07:00+02:00August 11th, 2014|Business Resources, Entrepreneurship|0 Comments

Missile Marketing 2: Hope

So many people run what I call HOPE based marketing. They place adverts online, in the phone book or local newspapers and then sit back and hope that someone reads them and calls with an order.

If you have ever, or currently use the word “hope” in connection with your marketing, you know that you are in trouble. In fact this word should not be used in any association with running a small business. Never hope money will be paid, never hope people will read your adverts, or hope they come to an event.

Turning hope into certain confidence is key to developing a solid marketing strategy that will develop your business into the future.

So our lesson today is: take a look at your business marketing strategy and where you ‘hoping’ that things are going to work, start to change these. In our next post we will begin to discuss more productive ways to target your customers

By nbmedia|2014-07-28T13:16:06+02:00July 28th, 2014|Business Resources, EI Clients, Entrepreneurship|0 Comments

Doing Business in Africa

This week we attended a workshop presented by the Cape Chamber of Commerce on the challenges of doing business in Africa. Some very interesting speakers were present; here are some snippets of their wisdom:

Identified Risks

Non payment of accounts
Exchange control issues with unstable currencies
Problem and expense of moving people around different regions
Many different staffing regulations
Credit risk insurance
Freight and logistics issues
Labour unrest

Some recommendations

Find quality partners in each region before launching a new venture
Visit places personally, do not do internet meetings
Mitigate risks by investigations and relationships
Cover all your bases with legal contracts and clauses
Build in arbitration and mediation clauses into all contracts
Do not hurry business deals, let them evolve at their own pace
Plan for the worse, hope for the best

Even with all the challenges and risks, Africa remain the most lucrative market on the planet with countries boasting growths in excess of 25%. First one in gets the catch.

By nbmedia|2016-11-01T10:20:32+02:00July 25th, 2014|Business Resources, EI Clients, Entrepreneurship|0 Comments

Missile Marketing 1

In military terms there are four ways to fire a missile.

You can aim as well as you can and fire and HOPE that you will hit, or come close to the target. You can use a more sophisticated missile and guide it as it goes using MCLOS or SACLOS or you can use super advanced guidance using FAF technology.

In this series this week, we will use missile targeting to look at four ways that your marketing could be running. Each has lessons that we will chat about.

By nbmedia|2014-07-23T10:48:36+02:00July 23rd, 2014|Business Resources, Entrepreneurship|0 Comments

Social media tips week: Get selling

When it comes to social media, you are NOT allowed to sell anywhere other than your own website, unless of course you have paid for the right to do so with FaceBook Ads or Google Ads.

So be careful not to promote your goods as For Sale in the social cloud. A better strategy is to talk about the benefits of your product offering and then provide links to a sales or landing page within the article. You can do this on other websites as well in their comments. But be careful not to offend or ruin a relationship. It could destroy that access point for life.

Selling online is a lot harder than in person, so my strategy has always been to get the person on the phone or in front of me as soon as possible to convert and close the deal. Do not keep a person hanging online by providing them with lots of emails and links with all your product features and pricelists. Chat to them directly and list to their needs, then propose a solution that will satisfy them.

Just to recap the weeks tips:

Get Online – Register yourself and your business
Get Profiled – Load good quality images and descriptions
Get Linked – Link up all the platforms so they work together
Get Landed – Create landing pages to convert sales
Get Selling – run campaigns that attract clients back to your website

By nbmedia|2016-11-01T10:20:32+02:00July 11th, 2014|Business Resources, Entrepreneurship|0 Comments

Social media tips week: Get selling

When it comes to social media, you are NOT allowed to sell anywhere other than your own website, unless of course you have paid for the right to do so with FaceBook Ads or Google Ads.

So be careful not to promote your goods as For Sale in the social cloud. A better strategy is to talk about the benefits of your product offering and then provide links to a sales or landing page within the article. You can do this on other websites as well in their comments. But be careful not to offend or ruin a relationship. It could destroy that access point for life.

Selling online is a lot harder than in person, so my strategy has always been to get the person on the phone or in front of me as soon as possible to convert and close the deal. Do not keep a person hanging online by providing them with lots of emails and links with all your product features and pricelists. Chat to them directly and list to their needs, then propose a solution that will satisfy them.

Just to recap the weeks tips:

Get Online – Register yourself and your business
Get Profiled – Load good quality images and descriptions
Get Linked – Link up all the platforms so they work together
Get Landed – Create landing pages to convert sales
Get Selling – run campaigns that attract clients back to your website

All set, ready, go

By nbmedia|2016-11-01T10:20:32+02:00July 11th, 2014|Business Resources, Entrepreneurship, Social Media|0 Comments

Social media tips week: Get landed

Social media is just that: social. So start being social and make new friends, link to groups and people who could be potential customers or Brand Champions. Having all your platforms linkedwill greatly assist you in this process. Ask questions, answers questions, make comments, repost cool relevant items and be nice.

Ok, not nice all the time. Nice people online are boring and often forgotten. Ruffle the feather every so often with a personal opinion on some topic or a short editorial on a hot issue. This will get people talking and sharing a little about what you say.

The main rule for chatting is to lead people back to your website to get them to engage with your product or service. To make this effective, make sure you have a ‘landing page’ for people to click through to. A landing page is a web page specially designed for a specific task, such as selling, promoting, gathering information and the like. Design a landing page that will promote a specific product offering, add a capture form and then blog about it. Add links to the blog to take people direct to the page and not your home page. Add to this by posting shorter posts on FaceBook and Twitter with the same link. Give people some incentive to capture their details and then sit back and see what happens.

It may not work well the first time you try it, but keep at it, change a few things and try again. Keep promoting the page until you have gotten enough response, and then do something else.

Your strategy here is to collect people’s details who have found your offerings appealing. This is what we call your Sales Pipeline. Keep their interest peaked by following up with emails, phone calls and personal visits.

By nbmedia|2016-11-01T10:20:33+02:00July 10th, 2014|Business Resources, Entrepreneurship, Social Media|0 Comments

Social media tips week: Get linked.

By this stage you should be online on a number of platforms each with their required profiles fully completed. Working online can be very time consuming and become a huge time thief for you in the day. What you need to do is to use some of the tools that exist to ensure that your social media is consistently updated and run well. You also need to know when people comment and reply on any of the platforms. Gulp! I hear you say, but this is not that complicated. Just a few tools and a few minutes each day will keep you in the driving seat.

So here are some of my all time favorite saving tools for you to use:

RSS feeds. This is a bit technical, so if you are not a techie, ask your web guys for help here. If you want to give it a shot, useFeedburner from Google, it makes it a whole lot easier to set up and use. What this does is to replicate your blog posts to subscribers and to a number of publishing platforms automatically every time you publish a new blog.
IFTTT – stands for IF This Then That. This has to be the best tool invented since forever. Register an account and then set up a number of recipes to use on your platforms. Essentially it will post on your FaceBook page or Twitter each time you blog. Or the other way around or both. Look at some examples and just do what others have done to learn before you start designing your own recipes. Be careful not to create loops and fill your profiles with junk.
Hootsuite – A simple way to keep track of replies and new comments. Take some time to learn all the features and once set up it will work for you forever.Get these up and working for you and your life will be just that little easier with regard to your social media management. This will then allow you more time to run some campaigns and marketing strategies.

By nbmedia|2016-11-01T10:20:33+02:00July 9th, 2014|Business Resources, Entrepreneurship, Social Media|0 Comments

Social media tips week: Get profiled

Once you have all the required platforms registered, ensure that your personal and business brands are properly represented on each of them. Here is a short check list:

Get a professional pic of yourself. Head and shoulders or waist up os good. Make sure it is clear and edited if required. DO NOT use your logo for your personal pic. And never use your dog, baby scans or children as substitutes. People want to get to know you as a person, not as a picture of someone else.

Put your brand logo as the profile pic on FaceBook page, Twitter and YouTube. This will give your brand an identity when your post on these platforms.

Create a cool banner that can be used for both FaceBook Page and YouTube. The sizes are slightly different but they should look the same. Twitter allows for w full wall paper backing as well as a banner. Get a designer to do these for you if you do not have the right tools, but PowerPoint works well for most. Create a design, group it, right click and save as a pic. Then just upload the pic to the required platform. For a more professional look, pay someone. Remember to save your logos with your business name, this helps Google to get to know you

Enter in a business profile in each platform. It is best to write these out in Word first, then just copy and paste them to ensure a consistent brand identity. Keep them short and to the point. Most people want to read these in less than 5 seconds, so work on them to get them right before posting them.

Ok we are getting there, more tomorrow.