The Marketing Mentress: Who is YOUR BEST Salesman?

From 1987 to 1992, the Government of Canada sponsored the "Business Owner Development Program".

This was a program to help small businesses become stronger and more profitable. Each business that registered for this program only had to pay 1/3 of the registration fee for two people to attend. The Canadian Government picked up the rest of the tab.

It was my privilege to have the opportunity of first taking part in this program as a business owner, and later as a business consultant.

As a business consultant I had 32 different businesses to work with each year for the ten month program. It was my responsibility to meet with each of these 32 businesses once a month for two hours helping them implement the things they were learning in the program into their business.

It was the most challenging work I had ever done up to that point in my life!

Some of the things that the small businesses learned were: time management, cash flow and money management, taxation, selling from the inside out, marketing, how to hire great employees and train and keep them, organization, how to target your market, and many other keys to managing a small business.

A small business was classed as any business with 99 or less employees. I don't know about you, but in my imagination 99 employees seemed like a BIG business to me at that time.

The month we had the sales training I was shocked to say the least at some of the responses I would receive from 'my' businesses.

The first month as we were getting started with our monthly sessions, we worked with simple cash flow projections. These cash flow projections helped me have a better idea of how I could help each of the businesses in my care.

With my assistance, each business set up a 12 month cash flow projection spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel. It was amazing to watch them as we progressed through the months plugging in the numbers based on past sales and expenses.

Many of the businesses would see their bottom line getting deeper and deeper into the "red" and they would exclaim, "I gotta get me a good salesperson!!!"

I explained to them that the moment they signed their name on the dotted line as the owner of their business, THEY BECAME THEIR OWN BEST SALESMAN. It was up to them to figure out how to sell their own products, or they would be unable to train any salesperson how to do it.

If they could not sell their own products and hired a salesperson, said salesperson would bring their own habits into the business...good and bad. Probably mostly bad.

The new sales person would have to sell enough product to cover the present bottom line, plus cover their own wages. There would need to be more product sold just to cover these two things

It was interesting to watch their faces as they digested what I said.

Thus began our 10 months together.

How are your sales? Are you, your company's own best sales person?

Social media is one way to market to your target audience. How is your social media working for you?

Need some help?

Attend my LinkedIn 101 - Stuck in LinkedIn Peanut Butter webinar Tuesday, February 9th from 7:00pm to 9:00pm MST.

Christine Till