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Achieving Success as a Business Coach

By Norman Walker
There are numerous eBooks and articles on building and growing a business, but the uniqueness of every business makes calls for customized guidance. Being expert entrepreneurs, business coaches understand the requirements of business growth and success.  As a business coach, you will be responsible for leadership development, solving problems, succession planning, and so on. Your goal should be to share experiences with business owners by offering guidance and mentorship. Let’s look at how to achieve success as a coach.  Be passionate about teaching There is a tendency for business persons to be skeptical about sharing their knowledge with others. To ...
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How to Create a Local Professional Services Marketing Budget

By Norman Walker
Any professional services firm that wants to grow has to not only retain existing clients but keep finding new clients. Taking a methodical approach to this requires developing an effective marketing plan to suit your budget.  A systematic plan based on strategic business goals and an informed understanding of relevant client groups works best. This enables you to allocate your budget in a way that maximizes your chances of success. Here are some thoughts on how to develop a local professional services marketing budget  Start with your business goals The purpose of marketing is to find new clients for your practice and to identify unmet current client ...
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Best Practices for Hiring Candidates Online

By Norman Walker
The way of earning income is rapidly changing over time, with millions of people shifting to work online. As a result, job opportunities are becoming competitive as new websites are cropping up with onerous regulations.  With millions of jobs advertised daily, you can apply freely and be selected to work in a top company from the “comfort” of your zone. On the other hand, it's increasingly becoming hard for different companies to determine who is legit for the job. Here are the best practices that you can apply when hiring candidates online. Keep your website clean and brief With thousands of applications sent, it will be tough to select and verify the ...
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Finding the Right Business Partner to Expand in China

By Norman Walker
We know that China is making efforts to open its economy to foreign businesses. However, you have to do good research before you consider expanding your business into China as there is more red tape involved. Perseverance can get you into the most lucrative, rewarding business environment in the world.    A business partner expands your international growth   Finding a good business partner is important – one who understands the complex Chinese regulations. You want to be sure of the credibility of your business partner and WPIC helps businesses that don’t have the know-how to operate successfully in China. For more information on this, visit ...
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Sprucing Up Your Garden for the Perfect Work Break

By Norman Walker
Just a few simple, creative ideas can spruce up your garden. Everybody loves outdoor time in a well cared for garden. We’re living in stressful times and you want to ensure an outdoor nook area with rustic garden furniture and the sound of trickling water where you can sit, dream and relax. Giving your garden a spring-clean  Sprucing up your garden doesn’t have to mean breaking the bank. When it comes to choosing grass, shrubs, flowers, succulents and stones, a lot can be chosen from cuttings out of other gardens, from empty properties and from the open countryside near you. There are literally so many ways to give your garden a bit of a lift without ...
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4 Types of Insurance Every Business Owner Should Know About

By Norman Walker
Being your own boss is great. You're no longer on a capped income and you get to make all the decisions, which includes your working hours. But as with most things, there are some disadvantages. Nobody can fire you anymore, but the moment you open your own business, you're exposing yourself to certain risks. And this brings us to the subject of this article: business insurance. Business insurance or commercial insurance is essentially risk management. You use it to protect yourself and your company against financial loss resulting from property damage or lawsuits. Maybe there's a fire that destroys most of your inventory and equipment. Or maybe  one of your ...
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How to Save Money and Legal Hassles by Paying off Back Taxes

By Norman Walker
If you are facing a situation where you are struggling to pay your back taxes, try not to avoid the situation but find out what options you have for dealing with them if you want to save money and legal hassles. The IRS offers various forms of tax relief to help you and is more amenable to working out late tax payments than before. For example, it may accept an Installment Agreement request or an Offer in Compromise (OIC).  Tax relief options Receiving a notice that you owe back taxes is stressful but thanks to the Fresh Start Program offered by the IRS, there are various tax relief options.  Fortress Tax Relief will deal with the IRS on your behalf. ...
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Skills You Should Master While in Quarantine

By Norman Walker
Even two years ago, not many people would have been able to predict the possibility or consequences of a global pandemic. A disease or virus rapidly spreading through the population seemed like something that belonged in the middle ages or dystopian society movies.  Last year when the world went into lockdown, people found themselves in an alternate reality. A reality that did not involve traffic or sitting in the office for 9 hours a day.  While there are some who have not been able to break out of the stupor of quarantine, there are others who are using the time to upskill themselves. These are some skills that will certainly stave off boredom and may provide ...
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How to Become a Seller on Rakuten Japan

By Norman Walker
Japan is one of the world’s oldest and advanced countries. Their culture dates back centuries and the Japanese people are extremely proud of their heritage. One area of Japan that has not fully been explored is e-commerce. This comes as a bit of surprise, seeing that the market is worth over   $150.1 billion .  The Japanese people have money to spend and fashion and consumer electronics are the main areas of interest. However, overcoming the single language barrier can be difficult unless you use the right channels.  Rakuten Japan is one of the preferred channels to work through, but you need to have your act together if you want to make it. Here are some ...
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Sales Kickoff content planning

By Madeline Turner
Hi all, My team and I are in the process of planning our annual SKO for the end of January 2020.  The theme, location, hotels, and tracks have been locked down and an agenda has been proposed.  I am hoping to get input into the processes that others follow to actually develop SKO content. What are the steps to develop content (i.e. presentations) for each topic? How is content developed, who usually helps in the development process, and what does the timeline look like?  Thank you!
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Organizational implications to a successful sales enablement implementation

By francois delvaux
From our research, sales enablement has gained momentum in the last two years among B2B organizations we surveyed. With many stating that its a way for them to 1) boost sales productivity and 2) achieve more impactful customer interactions and 3) overall gain better sales results.  From our Q4, 2018 survey (Minds&More, Showpad, Kynetec) where we contacted over 2000 companies and the focused our research on the 100 companies that said had a digital platform in place for sales and marketing. - 72% of them said that they   gained revenue growt h - 78% of respondents stated achieved   sales productivity improvements While part of the Sales enablement ...
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The 'U' Matters...

By Vinay Kalyan Parakala
The ‘U’ matters… Before you embark on enjoying reading this article as much as I enjoyed writing it, you should know that this article would not have been possible without a bunch of professionals who I have very high regard for. Especially  Neil Barman  who has been my ideation partner and content advisor and  Abhi Bajaj  who helped proof read and edit the article.  I am greatly influenced by the work of some stalwarts in the field of sales and sales enablement,  Mike Kunkle ,  Scott Santucci ,  Tom Erdman ,  Paul Drury ,  Atul Jalan  and  Vikram Nair  amongst others. I dedicate this piece to the memory of the late  Robert Racine , a giant in the universe ...
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Is it really a surprise that fast paced business is moving all mobile?

By Scott Hall
Everything is going mobile or is there already. You order your food from mobile, you handle payments through mobile, you use Facebook on mobile, you book flights on mobile. The list is endless. And things are about to get even more mobile. There’s new generation hitting college who are born with touch screen. They use laptop for 0% of their tasks. Considering this, is it really a surprise that fast paced business is moving all mobile? I am on the move most of time. Meeting customers, partners, prospects or traveling between these meetings. We want to use every aspect of what today's smart phones have to offer. To revision completely the usual form-based user ...
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How To Improve Onboarding With Guided Selling

By Andrew Rhodes
Sales leaders stand at a crossroads. One path embraces the myth that great sellers are born, not made. And since great sellers are already great, that means they don’t need training.   But there’s another path you can take. On this path, sales is a science that can be taught to anyone. And with the right training, everyone can improve . The technique of guided selling delivers the right training to new sales reps at just the right time. Guided selling is one of the best tools you can use to grow your team and stay on the right path.   One Challenge With Many Faces   What’s your top challenge with new sales hires? If you’re a sales ...
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Collecting Success Stories

By Alistair Fox
The Problem One of the issues raised recently in the SES forum was the challenge of collecting customer success stories. As most sales and marketing professionals know, good success stories are a great resource for sales. They provide: Proof-points from real customers Guidance for sales on the sales cycle Differentiators and value messages for specific product-market combinations But they can be difficult to collect because the key information is often held by the salesperson, and: By the time you contact the salesperson, they have already moved on to the next sale Salespeople are not incentivised to provide the information ...
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Sales Centric Marketing Strategies

By charlene nichols
My ultimate goal in starting SellSMART was to help create synergy within my customers' business between the sales department and all other departments to create a "sales-centric" culture. Although my core offering was centered around sales training, I found that KPIs were seldom clear and identified for my potential clients. I worked backwards to find a starting place and arrived at the very beginning of the sales cycle for my customers- traffic generation. What I found is most of my customers had survived by word of mouth and foot traffic for so long, that their digital marketing strategy (where I advise my customers to focus their marketing) was basically a ...
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The Birth of Today’s Mobile Salesman

By Scott Hall
In today’s new digital world the activities of the sales teams has not changed. Still required is customer contact, presenting the product, communication, closing the deal and support.  What has changed is the rapid pace of sales technology and innovation. It is transforming the way sales operates. The new generation of sales are technology focused. Everything is digital. Every aspect of a job and social life is being completed on mobile devices. From games and facetime to work activities like calls and emails. This means gone are the 9 to 5 hours and sitting at desks entering sales activities into your companies CRM.   In the new digital world, technology ...
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How to Time Manage Your Way to Sales Success

By Steve McCullough
How do sales professionals manage their time for maximum impact?   What are the right activities to focus on, and which should not have quite as much focus?     Are your priorities unclear or out of focus, leaving you in reaction mode and worried that you’re not focused on the right things?     When we slow down to really think about how and where we spend our time, it’s easy to feel that “the whirlwind” is mostly in control. But how we spend our time is the only thing we can truly control, so letting the winds of chance blow us about can have profound negative implications on sales and revenue results.   Sales professionals with properly aligned ...
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Drowning in business cards?

By Scott Hall
If you're like me you come home from conferences and trade shows packed with new ideas and huge pile of business cards. After breathing office air for a while it's time to start the follow up, right? Well, I can break the task into two significant problems, and I bet you feel my pain: I would need to convert those 100+ business cards to leads and contacts in Salesforce. I have only some gibberish notes of what was discussed and agreed with each contact. Reality check. With all the tasks piled up on my desk during the conference absence there’s no way I have time for this. Even if I would have someone to type those in Salesforce for me, they are still ...
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