I was talking to one of my students from my offline mentoring program today, and he was expressing frustration that he had been in touch with several prospective clients who were on the verge of committing to buy from him, and yet he couldn’t seem to nail down the final sale.  He’s shown them everything he could do for them, given them pricing and a timeline, and they are ready to commit – only they haven’t yet.

Understandably, he doesn’t want to bother them by contacting them repeatedly, but he doesn’t want to lose out on what seems like a sure sale because they’ve forgotten about him for whatever reason.

As someone who sells websites and web services for a living, as well as a full-time small business owner, I can see this from both sides.  Business owners have a million things on their plate at once, and there are always fires to put out.  Though we all know that changing a business’ website can have fantastic effects to their bottom line, it’s not exactly an “emergency” to the business owner, so they allow everything else to take precedence over it – and it’s hard to blame them.

What we can do on our end is follow up consistently, politely, and not so frequently that we start to annoy our prospect.  Calling someone once per day (until we are able to get in touch with them) if they have already made it clear that they are interested in working with us isn’t too much, in my opinion.

As I’ve mentioned many times, I’m not a good salesman, and I’m actually terrible at following up.  If I couldn’t get in touch with someone for a few days, I’m the type that would stop calling, and then forget about the prospect altogether.  Of course, this is a terrible way to make sales, but I’m working on getting better.

My initial sales strategy needs more follow-up too.  I contacted prospects via email, and if they didn’t get back to me, that was the end.  Following up with a simple reminder a week later can convert dozens of additional clients, yet I just didn’t make the effort.

Once I changed my strategy, and followed up with clients, in a non-aggressive way, it really made a huge difference to my bottom line.

By the way, if you’re interested in building a local business of your own, with very little risk, check out my mentoring program.  I’ll come to your city, build your website, and find you clients, until you turn a profit!  Guaranteed!

Happy New Year!

One of my new year’s resolutions this year was to finally make this blog something that people are interested in reading.  I’ve had this site for about seven years, and it’s been in it’s current form for about two years and I’ve done almost nothing with it.  2011 is the year when that changes, along with many other things.

For the past several years, I’ve had a tradition on New Year’s Eve.  After everyone goes to bed, I sit down with a pen and a legal pad, and I brain dump onto the paper.  I think about the past year, and my goals for the coming year, and I get it all out.

Then, I make a list of what I want to accomplish in the next 90-120 days.  It would make sense to set goals for the year, but I think those are too easy to break.  Any goal that I don’t want to start working on immediately isn’t something I even want to bother writing down.  I’ll keep it tucked away until I am ready to work on it.

Anyway, at the end, I’m left with a list of 10+ things I want to accomplish on in the coming months.  These aren’t goals like “make $15,000 a month by March”, but rather goals like “Sell the viral script I’ve been working on” or “Create and sell a line of WordPress themes”.  Sort of like goal/projects.

This master list (which ended up with 13 items – my lucky number) now sits on my desk, and every morning when I plan out my day, I look at the list, and for each item, I ask myself “What can I do today to get myself closer to reaching that goal?”.  It’s a surprisingly effective strategy.  I’ve already made huge progress towards two projects I’ve been sitting on for months!

Writing this post is the first step towards one of the goals, which is to communicate more through this blog, and post valuable information that you can use to help your own business.  If you haven’t sat down recently and assessed everything you are doing online, I suggest you do so soon.  The New Year is a great time to do it, but there is never a bad time.

All the best to you and yours in 2011!  You’ll be hearing from me again soon!