Sales / Sales Management

Spring Cleaning For Small Business? Yes! In December!

December 12, 2023 by Jim Blasingame

Whether it’s a year where something we once knew as “normal” was part of our reality, or during an unprecedented and unimaginable year of a global pandemic, the abiding management question for all small business owners is always valid: “What’s the best use of my time right now?” And at no other time of the year are we more time-management challenged than in December.

The twelfth calendar month is the only one where two powerful imperatives converge against a hard stop, each demanding a full measure of your time, attention, and resources:

The perennial push to close out the sales year as strongly as possible, while
Simultaneously taking steps to set the business up for a fast and clean start when the New Year dawns on January 1.

Pardon the football metaphor, but in the marketplace game, your business plays all year, December is the two-minute drill of your fourth quarter. And in this tight transition period, that fierce competition for precious time and resources requires discipline and devotion to fundamentals.

Our grandmothers practiced the fundamentals of spring cleaning when the weather broke warm. In the marketplace, in order to kick off the New Year right, your spring cleaning should happen before then. There are many targets for a business’s December cleaning, but here are five important ones to get you started.[Continue Reading]

Five Financial Mysteries Revealed, Part III

October 24, 2023 by Jim Blasingame

This is the last of a three-part series covering what I call The Five Financial Mysteries. In the first two articles, the first three Mysteries were revealed about the relationship between cash, accounting, and profit.

In this article, I’ll complete my attempt to help you stay on the right side of the business survival/failure statistics. So, buckle up as I reveal Financial Mysteries Four and Five.

Financial Mystery Number Four

You can get squeezed between vendors and customers.

Vendors and customers are the prime entities every business deals with financially every day the business is open. Understanding your relationship between these two, (literally between, because your business is in the middle), is the key to cash flow management. The way to avoid getting squeezed is [Continue Reading]

Mastering The Sales Discipline To Shut Up

September 21, 2023 by Jim Blasingame

Contrary to what you’ve heard, selling is the oldest profession, because “In the beginning” the serpent sold the apple to Eve. Everybody knows that. You might say she bought wholesale and then sold the apple retail to Adam. And as we now know, that was one expensive transaction.

A key characteristic that separates humans from the other animals identified in Genesis is ego. And while ego can be a beneficial motivator in selling professionally, in order to do that successfully, we must do something that’s in direct conflict with our ego — we have to let someone else talk more than us.

So, when you’re on a sales call – face-to-face with a prospect – what do you do? Do you unload the dump truck of stuff about products, pricing, etc. that your company installed in your head? If that’s your answer, your professional selling career is doomed. [Continue Reading]

In The Age Of The Customer, Relevance Trumps Competitiveness

July 14, 2023 by Jim Blasingame

For 10,000 years, customers refined their search for products and services down to a couple of semi-finalist sellers based almost entirely on the classic competitive value proposition: price, product, availability, service, etc. I’ve termed this period the Age of the Seller.

That was a nice trip down memory lane, wasn’t it?

The new prime differentiator today is no longer the competitive model, but rather a customer’s appraisal of how relevant a seller is to them, often before they even know if a seller is competitive. So, does this mean that sellers no longer have to be competitive?

Not at all – no one will pay you more for less. But consider three new marketplace truths: [Continue Reading]

Networking For Referrals: It Makes Business Easier And Life Simpler

April 20, 2023 by Jim Blasingame

The act and practice of networking – for business or any other endeavor – is one of the great intangibles in life. Networking can help you get into a college, a new job, a business prospect – you get the picture. But none of this happens until you actually meet people.

In the marketplace, the business reason for networking is to get referrals. Ivan Misner is the Founder of Business Network International (BNI), the world’s guru of networking, and the author of a wheelbarrow-full of books on the subject. He thinks people who don’t get enough referrals just don’t know how to ask for them. I agree. Ivan has an excellent suggestion to help with this, and it revolves around the person called the “center-of-influence,” or COI for short. The COI is the connection between you and the person you want/need to meet, and whom you likely met while networking.

Ivan says, “Don’t make your COI do all your work for you. Help them out by asking this question, ‘Who do you know who…?’ and then finish the sentence with a description that fits what you need: your business, industry, product, service, etc.” Here’s an example: John, let me ask you a question, who do you know who buys advertising? …truck tires? …owns apartments?

Here’s a concept I call, “Blasingame’s Entrée Spectrum.”[Continue Reading]

Bring Your Customer’s Customer Into Focus

March 10, 2023 by Jim Blasingame

When you take a photograph, the resulting product is two-dimensional: tall, wide, and flat. But in most cases, you want the photo to show depth, where images in the foreground and background are all in focus.

In photographic terms, the range of focus front to back is called depth of field. The best way to expand depth of field so more of the subjects in the photo are in focus is to add light. Light contributes to depth of field.

If you were given a photo of people who were the most critical to your success, you’d easily recognize your customers in the foreground in perfect focus. But as you look deeper into the photo you’d notice the images behind that first row increasingly drop out of focus with each receding row. The reason is that for most of the history of the marketplace, businesses have gotten away with having a very narrow customer depth of field.

When the coin of the realm was to be competitive, that meant you spent all your time thinking about how to serve the person in the foreground, the first row of your business world: your customers. But as I’ve revealed in the past, being competitive has been trumped by being relevant. And in The Age of the Customer, perhaps the most important component of being relevant to business customers is helping them serve the most important person in their photo: [Continue Reading]