When I talk to business owners such as yourself, without a doubt, the number one thing you tell me when I ask “How’s business?” is:

“I need more sales…”

So…

I decided to take that sentence apart and break it down into its core components.

Once we start talking about getting new sales, this is when a flurry of questions start to evolve, such as:

1. I’m not a sales person, and it’s awkward to ask for a sales, so where do I start?
2. 90% of my business is referrals, how do I get more?
3. There’s so much information out there, what’s real?
4. What do i focus on?
5. What should I say?
6. What medium should I use to let others find me (calls, email, social, etc)?How often should I be communicating with my prospects?
7. How do I find more time in my day to grow my business since I’m spending most of my day with my current clients?
8. On and on…

There’s a long and short answer to the question of “how to get more sales”.

First, what is a sale?

Seem’s obvious enough.

A sale is a value exchange.

Usually it goes like this, “You give me X result and I’ll compensate you monetarily”

The biggest area where I see that this fails is not in the actual sale in exchange of products and services for money, but in the PROCESS before, during and after the actual sales.

If you break down the actual sale, which is only the transactional step in the process, you’re missing the vast majority of the preemptive steps that lead to actual sale.

You’re also missing the post-sales activities that will turn your one-time sales, into multiple sales and future referrals.

Let me illustrate this so it makes better sense.

This is a diagram of a Continuous Improvement Cycle (more on this in a future post) of the typical steps that need to happen before a sale and what happens after a sale to prime your profit pump for future sales.

As you can see a typical sales process can have 5+ steps in the acquisition and monetization phase prior to an actual sale and another 5 to 10 steps after the initial sale to setup your retention phase.

Once you visually see the steps, things make much sense. They also cause a bit more confusion since each step within the process comes with several of its own questions.

The point of this illustration is to show you that a single sentence, like “I need more sales” really is an entire process, each with it’s own starting and ending points that need to follow a seamless flow in order to make a new sale.

Kinda scary. I know.

Don’t fear, there’s a straight forward approach to understanding each step of the sales cycle to break each area down to see where your bottlenecks are.

For many of you, this may be the first time that you’re thinking about new sales in this process based approach.

When you visually break each step down based on what’s working for you now as a start, you can better understand what areas you need to focus on to turn what’s working now into a repeatable process.

If you really don’t know what’s working now and you’ve gotten sales in a reactive manner, this sales process initiative is imperative to starting to understand what’s working in your business and how to systematize each step to start getting.

What’s next?

Don’t let this process based approach to more sales intimidate you. Once you grasp this concept of sales process mapping, vast, new ideas and possibilities will start to unfold for you and your business.

If you’d like help creating a sales process map to break out what you’re doing now, refine it, optimize it and systematize it, please schedule a free consultation with me and I’d be happy to break this whole process down for you to help you get “more sales”.

The post I need more sales appeared first on Christian Fea.

The concept of Empiring could actually be applied to not only business, but it can be applied to your personal life too, your relationships with your kids, with your spouse, with your family. Something that you want to do on a large scale, something you may want to change in the world, some type of vision that you want to go after. This is this whole concept of Empiring, it’s going from where you are now to making great changes, great strides and great accomplishments in the quickest amount of time. What I’m talking about here is, as I said, I originally thought about this concept probably 15 to 20 years ago, and I’ve been a consultant for about 20 to 25 years ago. If you guys don’t know my background, originally, I started out in software development and I was a software developer for about 15 years and then I was a CTO. And then I began a career of selling mostly enterprise software.

This combination of how we were developing software 15 to 20 years ago is very different than a process that you’re creating software now. Out of this trial and error in this in the trenches approach to, “Hey, what’s working? What’s not?” Lots and lots and lots of experimentation on, “Hey, how do we make that process better, faster, easier?” I became very obsessed, if you will, of this whole concept of process, on how things happen, how you start something and how that evolves to an end point. If you’re talking about, I mean, it could be something very simple. Everything in life is really based upon a process from brushing your teeth to walking to your car to starting your car to driving to work. The process is just involved with lots and lots of different steps. How do you go from starting a process to ending that process in the least amount of time and being most effective?

This concept of Empiring, let’s just say that we’re applying this to a business right now. If you want to start a business, they’re literally there’s dozens of things you have to do, if not hundreds to start a business, okay? You have to come up with a business name, you have to do in a corporation, you have to do tax filings, you have to file with the IRS, you have to set up QuickBooks. For example, you have to do your sales collateral to figure out your product market fit and pricing and your value proposition and come up with sales tax. It’s just endless. So whatever this process is on what you want to do whether it’s business related, personal related. If you want to change something in the world, if you want to make a difference in someone else’s lives, if you want to make some type of massive transformation, everything is a base, everything is based on a process.

So really I became a master of process optimization. I started thinking in just how things are done, why they’re done. I can remember sitting in movies and thinking about, “Well, what if they do it this way and what if the process was different?” You can take it even to something more simple like going to a restaurant, for example, a fast food restaurant or a sit down restaurant or subway for something like that. While I’m sitting there wasting time in line, I’m thinking about a certain type of system that could be in place to help me order what I want faster and reduce the amount of error or loss because there’s a certain amount and I don’t know exactly what the percentage is in the food business on loss. Because wrong things are made or the waitress or the waiter didn’t listen to exactly what you said, and they have to go back and they have to change it and there’s a lot of frustration.

This whole concept of process optimization become fascinating to me and I started to apply that to what I was doing in my work and for my consulting clients and how to apply that to sales and marketing and how to make things automatic and take the human error of human beings out of the process. I’m not talking about making this robotic and completely unemotional, I’m talking about how do you make a process or a human being more effective by applying process automation to make his work easier, faster and better and more enjoyable. I know I’m bouncing around from different topics and different topics here, but this whole thing about Empiring is a combination of multiple disciplines and domains of study and trial and error. We’re talking about the evolution of software development, we’re talking about Agile process, project management, we’re talking about Six Sigma, we’re talking about leadership principles. We’re also talking about psychology and why we make the decisions we do.

At what times during the day do we have our peak energy cycles on when we’re most productive. There’s a whole psychology side of this Empiring and how we want to structure our days and how we want to break things down into the smallest possible unit, which we call physical movements. How we break those down into momentum mini days and how we apply that over a course of a week. There’s a lot of different disciplines that are coming to this program. It’s super exciting, it’s a super effective way to help you get from where you are today to where you want to be. It doesn’t matter if it’s in business, it doesn’t matter if it’s a relationship, it doesn’t matter if it’s you want to solve world hunger, you want to launch a rocket into space, it doesn’t matter. There’s processes in place that can help you go much faster, much easier.

Basically, you’re going to be breaking these tasks down into the smallest possible unit and how you apply that to get to where you want. Over the next couple of weeks, I’m going to be launching some different videos, I’m going to walk you through this process, I’m going to keep you involved and include you prior to the launch. But this is just a very raw introductory meeting, this is totally not scripted, this is just off the cuff of my mind. I didn’t plan this at all. I just wanted to get out there to you to let you know that some really big and exciting things are coming to help you advance to that next level of productivity and evolution. All right, so I’ll keep you updated. New videos are going to be coming soon. All right guys, thank you.

The post Empiring initial rough cut explanation appeared first on Christian Fea.

And just about everyone says the same thing. They say, “Well, you know, I get up early because I’ve got to drive. And I get up early. I’ve got to get in the car, I’ve got to get ready. I’ve got to do the whole commune and plan to get to work. Once I get to work, I’ve got to park my car. Then I’ve got to get out to the office. By the time I get in the office, it’s say, 9:00. And then I check a little bit of email. And then I have some coffee, and then I go to water cooler and I make my rounds, and I talk to people in the office. And by that time, it’s 10:00, 10:15. I make some phone calls. And then I have some meetings. And by that time, it’s ready for lunch. Then after lunch, then I come back. I have some more meetings. I do some paperwork. I do some computer work. By that time, it’s 4:00 and I’m ready to go home.”

I ask them if they actually try to plan their day as far as time slicing. And time slicing is a really good technique because it takes the whole proportion of your day and turns it into slices like a pie. Let’s just say there’s eight slices in a pie. If you look at your day like a pie, and you slice it into eight different areas, doesn’t have to be eight, just an arbitrary number. It could be three. It could be four. It could be five. What I do is I break it out into several things called mini days. Each mini day only lasts a certain amount of time. For example, accounting. This is where I do invoicing. This is where I bill for employees. This is where I bill my contacts. I’ll set aside one hour a day for accounting purposes. This is where I do, say, I download information from the day. And I’m going Quick Book activities. This is stuff that’s very important to my business, so actually I do this myself in conjunction with my accountant. But I keep the pulse on it.

One hour a day, I focus doing accounting activities. And regardless if I finish all I need to in that one hour time slot, I move on to the next task, or the next mini day. The next mini day could be marketing, and I’ll spend two hours a day on marketing. Again, these are arbitrary numbers. And the way you do business or how your life is set up, it’ll change. But the overall thing to remember is to divide these into mini days. Two hours a day, I’ll spend on marketing. I’ll do sales copy. I’ll do pay per click. I’ll do talking to my JV partners, setting up deals, getting on the phone. But that two hours is strictly dedicated to doing marketing activities. I turn off the phone. I turn off the email. I don’t want to be interrupted within those two hours.

After the two hours, I’m going to go on to my next mini day, take a little break between that, but I’ll go on to my next mini day. Now the thing to be concerned with and realize is that there are certain things that you have to do every day. By chunking them up into mini days, you don’t let things get too far behind because you think it’s more important. Now the things that are not so important still have to be done. They’re not critical, but they’re important. And by having the mini days, and stopping at a certain point, you don’t spend the entire day, say, on accounting activities. Or you don’t spend the entire day, or the majority of the day, on meetings or marketing. Whatever that might be, it’s broken up into small manageable chunks that you’re doing every day so you never get very far behind.

I want to leave you with one takeaway point. For the next seven days, do this. Take a piece of paper and write down everything you do from the time that you get up until you go to bed at night. I don’t care what it is. And this is kind of a loose representation of where your time is going. You will be absolutely amazed at how much time you waste on inactive, nonproductive things that you could be using towards building a business, or towards doing something that’s productive and efficient that’s important to you in your life.

The big takeaway is, take a look at where your time is going and you will absolutely be amazed of the time that’s being wasted on things that are not getting you towards or bringing you closer to your major objectives in life. Okay. We’ll talk to you soon. Thanks. Christian

The post Life Optimizers… Time focus and the mini day challenge appeared first on Christian Fea.

Velore Networks: The blockchain powered, relationship marketing platform to optimize your human capital and word-of-mouth acquisition channel.

The essence of the Velore network is to establish a peer to peer trust network for the purpose of optimizing the under utilized asset known as human capital relationships.

The current concept of relationship marketing, i.e. referrals, affiliate marketing, networking, recommendations, word-of-mouth and influencer association is currently a haphazard, unoptimized attempt to infiltrate a specific trust channel to recommend products and services to an audience based upon a trusting peer to peer , 1:1 or peer to mass 1:x relationship.

The initiation, process and transactional management of social, peer based recommendations or word-of-mouth process has been traditionally executed in a centralized, unmanaged and reactive environment that lacks a formal framework. This current environment is highly inefficient that produces an outcome of inefficiency. In and optimize an intentional environment, this method of value exchange, i.e. recommendations and word-of-mouth, has the power to be on the magnitude of hundreds to thousands of times more effective if the overall process has a centralized management system built into it.

Velore aims to solve the challenges of the existing Peer to peer and peer to mass recommendation process to optimize this channel not only from a commercial exchange standpoint but from a chain of value standpoint.

The post Velore Networks: The blockchain powered, relationship marketing platform to optimize your human capital and word-of-mouth acquisition channel appeared first on Christian Fea.

All of us understand that word of mouth advertising works. And quite efficiently. When you enact a real referral plan that any random person can profit from and go one step further, you’ve crafted a great way of optimizing your chances that were public.

What Can a Client Referral Application Do?

Even in seeking out referrals you’re likely just adding a fresh component to an activity you probably carry out on a regular basis. What can a professionally created software do for you? A functionally organized client referral application that provides guidelines or examples can allow it to be very simple for customers to refer you to others.
A referral plan that is adaptable can give you a faster path to the customers that are perfect.

Those ‘ in addition to the referrals thank you’s’ you hand out for the first launch can assist you to develop faithful customers who’ll return for future services or merchandise conditions to you.
A string of referrals and continuing introductions will definitely allow you to raise your company growth and your company network.

There are a number of components you should definitely have an understanding of before starting to share your referral software with others, while there are many problems which should be taken into account when creating a client referral software. Make sure that the format you’ve selected for referrals functions nicely with the particular targeted people which you will want referrals from after you have your aims in mind.

What are you going to offer as incentives or rewards?

In the instances of freelance workers and small business, free consultations or reductions can be an excellent starting point for supplying incentives. No one anticipates a fighting small business or person to allow them complex prizes or never-ending free services.
What makes up a referral?

Or are you going to need new referrals before rewarding to make a purchase. While this is completely your choice, you should definitely ensure you make this clear nicely in advance so that there are not any awful or miscommunications feelings within your application.
How are you going to monitor and handle your referrals? Understanding who, what and when are the critical components involved when it’s time in understanding. Should you not need an easy filing system, whether a complete database or a workable system, perhaps you are doomed to fail. Springtime for a consultation with a specialist if desired or buy a database system that is fundamental to begin.

Christian Fea is CEO of Synertegic, Inc. A Growth Marketing firm that specializes in fast growth strategies to get your brand more profitable faster. He exemplifies how to profit from Joint Venture and Referral relationships by creating profit centers with minimal risk and maximum profitability.

The post Can Referral Software Help Me Grow My Business? appeared first on Christian Fea.

When you’re working on marketing even more of your product and services, making brand-new products and improving the ones you already have you have 3 main, higher degree ways to obtain it done. You either develop it, you buy it, or you companion with other people for it. In this 2 component series, I’ll be demonstrating some higher level encounters to these methods to product and service creation. I’m presently dealing with a “Build Buy Get Companion Rating Matrix” that enables you to tweak your decision making process and find a strategy that ideal fits your circumstance. Try to find this in future posts, yet I’ll email you when it’s done.

Regardless if you decide to construct it, buy it or partner for it, consider your main objective in this stage is to actually have a product and services that is ready to offer. I’ve seen dozens and lots of businessmen acquire so caught up in having their ego’s brushed while their checking account perish a rapid fatality.

Create it – This strategy ahead up with a new product and services is the one that many business owners at first opt to take, yet it’s the most costly course as for time and money goes. Considering just how quickly the desires and needs of your customers change and unless you have deep pockets for a round product creation cycle, this alternative isn’t really as attractive as you the moment believed. If you’re a small company proprietor with a restricted spending plan and time and you do not need to have all the copyright civil liberties, I ‘d recommend you to think about partnering with others, at least initially to confirm that there truly is a market for what your ready to invest enormous quantities of time and money into.

Be mindful of what I call, “Builder Remorse” Builders Sorrow implies an essential choice junction that lots of brand-new businessmen make. New businessmen, and overtimes experienced business owners believe that their product is larger and a lot better in some undefinable means and their going to outsell their competition merely because it’s theirs. One word on that. Ego! Although the product or service is 95 % the like every little thing that’s in the marketplace already. Their 5 % differentiation is just an unverified theory. Concepts are all over, good ideas are limited and great suggestions or sparse. Don’t end up retiring your suggestions, services and product to theory-ville instead of the performing the golden rule of advertising. Test, test, examination.

Buy it – This might be a better alternative for you to get started swiftly and bring your concept to market. While it could be tougher to find an off the shelf product that matches your vision, think about the moment cost savings you’ll have in acquiring your product or service to marketing by purchasing a version of your vision that you could alter. Either include in it or include it into your alreadying existing product.

Partner for it – A better means to develop a sales circulation stations or anxiety of shedding your copyright, reputation, time and money? Any person that’s ever done a real collaboration deal (not simply and email list promotion) will inform you that there can be ONE HUNDRED’s of jobs, information and inquiries to figure out before also recommending, offering or integrating your product into other people’s sphere of influence, sales processes, follow-up procedures, sales groups and up-sell approaches.

On the downside, you’ll hear about scary stories that partners slouch, unethical, don’t know exactly what’s going on in their very own camps, have undelivered assurances, do not follow-up and have prevented you and gone direct with other people. The top reason I view that collaboration bargains fail is vague and impractical assumptions. Adhered to by a close 2nd to personality clashes and do not have gloss perspectives to acquiring concerns addressed with potential partners. Yes, some kind of ramshackle ventures will happen to you if you make a decision to create a partnership advertising program (PMP) and go this course without the correct prep work, expectations and mindset.

Nonetheless, there’s wonderful feasible upside take advantage of with collaboration deals. If you’re in advance and truthful about exactly what you need to offer and how you could beneficially add to the task you’re taking the initial step to producing equally useful and profitable connections. If you’re well ready, develop a master plan, a letter of intent, connect and follow-up routinely with your crucial partners then collaboration deals can be the most lucrative, fastest time to market, highest yielding, repeatable, reproducible advertising and marketing approaches you’ll ever before assemble and execute and make money from.

Religious Fea is Chief Executive Officer of Synertegic, Inc. A Joint Endeavor and Referral Advertising company. He displays how to profit from Joint Venture and Reference connections by producing earnings facilities with minimal threat and max productivity.

Go here for even more Joint Venture Marketing Strategies to assist you enhance your earnings.

The post The 3 higher level ways to create a new service or product appeared first on Christian Fea.

With nearly 100 million people using Facebook, 78% of them use their mobile devices to access the network.

By 2017 it’s expected that 154.7 million Americans will be using Facebook.

New Facebook Marketing Research Shows What Works
The latest research on Facebook marketing shows interesting trends and opportunities. Use this to update your Facebook marketing with the latest findings.

Facebook Marketing: 4 Key Elements
Here are four key marketing components to consider in order for brands to succeed on Facebook.

8 Tips to Maximize the Marketing Value of Facebook Cover Photos
Advertise your products and services by turning your Facebook cover art into hard-working marketing billboards. Here are eight tips to create, manage and leverage cover photos as Facebook ads.

500 Social Media Marketing Tips: Essential Advice, Hints and Strategy for Business: Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, and More!

The post Facebook marketing holds key to future profits appeared first on Christian Fea.

Interesting I thought…

My next question was, “Do you have a formal process for getting more referrals?”. 7 out of 10 of the business owners ultimately said, “No ,we don’t.” By ultimately, I mean they fumbled their responses with “No, but we should”, or “I’ve asked my sales team to ask for referrals”, or “We give a bonus to our employee’s for providing referrals.”

So you can deduct that based on this simple test that 80% of business owners admit that referrals are the best way for them to get new clients, yet 70% of them don’t offer a precise process, system or procedure for getting new referrals.

This is a huge opportunity for business owners to get serious about developing a process of referrals.

Your action take away: How can you create a referral getting system to consistently bring in new clients to reduce your new client acquisition costs?

Jeffrey Gitomer illustrates the value of customer referrals and how to get them.

How to Get Proactive Customer Referrals | Sales Training | The …

The post How to automatically get referrals for your business appeared first on Christian Fea.

What Can a Client Referral Program Do?

Even in actively seeking out referrals you are likely only adding a new element to an action you probably already carry out on a regular basis. Advertising and selling your own products or services. So what can a professionally created program do for you?

• A functionally structured client referral program that provides examples or guidelines can make it incredibly easy for clients to refer you to others.
• A flexible referral program can provide you with a quicker path to the most ideal clients.
• The referrals as well as those ‘thank you’s’ you hand out for the initial introduction can help you gain loyal clients who will return to you for future services or product requirements.
• A series of ongoing introductions and referrals will undoubtedly help you increase your business network and your business growth.

Take Into Consideration

While there are many issues that should be taken into consideration when creating a client referral program, there are a few elements you should absolutely have understanding of before beginning to share your referral program with others.

While research and planning is the best starting point for setting up your client referral program, you must also consider your goals for the program itself. Once you have your goals in mind, make sure the format you have chosen for referrals works well with the specific targeted individuals that you will desire referrals from. There are a few questions you can ask yourself to help determine the best path to success.

What will you offer as rewards or incentives?

In the cases of most small business and freelance workers, discounts or even free consultations can be a great starting point for providing incentives. No one expects a struggling small business or individual to grant them endless free services or elaborate prizes.

What constitutes a referral?

Will you reward your referral network with handing over the names and contact information for you to chase down? Or will you require new referrals to make a purchase before rewarding the one who sent them. While this is entirely your decision, you should absolutely make sure you make this clear well ahead of time so that there are no miscommunications or bad feelings within your program.

How will you manage and track your referrals? Knowing who, what and when are the vital elements involved in knowing when it is time to reward. If you do not have a workable system, whether a full database or a simple filing system, you may be doomed to fail. If needed, spring for a consultation with an expert or purchase a basic database system to get started.

Christian Fea is CEO of Synertegic, Inc. A Joint Venture and Referral Marketing firm. He exemplifies how to profit from Joint Venture and Referral relationships by creating profit centers with minimal risk and maximum profitability.

Click here for more Referral Program Strategies to help you increase your profits.

The post Can A Client Referral Program Help Grow My Business? appeared first on Christian Fea.

12 Tips for the Best Business Referral Networks

With a few helpful tips and suggestions you should be able to build an impressive network, even if you are without extensive contacts currently.

1. DO be worth talking about. You can’t expect networkers to want to mention your products and services if your products and services are subpar, or even worse, embarrassing.

2. DON’T put people on the spot. You may ask for an introduction or reference, but find a balanced way to do so that doesn’t sound pushy or aggressive.

3. DO remain visible and be well liked. It is easier to refer a business that has a kind and understanding representative than it is to promote even great offerings where individuals will have to deal with a cold, elusive networker.

4. DON’T use inappropriate practices to build your lists.

5. DO contribute to and join in with as many worthwhile groups, causes or charities that you have time for.

6. DON’T hog the spotlight at every committee or business meeting. While it is okay to share ideas, and to share positions of leadership, make sure you aren’t overselling your business, or yourself, with aggressive communication standards.

7. DO show up when you RSVP in the positive or tell your business or consumer network that you will be there.

8. DON’T expect those in your industry or individuals with similar expertise as yours to be willing to be a referral source for you. These individuals will have their own objectives and businesses and are already unlikely to want to share that with another business in direct competition with theirs.

9. DO reach beyond your own professional scope to locate business connections. Managers, educators, salespersons and business owners who aren’t in direct competition may have a need for your offerings and be willing to share that with their own colleagues.

10. DON’T rush into any new business relationships. Take the time to look into those businesses and see what they represent, how well their brand is accepted and exactly how much business they do.

11. DO make sure that business connections run both ways. If your business referral networks are extending themselves to you at their cost, make sure you at some point, in the near future, reply in kind.

12. Perhaps most importantly, DON’T rush or panic. Your business isn’t going to collapse immediately without the foundation of good business referral networks to support it. Take your time to selectively cultivate them and your business is certain to benefit.

Christian Fea is CEO of Synertegic, Inc. A Joint Venture and Referral Marketing firm. He exemplifies how to profit from Joint Venture and Referral relationships by creating profit centers with minimal risk and maximum profitability.

Click here for more Referral Program Strategies to help you increase your profits.

The post 12 Guidelines for Great Business Referral Networks appeared first on Christian Fea.