If you are a loan officer or mortgage broker and you are on the market for mortgage leads, you may want to research the companies you are considering to determine exactly what kind of leads you will be receiving. Not to mention, where they are coming from.

A junk lead is classified as a lead that is old or recycled by many loan officers and many lead companies. It may come cheap, but chances are, it won’t be worth the two dollars you spent on it.

A real time lead is a lead that is considered fresh. Meaning, you will receive it on the same day the applicant fills out the on-line form. If the lead is any older than a day, it can hardly be considered real time.

When researching mortgage lead companies, be sure to find out where the mortgage lead company is obtaining their leads from.

If they obtain them from web sites they own and operate themselves, where they are directing potential clients to fill out on-line forms, you can safely assume that you will be receiving fresh, real time leads.

If the customer service

rep for the mortgage lead company you are considering starts dodging your questions, than you can safely assume that the leads are not fresh.

This is not to say that the lead company does not have good leads to offer, but it would be wise on your part to find out exactly where the leads are coming from to be sure you are getting the best quality leads for your money.

In the end, it all depends on what you are looking for. Quality or quantity.

Quantity will most likely get you hang ups and answers such as “ I closed that loan weeks ago,” or “I filled out that application months ago.” If you are tired of these scenarios, you should definitely consider going with quality mortgage leads, otherwise known as real time mortgage leads, it just might be worth your while. Best of luck.

Jay Conners has more than fifteen years of experience in the banking and Mortgage Industry, He is the owner of http://www.jconners.com, a mortgage resource site, he is also the owner of http://www.callprospect.com, a mortgage lead company.

How often do you sit around and wonder how to make more money and get more people to buy more from your company? It’s one of the most basic problems every company faces.

The answer is astonishingly simple. Too simple maybe. But I’ve seen it work over and over again with our customers in every line of business you can imagine.

You have to promote. Your income is governed by the size of your customer base and how often and effectively you communicate with those customers.

So raising your income is simply a matter of keeping in touch with your existing customer base, reminding them you are there, offering them goods or services they might be interested in, in such a way that they want to buy more and more often from you. And increasing the size of your customer base by finding and contacting potential customers and persuading them to buy your products or services and then adding them to your customer base and keeping in touch with them in the same way.

If you have a good service or product and you make sure you service your customers well, you cannot fail to raise your income.

How rapidly you raise your income depends on how rapidly you do these actions, how much you promote. Handling the quantity or volume of promotion is definitely the most obvious thing you can do on an immediate basis. Believe it or not, if you send out crappy, crappy promotion, your income will go up. You may not be happy with the Return on your Investment (ROI) for that marketing effort, but definitely it will raise your income. Once quantity is handled and you are sending out loads of promotion, you want to tweak it and raise the quality of your promotion. And here are some things you can do.

Use Offers

to Improve Your Response.

One of the barriers to buying which you work hard to overcome is “no hurry.” Why buy it now when I can think about it for a few weeks, shop around a little and get back to you, maybe? Familiar with that “I’m interested. I’ll get back to you.” Or the card you have designed and mailed out gets put in a drawer somewhere for possible follow up, maybe next year some time.

One way to deal with this is to reward those who buy now and penalize those who don’t. How? With some special offer and one that is attractive and one which has a time element attached to it. “Order your new lawnmower now and we’ll give you a free edger. Offer good until the end of May.” (Or whatever, you get the idea). Obviously the offer must be financially feasible for you so you’ll have to do some number crunching before you make the offer.

You can tie these special offers in to some particular event or season (like jewelry for Valentine’s Day or flowers or chocolates or just about anything for Christmas) but you don’t have to.

Special Offers help you maximize on your direct mail marketing and keep your customers ordering from you when you want them to. It’s just one more way to be in control of your promotion.

You can control how much and how fast your company grows.

Joy Gendusa founded PostcardMania in 1998; her only assets a computer and a phone. In 2004 the company did close to $9 million in sales and employs over 60 persons. She attributes her explosive growth to her ability to choose incredible staff and her innate marketing savvy. Now she’s sharing her marketing secrets with others. For more free marketing advice, visit her website at http://www.postcardmania.com

For most businesses, making a sale is all important. However, despite the amount of effort and attention given to getting sales, there is often no attention given to developing and effectively implementing a systematic marketing process. There are many things that can go wrong between the point of the customer first developing an interest in your product or service and the time of making the sale. Despite knowing this, very few businesses actually take proactive steps to nurture the progress of a sale. In sales and marketing, as in life, preparation makes a world of difference.

Be Prepared to Initiate

In many businesses there is no real attempt to initiate action towards a sale. Many sit and wait for customers to come in or for the phone to ring. They hope the customer will initiate the action. This is OK when things are busy, but what happens when trade slows down? Often the first thought is that we had better do some advertising. Unfortunately, random, unfocused, one off type advertising rarely achieves good results. You need to know what initiates action from your customers and then consistently and regularly set that process in motion. This takes a degree of preparation and planning, by analysing customer needs, preparation of a targeted marketing message and delivery through the right media to attract the appropriate amount of attention from the right customers.

Be Prepared to Measure

Is there anything worse when not making enough sales than to spend money on advertising that doesn’t work? The trouble is, many people don’t actually know whether their advertising is working or not. They don’t take the time and effort to monitor and measure the response to advertising. Every time a new customer makes an enquiry or purchase, you should be asking why they came to you. Then note and keep track of the answers. If you can’t tell what advertising works and what doesn’t, you will end up wasting a lot of money. When you spend money on advertising, be prepared to monitor and measure the results. No one really knows what will work and what won’t. You need to measure results and fine tune your advertising so that you do more of what works and less of what doesn’t.

Be Prepared to Respond

Even worse than doing advertising that doesn’t work is to be unprepared to deal with the enquiries that do come in. Nothing kills off sales quicker than not giving customers what they expect. You need to be prepared with follow up marketing materials, stock to sell and people who are trained to deal with the enquiries. Sales staff need to be trained and prepared to be customer focused. They should be able to lead the customer in a helpful manner towards making a decision in such a way that no pressure is ever exerted by the sales person or felt by the customer. My experience is that very few sales people ever achieve this level of expertise. How about yours? How much training do you give

them?

Be Prepared to Help

Customers hate to be sold, but love having their needs met. In these days where customers are much better informed, most of the old sales techniques of the last decade no longer work. Customers are put off by tired and over used sales techniques. Today selling is about being helpful, providing advice and assistance to customers in matching specific products or services to the customer’s specific needs. You need to be good at discovering those needs to be able to offer helpful solutions. Many sales people jump too quickly over the process of discovering needs and skip straight to the “solutions” stage. This makes selling difficult. When you spend most of your time discovering needs, you build a lot of trust that means when it comes to offering the solution it is usually obvious that it is the right one for the customer and they buy with minimal hesitation. It all comes down to being prepared to help, not sell.

Be Prepared to Compete

Do you worry about your competitors and feel that they are getting too many sales that you should have won? Well, don’t just worry and get annoyed about it. Be prepared to fight back. Find out what the competition does and learn about their strengths and weaknesses. Then get proactive. Attack their weaknesses and downplay their strengths in your marketing and sales efforts. Do a better job of marketing your business and products or service than they do theirs. If you can’t do it yourself, get help.

Be Prepared for Objections

You have probably noticed that most sales don’t go through the process smoothly without the customer raising some objections. Despite this, many sales people seem to be caught out when customers have a problem or need an answer to a concern they have. This is often the case when the same types of objections are raised repeatedly. Good preparation can help in overcoming objections. Get your salespeople to write down objections that stump them. Find the best way to overcome those objections and prepare your sales people to answer them effectively. This is best done by answering the objections before the customer raises them. Do you know what a difference it makes to a sales person’s confidence levels when they feel prepared to tackle objections? It’s enough to make your sales graph go through the roof.

(c) 2004, Greg Roworth, Progressive Business Solutions Limited

Greg Roworth is the Managing Director of Progressive Business Solutions Limited, a business development consultancy firm with branches in Wellington and Auckland, New Zealand. Greg has created a unique business development program that assists business owners transform their business from a state of total dependency on them to a state where the business works so well they don’t have to.

Greg is also the author of “The 7 Keys to Unlock Your Business Profit Potential,” which descibes the fundamental keys a business needs to achieve this transformation. Find out more, get 2 free chapters, or buy the book online at http://www.small-business-success.ws

Since the advent of the Web, business had been good, if not better than before. This is because the Web provides more viable means of disseminating information about the products and the business all at the same time.

Therefore, most businesses know that the proliferation of the on the web business will plainly boost the income-generating potential of the business.

However, most online entrepreneurs contend that for an online business to generate good income in the Internet, the business must have its own product. For this reason everything is a sale, for more details visit to www.newbies-guide-to-making-software.com as well as the thoughts that you have in your mind could count as a product for sale when presented in the Internet for other someone’s use.

But contrary to most popular beliefs, having your own product does not limit you to the many possibilities of earning more by using a “license” that is attached with an “information product” that you may gather on the web. These are known as private label rights.

Private label rights are just one of the three “basic rights” that are embodied in the concept of resale rights marketing. Among the three, private label rights are considered as the most

moneymaking and rewarding.

Private label rights are represented in a certificate or authorization that is attached with an “information item.” The basics of private label rights is to permit everyone to transform, reorganize, change, for more details visit to www.guide-to-plr.com or improve the elements of the said merchandise to go well with the purchaser’s personal desires and yearnings.

For example, if you have a private label right, you can easily segregate the contents of an ebook, and persuade somebody to buy the elements as sequence of pieces of writing.

One of the very best things about private label rights is that you can actually do the same thing inversely. For instance, if you were able to buy a set of information products like an accumulation of articles embodied with private label rights, you can easily bring them together without the risk of some law-affiliated predicaments. Hence, you can gather different articles from different proprietors. With a common thought, you can come up with a creative masterpiece.

In relation, with private label rights, you can for certain append some information on the said product to form it more superior and creative, thus, creating an impression of having a product of your own.

An important part of your business plan should be to generate a steady stream of qualified leads. Making sure that leads flow into your “pipeline” will be one of the most vital aspects of your overall business. This will be particularly true if your business is network marketing. You need an abundance of leads constantly flowing in because sales and recruiting is mostly a “numbers game”. There are plenty of ways to obtain new leads, depending on your time and resources. Perhaps the most simple method is to buy a list of leads that pertains to your niche. Many firms in fact provide this service, and you can acquire leads pertaining to nearly any topic under the sun, from pets to sports.

Make absolutely certain that you choose a firm with integrity. Make sure you can always call them on the phone. Each individual lead typically costs between 1 and 5 dollars each, depending on variables like freshness of the lead and how many customers are allowed to communicate with the lead. It is possible to buy exclusive leads but they are obviously more expensive and you may be on a budget. Leads will come with a broad spectrum of data for the most part like name, postal address, telephone number (sometimes they provide more than 1 contact number), email address, investment they are willing to spend and their interest level.

A key is to make certain that your leads are from a solid source. Sometimes leads acquired from the world wide web are inferior if there is an incentive of some kind to fill out the form such as a free prize of some sort or the other. This can be the wrong motivation to fill out such a

survey and therefore the leads are less than ideal. Their only motivation should be interest in being matched with a home-based business. In addition, note that internet forms are sometimes filled out by children for kicks. This is in fact a severe problem so always find out precisely how the leads are generated. Be certain you know how fresh the leads really are and if you will have exclusive rights to them. Generally a lead should be sold to no more than three other people.

Another option in leads generation is simply networking. Numerous business networking groups and/or organizations exist in just about every major US city. Whether it be through your city or state economic development departments, Chamber of Commerces or private initiatives, the structure is already set in place. And also many local newspapers publish meeting dates for the different interest groups.

You really should be an active participant in these meetings as they can truly help your business. Although networking can really take place anywhere, certain environments are better for building a productive network. Business meetings fall into this category. It may sound like a bit of cliche, but the key with leads is in the follow up and follow thru. Bear in mind that you might need to follow up more than once or twice before closing the deal. After making your initial sales presentation, you need to follow up to answer any questions or objections, then you will be ready to close the deal.

For further information go to Home Business Articles and discover more about sales lead generation and other related topics in the free-reprint original home business article archive.

Ryan Joseph is a writer/researcher. For more info. visit http://www.aaronsfreebies.com/

Corporate marketing groups – especially bandwidth-challenged small-to-mid-sized departments – can be so focused on tactics and fire fighting that they jeopardize their marketing investment. There is a tendency to overreact to events, to tackle symptoms rather than underlying fundamental problems and to jump at the opportunity to please the boss. Many times, this kind of tactical knee jerking may be fatal.

Without great marketing, companies won’t flourish, especially those in highly competitive markets. Yet the chaotic nature of emerging or dynamic growth companies and the tendency to place the marketing burden on too few individuals is a setup for failure. Promising companies may be left in the dust, or at least handicapped at the starting gate.

Marketing Operations is emerging as an important discipline for improving performance and measuring ROI in admired technology companies (like Intel, IBM and Amazon) who have refined and fine-tuned their marketing organization with an operational focus. Given the demands that these organizations face today, an innovative approach is central to solving critical issues like results measurement, bandwidth constraints and creativity limitations, and building value-added outsourced supplier relationships and effectively managing budget. Many of the best practices, efficient processes and systems approach from large company Marketing Operations can and should be applied by emerging companies that are serious about their marketing investment. Here’s why:

PROBLEM #1

Ill-defined metrics

Today, more than ever, corporate marketing departments need to justify their existence. The need to measure results is unavoidable. However, the instincts and skills that make an outbound marketing practitioner great-action-orientation, verbal and written acuity, persuasiveness, the ability to build strong relationships-often don’t translate into an ability or willingness to scientifically and objectively evaluate success. Add in broken systems and the organization’s unwillingness to pay for marketing evaluation, and it’s no surprise that many marketing departments are unable to define meaningful success metrics.

SOLUTION

Marketing Operations ensures that the right processes are in place to establish meaningful metrics at the front-end of marketing process, enabling the measurement of success at key intervals, and as each program concludes.

PROBLEM #2

Slammed resources

The prevailing attitude of “doing more with less” can leave key people discouraged, overwhelmed, near burnout, and eventually, circulating their resumes. The consequences for organizations are costly mistakes, high turnover, and collapsed programs when key people leave, and missed opportunities to leverage the “ugly-stepsister-Cinderella-in-waiting” programs that never get off the ground because of a lack of ownership.

SOLUTION

Marketing Operations addresses these resource limitations by ensuring workload is effectively allocated, roles are clearly defined, interdependencies are understood, team members feel satisfied with their jobs and the programs and additional resources, whether through additional headcount or outsourcing, can be successfully justified to executive management.

PROBLEM #3

Sketchy institutional memory

Marketing is dependent on accurate information, a historical view into past successes and failures, and the ability to recognize patterns that link seemingly unrelated data points. Unfortunately, knowledge in many marketing organizations is scattered all over the company. It’s in the heads of individual workers, on shelves, on people’s hard drives, in long forgotten filing systems. When people leave, a big piece of organizational knowledge goes with them. Information loss is a huge productivity killer for marketing teams. Lost insight that must be regained or reacquired wastes previous marketing investments.

SOLUTION

Marketing Operations facilitates knowledge sharing, an enduring repository of information and greater decision-making based on fact, as opposed to hunch.

PROBLEM #4

Constrained creativity

The best creativity comes from many brains working together in collaboration. A consequence of the age of the “individual contributor” director is constrained creativity. When the entire creative burden falls mostly on one outbound marketing person, the ability to think out of the

box can be severely impacted. Creative synergy results from many minds thinking as one.

SOLUTION

Marketing Operations enables the creative process to benefit from the synergy of team.

PROBLEM #5

Failed supplier relationships

Most successful companies can point to strong, long-term marketing supplier relationships as integral to their success. Likewise, a pattern of failed supplier relationships is often an indicator of marketing department failure, rather than poor vendor performance. Unfortunately, companies that have had consistently bad relationships with outsource suppliers often react by seizing control and bringing everything in house. While this strategy may provides the illusion of control, it lets marketing managers deflect blame for failures, rather than teaching them how to manage their outsource suppliers by taking responsibility for the results. In addition, this strategy won’t scale with the growth of the organization.

SOLUTION

Marketing Operations helps set realistic expectations and mutual accountability between suppliers and the organization, increasing the effectiveness of outsource partners by empowering them to act as an extension of the internal team.

PROBLEM #6

Lost discretionary budgets

Use it or lose it. Misuse it and lose it anyway. Many corporate marketing departments are leaving discretionary budget on the table or allocating it to the wrong initiatives. This discretionary marketing budget “Catch 22″ occurs because:

• It’s very time consuming to manage the budget effectively, especially in companies with broken financial systems

• Each marketing spend-decision creates more work for the one-person or small-team marketing department in terms of project management, measurement, supplier management, etc.

• Doubt persists about the ability to successfully justify the expenditure to management

• Focus is instinctively on high-visibility marketing activities and C-level executive “requests” over fiscal management (marketing people are more inclined toward marketing than finance)

SOLUTION

Marketing Operations facilitates implementing the system support infrastructure and financial management discipline needed to protect precious marketing budgets.

PROBLEM #7

Narrow marketing mix

Many companies align their fate with the success of too few marketing programs. Whether it’s lead generation, public relations, trade shows or advertising, the over-reliance on any one particular program can derail a company-especially if a key program unexpectedly loses momentum. In the meantime, programs that could have had strong leverage never get a chance to prove their mettle and are forever relegated to the “B” list.

SOLUTION

Marketing Operations puts the means in place to launch potentially high-value marketing programs that would never otherwise get out of the starting gate.

The Bottom Line

In a nutshell, Marketing Operations is an organization’s best bet to:

• Ensure that success can be measured and replicated • Leverage systems and processes to enable consistently excellent performance

• Encourage great marketing departments to stay together

• Allow the marketing organization to flourish, despite the unexpected, but often inevitable, loss of a key employee.

Gary M. Katz, APR, is president and CEO of CommPros Group, a Santa-Clara, Calif.-based firm that provides marketing operations services to help companies leverage their marketing investment, plus a variety of outsourced marketing program management services to support lean marketing departments. Gary is a veteran with more than twenty years of experience in the technology industry where he directed corporate marketing, communications, public relations, lead generation and qualification, investor relations, and employee communications programs. He has served as director of communications for ShoreTel, director of corporate marketing for Aplix Corporation, senior manager of corporate communications for Insignia Solutions, and as a director, account supervisor, or preferred subcontractor for more than a dozen leading public relations and marketing communications agencies. A past president of Silicon Valley PRSA, he holds a master’s degree in organization development from the University of San Francisco and a BA degree in public relations from San Jose State University.

People often ask me what the difference is between sales superstars and sales “wannabes”. There are many possible answers to this question however there are several core characteristics that sales superstars display in bucket loads which are often missing or less obvious in more mediocre performers.

Not surprisingly, few of these are rocket science and none of them are new. It would be really easy to read through them and think, “I know that!” but the question has to be “Do I really implement that and if I did implement that consistently, what difference would it make for me?” So I challenge you to read this twice, rate yourself (honestly) on a scale of 1-10 in each are and then create an action plan to increase your effectiveness and consistency in every area.

 Have a plan and work it every day.

Sales superstars know what they want and they are focused on getting it. Period. When I run sessions I ask individuals to review WHY they are in sales and WHAT they want to get out of it. Most people do the exercise with the state of mind… “I know this” or “Why are we doing this? Can’t we just get on with it??!”. The problem is that although it seems obvious, it’s this desire that focuses us on doing what we need to do on a day to day basis.

Top sales performers plan their day the night before or at the very latest in the morning over their coffee. Rather than chatting about Eastenders (they probably don’t watch that rubbish anyway!) they are getting down to planning their day. They ask themselves questions like, “How can I achieve my goals today?”, “What activities do I need to undertake today?” and “How can I add value for my clients today?”. Then they plan their campaign and work through it meticulously.

 Prospect new clients every day.

Metaphorically speaking, sales is a bucket with a hole in the bottom. Get over it! If you stop filling the bucket, it will soon be empty. Empty bucket means an empty sales pipeline and an empty bank account. You can sometimes patch up the hole short-term by improving your client relationships, increasing your sales skills and by creating more from existing accounts but long term the bucket is still leaky!

Whether you fill your bucket by cold calling, networking, referrals, events, PR, marketing, direct mail, white papers… you need to be doing this every day. We all know this but only sales superstars do it! Most salespeople only prospect when they have little or no choice. Not only is this the wrong way to go about it, you also guarantee that you’re feeling pretty desperate when you do get around to it! And what client likes a desperate salesperson??

 Be genuinely interested in your clients.

Clients are bored of salespeople going through the motions. Salespeople are bored of going through the motions. So why do it?

I understand that it’s hard to get motivated on the 47th call of the day or the 15th meeting of the week but if you can’t get motivated then you can be sure that your client won’t be! I’m guessing that your market is pretty competitive right now. In many markets clients get hundreds of marketing approaches for every meeting they take or for every salesperson that they speak to. Make sure it’s you by getting motivated and interested in your clients now.

People often ask me, “How do I differentiate myself from the competition?” The answer’s simple… be genuinely interested!

 Ask great questions.

Most salespeople think they are great at questioning. Most salespeople are wrong. When I run sessions I often ask people to write down some questions they can ask of their clients. I give them between 5 and 15 minutes. Few people come up with more than 3 or 4 bland questions and many come up with less that that!!!

When I ask about it, delegates say things like, “Oh! It’s difficult like this. I have loads of questions when I’m in flow!!”. Poppycock! Most salespeople ask few or no questions and those they do ask are all about them not the client e.g. “Have you got budget?”, “Are you the decision maker?” and “Are you happy with your current supplier?”.

Great questions come from two things:- The first is being genuinely interested in your client. The second is planning and preparation. Questions need to be planned, rehearsed and written out. Questions need to be captured, learnt and practised. Focusing on this one area of your business over the next few weeks could well cause a sales explosion for you.

 Listen to understand.

If we’re bad at questioning we’re even worse at listening. If you think about it, this is hardly surprising because we’re never actually trained to listen. Most salespeople “listen to talk”. This means that they are filtering their clients’ words listening for what they want to hear. For this reason, many salespeople totally miss crucial pieces of information because it wasn’t what they were wanting to hear at that time. This can kill a sale.

To be able to listen to understand we need to be genuinely interested in our clients, focused on what they are saying and devoid of agenda. This doesn’t mean that we don’t have objectives for meetings just that the best way of getting there is to understand our clients, their challenges and their needs more fully. When we truly listen to clients with the intent of understanding we will reap the benefits because clients so rarely get listened to in this way.

 Know your clients.

In today’s fast moving market places few people know their clients fully. This means that they miss opportunities and

lose business because they don’t have enough understanding of how they can truly help their clients.

The information you need will change from market to market but could well include… size, markets, customers, projects, turnover, values, mission, individuals, individual drivers, future growth plans, exit strategies etc etc. When you start to truly understand your clients you can really start to tailor your solutions to meet their needs…

 Sell solutions not products.

Sell solutions not products. Sell solutions not products. Sell solutions not products.

Clients do not get up one morning and decide to invest in a new PC system. They buy solutions to challenges which are effecting their business growth, profitability, efficiency etc. Most salespeople are too tied up in the nitty-gritty of their products and have little or no understanding of what the real business benefits are to their clients. This is partly due to lots of product training and partly due to not asking the right questions.

If you’ve ever had problems with trying to get clients to commit; had deals that seemed “on” then went sour; thought a client needed a far bigger solution than the one they were prepared to pay for; had clients who bought something else instead… then you were probably selling products not solutions.

As a benchmark rule… we shouldn’t discuss specific products or solutions until we know what the explicit need(s) of our client is. (Explicit: stated by client not you!)

 Know your market.

Know who your core clients are, their demography, their industry sector, their personal demographics etc. Outline your perfect customer on a piece of paper… in detail. Check that there are enough of them to build your business to the size that you want to build it to. Work out how to reach them, create your offering for them and get to work!

I have worked with many clients who will not turn away business. They say things like, “You can’t very well turn stuff away can you?” I can see the argument for this in the short term but in the medium to long term it can become professional suicide. The reason for this is that you end up tied up working for the clients that you don’t want anymore and you never find the time to target and approach those who you do want.

Let’s say for example you’re a consultant and you charge £750 per day but you want to be in the £2,500 per day market. If you’re delivering 27 days a month at £750 you’re too busy to target the £2,500 a day clients. What’s more, if you’re good, the £750 a day clients will always keep you busy. Clearly this segmentation will not always be about money… you may choose to be at the bulk-business, low end of the market place.. even so, you need to know your market.

 Be proactive, confident and professional.

The outside world will always judge you by what you do and how you appear. It may seem unfair but it’s the way that it is! What’s more, you will normally be judged on your lowest point of your lowest day! If you have a bad day and you do something that’s not particularly professional then you can bet your last Rollo that you will be remembered for that and not your numerous great days!!

Sales superstars constantly raise the bar and ensure that they are seen as proactive, confident and professional by their clients, their peers, their managers, their friends and their families. If this is a case of “fake it until you make it” then so be it. Ultimately, if you keep on behaving a certain way it will become natural for you and before you know where you are, you’ll wake up one morning and just be that way without having to think about it!!!

 Learn from the best.

I once read that we become most like the 6 people that we spend the most time with. Now, that’s a bit of a scary thought. Factor in the moaning, whining, mood-hoovers that often surround us on a day to day basis and it’s hardly surprising that we end up struggling to stay “up for it”!

Everyone should have their own “success team”. This can be real or virtual. Who do you want to model your life on? Whose actions impress you? I try to surround myself with positive people who are goal-oriented and who take responsibility for their own success. I listen to motivational speakers and experts in the car. I seek out top performers and ask them what they believe, how they behave and what they did to achieve their success. Then I ask myself, “How can I use this to increase my success?”

So there we are… 10 characteristics of sales superstars. On your 1-10 scale – how effectively do you display them on a day to day basis? Where are your areas for improvement? How are you going to raise the bar and get more of what you want in your career and your life?

Good luck!

For the last 10 years, Gavin Ingham has been helping sales people to explode their sales performance by turning self-doubt, fear and lack of motivation into self-belief, confidence and action. With his inspirational approach to sales performance and motivation Gavin combines commercial experience, personal excellence and communications technologies in delivering personal and business sales success.

Visit http://www.gaviningham.net now to join Gavin Ingham’s free newsletter Real World Sales Tools ~ real world sales tools & strategies that you can utilise to outsell, out-manoeuvre, out-position & out-live your competition! Refer us to your friends & colleagues but never to your competition!

Join now and get Gavin’s ground-breaking 9-part objection handling course absolutely free.

If you are thinking of elementary school fundraisers there are many things to choose from. There are many companies willing to provide you with items to sell and they usually do this at a reasonable rate so you can walk away with a nice profit at the end of the day. The elementary school fundraisers are usually left up to the moms of the kids to get these things together. To have your fundraiser you will have to decide on what product you want to sell.

There is not much difference between elementary school fundraisers than with middle school fundraisers or high school fundraisers. The bottom line is that the school needs money for various reasons, but the product you choose may have to differ from elementary to high school. Another factor is that you may get a lot more help in the middle school fundraisers than what you would verses the elementary. With the lower grades, there may be a added problem of closely watching over the kids. Whatever the grade level, elementary, middle or high school fundraisers should be fun for anyone that participates.

You can choose a tried and true product or choose something that is new wave. Just keep in mind there is always a chance with a new wave product, your elementary school

fundraisers may not be as successful as with a product that you know for sure is going to sell. It is best to research the product you choose before you purchase it. This will insure that your middle or high school fundraiser will be popular with the people that purchase it. It is a good idea to make sure that the product you choose for your school fundraiser is of good quality there may be another time you will have to do this all over again. You have to give a good product for the donations to your fundraisers whether it is elementary or high school fundraisers.

If your elementary school fund raisers are too much for you then get professional help. Professional fund raisers will guide you through the process of how to make either your middle school fund raisers or high school fund raisers a huge success. Don’t be afraid to ask for help because there is lots of it out there.

Elementary school fundraisers, there’s lots of things to do. Make sure you do them well.

For a website totally devoted to Fundraising visit Peter’s Website Fundraising Answers and find out about Fundraiser Ideas as well as Church Fundraising and more, including Cheerleading Fundraising, Cookie Dough Fundraisers and School Fundraisers.

Which product feature of yours is every buyer keen to know about? Which sales tool closes prospects instantly? Your price. Yet, despite the far-reaching consequences of a company’s pricing, I’m surprised at how little time small business owners spend on it. Here are a few ways to bring pricing to the forefront of your marketing plan.

Price is a promise

Let’s say you’re shopping for cereal and come across two varieties. One is a well-known brand in a resealable 20 oz. package, which comes with a toy and sells for $4.99. The other is a store brand, that’s packaged in a non-descript plastic bag and sells for $2.99. Which do you buy?

If price was your only factor, you’d buy the $2.99 brand. But there are other factors. In this example, the $4.99 box promises you the reputation of a well-known brand, a toy to entertain your kids and the convenience of resealable packaging. Remember that a price guarantees all the promises wrapped up in your product or service.

Determine your promises

Before you ever touch a calculator, first take stock of all the value factors that are bundled into your price. If your company sells a product, these might include:

· the performance of your finished good

· your distribution capabilities or

· your service and installation services.

If yours is a service, value factors might include:

· the bottom-line impact of your deliverable

· your company’s ability to meet tight timelines.

· your experience level.

Pricing financially

After taking stock of all your value factors, grab a calculator. First, add up all your direct costs (those incurred as a result of delivering your service) which include labor and raw materials. Then, add up all your indirect costs (all other costs that aren’t direct) like rent, insurance and utilities.

Now, identify the profit your company needs to attain in order to fuel new investment and reward your employees. Finally, forecast what your annual unit volumes will be. Now, divide the total of your costs and profit by annual units sold, and you end up with a unit price. Sure, this is a simplified example, but the process is sound. This kind of analysis will help ascertain where your prices should be from a financial perspective.

Pricing competitively

It’s important not to stop here. Instead, gather competitive pricing information from any of these sources:

· Intermediaries (distributors, brokers)

· Previous customers

· Prospects

· Ex-employees of your competitors

· Trade associations

After digging around enough, you’ll be

able to generate a range of prices that your competitors fall into. Together with your financial prices, you’ll now have two reference points.

Pricing by position

The last step is to and ask this question “How do we want to be perceived in our market?” In my book The Marketing Toolkit for Growing Businesses , I identify 13 possible price strategies you could choose from, but to make this easy, consider just three:

· Premium Price; the most expensive 1/3rd of your market

· Middle Market Prices; the middle 1/3rd

· Budget Price; the least expensive 1/3rd.

Based on the value factors you’ve identified and your chief competitors, which of these 3 price level best matches your product? The lesson in this exercise is that price positions your product.

The worst pricing decision you can make

“Because we’re slow right now, we’ll lower our prices. Then as business rebounds, we’ll raise them.” This is a bad marketing decision because lowering your prices immediately positions your product differently to buyers. Plus very few companies make attendant cost reductions, so margins erode. And when you try to raise prices again, customers who bought at the lower prices will expect to get more value factors for the additional price. A better strategy is to maintain your current prices while seeking cost reductions to maintain your margins.

Another bad pricing decision

“If I drop my price to $15, then will you buy?” Here, you signal to a buyer that your list prices are not final. Sensing this, buyers will negotiate harder and the resulting price reductions will cut into your margins. Instead, think about coupling price discounts to the buyer with equivalent reductions in your offering. For example, you could say “OK I can lower my price to $15, but I’ll have to reduce our warranty period from five years to two.”

Sure, pricing is a financial decision. But it has wide ranging impact on your positioning, your selling efforts and your product offering. Remember the words of Thomas Paine “What we obtain too cheap we esteem too little; it is dearness only that gives everything its value.”

About The Author

Jay Lipe, CEO of EmergeMarketing.com and the author of The Marketing Toolkit for Growing Businesses (Chammerson Press), is a small business marketing expert who helps companies grow faster. He can be reached at lipe@emergemarketing.com or (612) 824-4833.

Kristin@emergemarketing.com

You may be engaged in a marketing activities that are working against you. Or, at the very least, are making sales more difficult. It’s a common problem – marketing that focuses on what your company can DO and what your company KNOWS and how much experience you HAVE.

Surprise! This doesn’t work.

Instead of focusing on YOU, market yourself as an innovative problem solver. You’ll be pleasantly surprised at how easily this approach attracts new customers. Emphasize how your service or problem fixes their nagging issue, pain, or dilemma.

It doesn’t matter what you offer as long as you keep some basic principles in mind:

1. Self Interest: People (you and me included) want to know what is in it for them. They are interested in useful ideas, services, and products that make something better in their life. Don’t talk about YOU. Start talking about THEM.

2. Comfort: People do business with people they know and trust. Start a “conversation” with people by giving them articles, newsletters, or other information that you have created to HELP them. This also allows them to learn more about the way you think and your capabilities

3. Generate Interest: Are you effectively communicating the one thing that makes

you unique? What can you offer that no other business can? In one sentence, describe it. This is your Core Marketing Message. Use it over and over to generate interest and get people talking about you.

4. Communication: To have a good relationship, you have to stay in touch. Whether it’s family, friends, or leads, this principle is exactly the same. And when prospects are ready to buy, you want them to know YOU provide the best solution. Keep communicating through phone calls, e-mails, lunch dates, and so on.

ACTION ITEM: Are you offering a solution to a problem? Are you communicating regularly? Do you know your core marketing message? If your current marketing materials don’t take this approach, rework them. With a focus on THEM, you will easily generate more sales and greater revenue!

Wendy Maynard, your friendly marketing maven, is the owner of Kinesis. Kinesis specializes in marketing, graphic and website design, and business writing. Visit http://www.kinesisinc.com/resources/articles.html for more articles and free marketing wisdom. You can visit her marketing blog, Kinetic Ideas at: http://www.wendy.kinesisinc.com

Want to harness the power of kinetic marketing? Sign up for Kinesis Quickies, a free bi-monthly marketing e-newsletter: http://www.news.kinesisinc.com