Planning to Sell Your Business?   17 questions.

Max. score 85. How did you do?

1  Have you had or are you planning to have your business valued?          

No 0          

Yes 5          

      

2  Do you have audited financials?          

No 0          

Yes 5          

        

3  Can you get away on vacation or holiday and have the company run without you?          

No 0          

Yes 5          

       

4  Are you planning to remove family members working in the business?          

No 0          

Yes 5   

       

5  Does your company have a written procedure and operating manual for the business?          

 No 0          

Yes 5          

       

6  Have you written job descriptions for all employees?          

No 0          

Yes 5           

      

7  Can you sell off unnecessary assets?          

No 0          

Yes 5          

       

8  Can you eliminate unproductive employees?          

  

No 0          

Yes 5          

        

9  If you have large inventory, can you reduce inventory to at least a manageable level?          

No 0          

Yes 5          

       

10  Does your largest customer represent more than 10% of your business?          

 No 0          

Yes 5          

       

11  If you lease space, do you have options to extend the lease?          

No 0          

Yes 5          

       

12  Can you keep your accounts receivable higher than your accounts payable?          

No 0          

Yes 5          

       

13  Can you reduce your total accounts payable to a 30-day average?          

No 0          

Yes 5          

      

14  Can you reduce the amount of personal perks in the business?          

No 0          

Yes 5          

      

15  Can you reduce/delay unnecessary large purchases?           

No 0          

Yes 5          

        

16  Can you focus on increasing your yearly sales?          

No 0          

Yes 5          

      

17  Can you focus on increasing your yearly profits?          

No 0          

Yes 5 
Chris Wilkinson.                              

Certified Business Behaviour & Attitudes Analyst.               

Business Coach.

Tel: (905) 275-2907 (Mississauga--Canada).

E-mail: buspilot@bell.net

5 strategies to build employee loyalty…….

----who needs disengaged employees?

1. Communicate, communicate and communicate again. An open-door policy and consistent communications are vital to ensure employees are motivated to stay with your business. Spread the word about where your company is going. Consider communications vehicles such as regular face-to-face meetings where people can give their input. And use informal settings such as breakfast meetings and luncheons.
2. Be an employer of choice. Make your business environment an attractive one by giving employees high-profile projects that will help them grow professionally. Be creative with your development strategies and allow employees to do on-site customer assignments, for example.
3. Get feedback from employees, even those who leave. Conduct exit interviews to find out why people are leaving and what measures you can take to encourage them to stay. Ensure your performance evaluation is a two-way process-in other words, ask employees what they think of your company.
4. Be innovative with rewards and compensation; look at long-term rewards such as profit-sharing and short-term rewards that involve personal or family life. If work is taking your employees' personal time, for example, you could offer theatre tickets for the entire family. Or make employees' lives a little easier by offering perks such as dry-cleaning services and catering. Most importantly, always be equitable with salaries to create a work environment that fosters fairness.

5.   Connect your people with what they do in order to increase employee buy-in and involvement in your company. Be sure your employees understand the impact of your products and services on your customers' lives. For instance, a company that manufactures tire rims could send a message to employees that its products are used in school buses that carry children. 

Chris Wilkinson.                              

Certified Business Behaviour & Attitudes Analyst.               

Business Coach.

Tel: (905) 275-2907 (Mississauga) CANADA.

E-mail: buspilot@bell.net

Are your sales people spending too much time chasing prospects with too little immediate potential? Be like the car salesman who asks, “and what are you driving today?”

Techniques for Qualifying Prospects…….

If your business relies on a great deal of cold calls and referrals, then you know the importance of properly qualifying prospects. Qualifying allows you to learn about your prospect and their needs in order to determine how your product can meet those needs. Guerrillas can save time by using the telephone as an effective tool to pre-qualify customers. The phone enables you to play the odds, covering a large geographic area to screen potential customers and set up appointments.

It is essential to accurately track these calls and designate whether a prospect provides low or high customer potential. When organizing your call schedule, move the lower-potential prospects to the bottom of the list. Catalogue all the calls you make, maintaining a call-back schedule. Update this schedule frequently. It may be helpful to employ a software program specifically designed for tracking calls.
As a salesperson, your ability to qualify depends on the number of different questions you can ask in each type of selling situation. When its time to meet the customer face-to-face, be prepared with a list of those questions. Include every single question you might ask of a prospect in order to make her aware of an overlooked need or buried dissatisfaction.
A helpful technique is to ask qualifying questions to determine the customer's needs without mentioning your product. Your interest alone can pave the way to a sale.
By asking specific questions of your prospect, you can determine whether the prospect doesn't have a need for your product or buys the product from another supplier. If the customer doesn't offer your product, find out what she is currently doing so you can explain how your product can enhance her operations.
Often when a customer says "I don't need this," she may really mean "I don't need this right now." Your competition may have beaten you to the punch. If the customer isn't locked into a long-term purchasing contract, you may still be able to set up a future sale. Unless you can come up with a way for the customer to move her current inventory, though, this is a tough sell.
If your prospect reveals displeasure with her current supplier or product, your presentation should emphasize how your product can meet and exceed their expectations. When prospects are shopping for an item with specific features or a stated price, remember that they are "shopping." They may be flexible if you can capture their interest and extol the benefits of your offering.
Listen to your prospect's wish list and then present the merits of your product. Your presentation should include the key features, benefits and prices. Don't laud all the bells and whistles if the customer might perceive them as frivolous and get sidetracked. And unless a specific feature jumps out at you, determine the sequence of your presentation with the visible, tangible benefits up front.
Remember, you won't lose a sale by asking too many questions or learning too much about a customer. Many customers are not conscious of their needs. Your questions will stimulate their awareness, qualifying them and hopefully, getting you the sale.

Chris Wilkinson.                              

Certified Business Behaviour & Attitudes Analyst.               

Business Coach.

Tel: (905) 275-2907 (Mississauga, Canada).

E-mail: buspilot@bell.net

During challenging times are you being pressured on compensation issues?

Three strategies to address the salary expectation issue.

• All news is good news. Regularly ask employees if they're OK, and don't be afraid of negative responses. Maintain a steady schedule of off-site meetings with your employees. Over lunch or coffee, pump them for information. You will likely find that employees who are well paid, will give you a heads-up when another employee is unhappy.  When confronting a malcontent, saying little is the best policy. Getting employees to become ‘real honest’ is a challenge. It's very important that you listen to them without getting defensive.
• Use numbers to defend salary levels. Base all salaries on a tangible measurement of some kind. Salary must be tied to performance expectations.  With the exception of cost-of-living adjustments,  do not bump up a person's salary unless they commit to higher expectations.  Recently there was a case where someone felt underpaid next to their peer, but the sales expectations were less for the unhappy person. Faced with an offer to adjust their salary based on higher performance expectations, the person declined the offer and stayed at the same compensation rate.

• Open the books. If employees understand, in general terms, the company’s financials, they're likely to have both a greater stake in the company and a better understanding of how quickly they can reasonably expect salaries to rise. The best way to explain a new bonus structure is to show how the company's overhead works. The more the employees know about how a business works, the less they think that it is a cash cow. For example, a profit-sharing plan might be less lucrative year after year, if overhead and benefits increase.

       Working with you.            

              Chris Wilkinson

Certified Business Behaviour & Attitudes Analyst.  

Business Coach.

Tel: (905) 275-2907 (Mississauga).

E-mail: buspilot@bell.net