Scaling up your business for multiple lead generation

Scaling up your business for multiple lead generation: by Jason Li 2012 ©

If you are a small business and working all hours of the day, but want more revenue as your reward, then scaling up your business is the next step.

Here are some answers if you’ve been wanting to generate a few more leads or customers every week for your business.

In fact, from what I’ve seen... being good at lead generation is vital to business success.

To help you scale up in terms of offering more for new and existing customers...

So that they can spend more money with you without adding much costs to you.

Scaling up

Scaling up your business is the way you can keep increasing your business so that it expands and brings in more revenue. So I’m going to share a several secrets that I’ve seen – and best of all they are all practically doable without needing too much training.

This can either be done yourself, or by working with other people.

Once you have found a way to begin scaling up, you can just keep on adding more add-ons until your business grows to a size that is much bigger than it is today.

Scaling up small businesses with more lead generation

When you are self employed then you do absolutely everything in the business...

In fact, small businesses with two or three people tend to work this way as well. So it can feel really hard to even contemplate ways of scaling up your business.

So here I’m going to share some kick-ass leverage and lead generation methods for those of you who think it would make a difference – because you’re busy and you want answers now.

Now scaling up a small business is not easy. I have seen businesses that have only one product range or a small amount of portfolio services or products on offer and really wanted to expand. Their only solution at the time was to maybe sell more of the same. An example would be a retailer locating another retail site so that they can now go from having one shop to two shops.

Obviously, this is great if you have a thriving business and can look to get a new retail shop financed with money in the bank. But not everyone can instantly afford to get another site up-and-running. What if you have no money? How long will you wait to get the money?

There is an alternative. I have seen many owners implement ways of scaling up small business in ingenious ways without having to wait years for a new site. In fact, just copying how the larger businesses do it in the following way will do you no harm.

Using ‘leverage’ in your business

Imagine you want to lift a boulder. Remember when you were kids and you came across sitting on swings and you went back-and-forth to get really high up; well in ancient times engineers used systems like these to move boulders with levers and ropes so they could move huge heavy objects that no human alone could move.

We are going to use the same practical method of using a lever to allow a small business or self employed person to leverage their business: so that a small amount of input using leverage will create a bigger output.

Leverage methods

The first and most important is using the internet: If you sell products then find a business that sells products in a similar nature to you on the internet and work out how you can apply it. Stick with this as it’s more than the obvious stated so far.

Let’s say you sell cartons of juice in packs of three, then you can start by looking at other juice etailers. Look at all the various methods they use to scale up. Next, look at businesses who sell other low cost items too that might not be juice but in multipacks; it could be packs of three tennis balls. How did they do things which your business can use as a solution? Look at the packaging, the offer, bundling with other products as examples.

Let’s say you are a dry cleaner, how could you get more passing traffic to stop and drop-off and pick-up? MacDonalds and car wash places have drive through mechanisms. Could your dry cleaner have one side of the business for drop-offs and one side for pick-ups in the shop? Could you even have a drive through for vehicles to pass clothes through a window on one lane, and collections on another window? Could you join up with a petrol station or grocery shop?

Your take away: leverage other business methods to increase your lead generation

Digital leverage methods

There will be a business out there with the same problem that came up with an internet solution that you can implement in your business. Imagine having an ecommerce site that worked in generating orders and leads without having to put money down on retail sites, or not waiting for another site in order to expand the business.

Is it possibly in any way for you to use the internet to leverage what you do? Read on for more ideas.

Digitise products

Is there any way possible for you to digitise what you do? What? Say that again? What I mean is, can you create a digital version of what you do; your products or services? Chefs and restaurants can create ebooks on how to cook meals that sell on the internet, teachers can create videos which students buy as standard lessons, teachers can provide one-to-one bespoke lessons on Skype, and businesses can create audio files to download to offer advice such as accountants, business coaches or nutritionists. These will reach people who have no time or cannot use your services immediately.

What about other products? If you have toys then you might have vlogs – video blogs - to teach kids how to do more such as Lego videos,  for business people on how to turn your smart phone into a business tool, or a hedge trimmer into ‘Average Joe’s’ favourite sculpturing tool.

Don’t just think of your local market, think country wide; worldwide even. Just think, your business could have a customer lying on deck chairs around a pool in sunny Monaco now, and she is telling her friends about your digital product that she can’t get locally.

Your take away: When you digitise, you get more people finding ways to use your products, reach more people, and give customers the opportunity to share with other people who might find your offer interesting.

Partnership Leverage methods

Partner with other product suppliers: Let’s say you are a photographer, could you create a website that includes promoting the photographic studio you use for a referral fee, partner with a wedding planner, partner with a video recording service, or add on a gallery to sell your product and exclusively other peoples stock, or partner with a camera shop to provide camera lessons to enthusiasts, or partner with a walking group, or partner with a site seeing tour.

Your take away: partnerships give you multiple ways of generating revenue and more touch points with potential clients.

Cash flow

Digital products allows you to scale up without having to spend lots of money upfront.

 In partnerships, as customers use other partner products and services, you can be promoted to them as a trusted partner. Doing it this way might be of no cost to you when using partners.

If it really succeeds, then it also provides you great feedback, and much more revenue. If you have a channel (partner) that brings in plenty of new customers then you will know what this type of customer likes. So if your leads keep coming from a walking group and they want your photography expertise you can expand on this area.

So how much can you scale up your business to a higher level from these ideas and practical methods?

Will any new lead generation ideas bring you new streams of income and more revenue? Will ideas like these add value to your business?

If you know of any businesses that may find the information here worth reading, please Pay It Forward.

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Main problems when training people to use online software

Main problems when training people to use online software: by Jason Li 2012 ©

Trainers find many problems when training people to use online software as it is a lot different from traditional blackboard, books or PowerPoint. You will find also find that students are not always sure what to expect from online training, and the following reasons will show you why.

Linear

When using traditional methods such as PowerPoint or books, training is more in a Linear method. So you will get a PowerPoint slide and follow sentences starting from the top as they arrive on the slide one-by-one until the slide is filled with sentences. And then onto the next slide and the next sentence starts again at the top.

Linear training by explaining key words and short sentences can be quite hypnotic and you will have to use a lot of conceptual skills to help the students visualise what you are explaining.

In order to keep the concentration of the classroom; firstly you have to have explained a concept and managed to get the students to understand; then you have to drag them back from the images that make sense in their heads back to concentrating on the slides; then you need to provide some interaction so that the students don’t fall asleep due to the sequential telling by the trainer. If you just explain sentence-after-sentence one slide-after-another, you will very quickly lose the concentration of the students.

As you can see from the way I have written the five paragraphs so far about linear training, there has been minimal interaction so you might be bored at this point. Imagine putting students through this for an hour of reading slide-after-slide?

So if you are still using old school technology and methods, then at every 5 minute intervals you will need to provide interaction or the information will not sink in. By the way, could you see the word linear is spelt out in the paragraphs above. Just thought I would wake you up. It was boring what I had to write above, but necessary, so the big letters would have given you some intrigue. You might even re-read the above again now and let it sink in.

Problems with online training

The problem with online training is different. It is usually training of a software programme or package. It is hardly ever linear in terms of starting at page/slide one and ending at the final page/slide at the final sentence. So you if you are the trainer that likes to just start at A and just go through the motions to Z you will need to adapt.

With online training, you will need to create a script to make sure you have your own linear training method. So you start in the programme where you want, and take them through the screens in a sequence that best allows the students to absorb the information.

Needless to say, most online training will involve a lot of jumping around, so you must go slow and thoroughly through a section at a time. Miss any steps and your students will not understand what has happened or how they ended up at a certain screen in the software.

In a classroom

Training online in a classroom is different in comparison to using traditional tools, as you would expect. If the students are just watching you: clicking different areas of the screen, typing, amending and jumping into new screens, it can be hard for them to follow.

Also, just watching can be very hard on the concentration. After following you make 10 clicks and 5 amendments or passwords, this can mean the student has to remember 15 different actions in a linear process, but through different areas and different screens; this can also involve flicking between two or more software packages too.

To let you know what this is like, play 15 moves in chess or monopoly and then walk away for an hour and then try to exactly replicate every move and option available chosen. It’s very hard to do and hard to expect any student to remember and put into action later.

So break each section into bite size chunks so that students can master each chunk. So wherever the student is in the software package, they know what to do in that section and can piece together sections they do know well; which will help them know which sections they need to master.

Over the telephone

In most cases when teaching on the phone or a conference call, you cannot see what they see on the screen; so make sure you are more descriptive in your directions.

Here is a way to practise. Describe step-by-step how you would make a drink or pour a drink. Then list all the steps. Then an hour later follow the steps and see if you complete the task without any problems. You might do it well and have a perfect drink. Or you might miss a step such as ‘twist the milk cap clockwise until the cap comes off, then pour the equivalent of three tea spoons of milk gently into your tea making sure it does not splash everywhere’. Forget this step and you have tea or coffee with no milk. Your training will need broken down steps to help students in pretty much the same manner.

If you jump a step, the student will panic naturally as they want to keep up and follow you. They may not even say anything and click around in silence and then before you know it be on a completely different screen to you. Then you will need to stop and reverse the clicks, which means you will be wasting valuable time.

Click and follow

By far the best way is for students to click and follow you on their screen.

I have done this both in a classroom and on the phone with a board room of directors. If a few people are sat around a screen, make sure you have a dedicated person clicking the mouse, and one person on the phone on their side as the main speaker for their group; with yourself on the speaker phone as the sole voice so everyone can hear you giving directions and answering their queries.

Go through each section one-at-a-time, and then give the other side on the phone a chance to ask questions. If you get asked a question, just show small simple things to questions if you know it won’t lead to more questions. If you think it will lead to more questions or take a long time to answer, say you will note it down and come back to it later as it will break up the training sequence.

Practice

Just like any job, you need to practise a lot. Training online is not natural, you have to re-train yourself and quickly get students adapted at the beginning of the session to training in an online way.

So set the rules for the students to follow what you say and how you will give them opportunity to speak and ask questions as you go along.

Script

Finally, make sure you have a script that you can test until it works. I have done this many times to ensure it flows smoothly and students can follow you seamlessly. It’s not easy to do. You just have to do it over-and-over again until you get it right.

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