29. November 2011 by admin.

It used to be simpler… Back-in-the-day when people used to write checks paying the monthly bills seamed a lot simpler. Here was the procedure: 

• The bills came in the mail (we call that snail mail today)
• You opened them
• You filed them according to due date
• You wrote all of the checks maybe twice a month in the evening
• You then placed the checks in the provided envelopes
• You wrote the due date on the back of the envelopes
• You doubled checked to make sure you put the right check in the right envelope,  quickly sealing the envelope after the double check
• You put the stamps on the envelopes so they were immediately ready to get into the mail
• Then you waited until the due date?
• You mailed it on the date it was DUE, probably floating a few days of credit due to the actual delivery of the mail

Floating checks was a cool benefit of the olden days but I’ll trade that for modern online banking any day. Just the thought of not having to balance a checkbook is worth it. 

What I really liked about the olden days was that you only got letters or monthly bills in the mail, maybe you got an occasional catalogue.  On top of that you always knew which bills would be coming and how much they would be. Maybe you got 10 pieces of mail a month.

Not today, it probably feels more like 100 pieces of mail, mostly junk mail arrive to your snail mail box every single month.

Today your monthly bills are probably all mixed up. You get some of them via snail mail, some via email. If you want your monthly bills to be organized again just like those simpler times my advice is for you to get one dedicated email address, dedicated to JUST BILLS.

Don’t give out this new email address to anyone but your vendors. Keep it a secret. Don’t give it to your sister, your mother, your Facebook friends, not to anyone but your vendors.

Here is a service that does just that. Check out BillsOnly.com. As the name implies here is a service for JUST BILLS.

Posted in monthly bill organization, monthly bills | Comments Off

10. October 2011 by admin.

When you run a small business there are no shortages of “Gotchas!” that creep up around every corner. One of the ways to keep the Gotchas! from getting out of hand is to stay organized. Organizational skills are the key to knowing what is happening in your business.

The area that probably needs the most attention is in the bookkeeping department. Just the sheer amount of paperwork that needs to be completed to file your quarterly taxes is enough to drive most small business people batty. Add in the amount of mail that comes into your office and I bet you find yourself wondering how to stay on top of it all.

Here’s an interesting tidbit. I bet you rarely mail things today, maybe a bill here or there. Most modern accounting programs allow you to email your invoices. In the future you can bet most company’s will skip the postage and opt for electronic mail.

Receiving invoices via email and paying those emails through your banks Bill-Pay features is a real time saver and it keeps you organized. As your bills come in your can immediately file them in your electronic vendor files. Never loose a paper bill again!

The same applies to your personal life as well. Every company wants you to go paperless. What they really want to do is stop the snail mail which cost them real money in printing, handling, and the postage on all of those bills. The difference between getting electronically organized using email in your business and your home is that your company has a permanent email address. That email address should really never change - unless you change your business name why would you change your email at your dot.com address?

On the flipside you may have only one business email address but I be you have 5 personal email addresses all meant to be “permanent” that you set up at different times. You probably have a yahoo email, a gmail email, and aol email and a host of others you have forgotten about.

I think I found a way out of this email mess of multiple permanent emails, get an email address specifically for bills. Here’s one it’s called BillsOnly.com. The object of BillsOnly is simple, create one family email address that you know will only receive bills. Contact your gas company, mortgage, electric company, car loan, lawn service, and credit card company and give them this new email address. Then on the 15th and 30th of every month log-in and see who’s sent you a bill. Pay them and drop the paid emails into folders to keep them forever.

To stay organized don’t give out that email address to anyone but a vendor or service provider that bills your family.

Even though BillsOnly.com would work for businesses to help them get organized the concept is the same. In a business you use your one business email address to receive your electronic invoices. In your personal life you need that same one permanent address to recieve your bills for the next 50 years. Check out BillsOnly.com

Posted in Organizatoin | No Comments »

26. July 2011 by admin.

When you are heading down I-85 and you are ready to make that turn onto I-185 towards Columbus, GA you have better check on 2 items before hitting the ramp. These are:

1. Gas
2. McDonalds

Columbus, GA shares area code 706 with Augusta. Which for those who know the state those two cities are very far apart. There is only pasture land, pine trees, and cotton between them. So when hitting I-185 make sure you have eaten and that you have gas otherwise you have at least 20 miles before you get anything that resembles choices for either item.

 Once in Columbus go all the way down to Front Street you will see a charming little southern town.

 Travelers Tips from: http://unitedstates-areacodes.com/

Posted in Business Travel Tips, Area Codes | No Comments »

5. July 2010 by admin.

In today’s world, certainly in the last 20 to 25 years the focus in selling has been on the “consultative sales approach” for closing more business.

I don’t disagree with this  this type of approach. It revolves around carrying on a dialogue with your prospects. The idea is to do more listening and less talking. Keep the customer conversing with you on what they need and then in theory…Wham o - the deal should just close itself.

If done right then a skillful salesperson can probably get the deal to “just close.” After all the prospect spent the last few hours, days, month and/or years telling you exactly what they need and why your type of product will serve their needs.

But for some reason, even with your product you didn’t get the deal or worse the prospect STILL has the same pain they had when you began the process.

Here’s the problem with people who use the consultative sales approach as a crutch, those that are always expecting the deal to close automatically:

Prospects are people and people in general HATE making decisions.

So to make it a little clearer, you may have the exact product that is needed but usually your competitor has a similar product as well. So which one of the two consultative sellers did the prospect buy from?

The one who actually closed the deal!

I am not abandoning the consultative sales approach. What I am saying is that a lot of salespeople are using it today. So if you get two salespeople with similar products, one of the two still has to close the prospect into a customer.

Have you lost the “art of closing?” Here’s my favorite way to tell… One of the homework assignments I give in my Sales Training classes in Atlanta, GA is: Will you write down the two closing statements you used last week.

You get some pretty interesting answers, but typically none of those answers are real closing statements. Learning to close could significantly increase your revenue next year.

David Peterson - Sales Expert: AtlantaSalesandConsulting.com

Posted in Atlanta Sales Training | No Comments »

24. May 2010 by admin.

As a sales trainer and a sales consultant in the Greater Atlanta area I get into a lot of interesting projects. Next week I will doing a train the trainer for a new sales manager in the roofing industry.

A couple weeks after that I will be conducting a full training seminar for a company in the paper industry.

However not a day goes by where I’m not consulting someone on the topic of sales. And not a day goes by where the subject of the Internet and more specifically how to get organic rankings on the search engines.

This topics has come up so many times over the past few years that i went ahead and setup a company to help the regular people (non-tech types) reach their search engine potential.

The search engines are not all that complicated. All they really want to do is to respond to a search inquiry with relevant search results.

That’s it… if you want to learn about specific flowers then they want to give you specific flower results.

So here is what you need to be relevant to the search engines:

1. Have a domain name that is search specific or you must have a brand name that is actually known for a product. I.E. “KFC” means “chicken” everyone knows that.
2. Set up your website to be SEO or Search Engine friendly. Title tags, alt tags, Heading tags all have to spell out the keywords that you are trying to be known for.
3. Have content on your web page that is also keyword specific. Search Engines want, no they need, content.
4. Have very LARGE web sites point into towards you. And have those LARGE  web sites write about the keywords that you are trying to be known for.

Okay, numbers 1 through 3 are basic SEO functions that your On-Site webmaster should be doing on a daily basis. Number 4 is a total different matter. It takes many, many articles to make you the “subject matter” expert on particular keywords. 1 or 2 articles per month will not do it. You may need hundreds on a particular subject.

Now a days that is not really a problem. You just need to hire a PR agency just like the big websites do. Luckily there are a lot of companies that write articles. Atlanta Internet Marketing is one of those company. They can produce 120 articles/press releases/blog posts/etc on all large websites to make you the subject matter expert on the keywords you desire.

Large companies have had PR agencies writing for them for years. That’s why they are #1, #2, or #3 on Google’s organic search. Hire you own PR agency. It really isn’t expensive and you will be amazed at the keyword phrases that are within reach of your marketing budget.

David Peterson: President of Atlanta Sales and Consulting

Posted in SEO, atlanta sales consulting | No Comments »

10. May 2010 by admin.

That’s quite a headline… “Immediate Positive Sales Results” One of the ways to achieve those positive results is through sales training.

As a Sales Trainer in Atlanta I’m a little biased. I believe that if you train your sales reps and do daily coaching then you should be good to go. The training give them their baseline knowledge of your sales process and the sales coaching allows your to “inspect what you expect.”

A lot of sales trainers are franchise holders of one of the many large sales training groups in America. These sales trainers purchase their material which is generated on a national basis - basically one size fits all approach.

I have attended many of these, and as I have written before any training from a competent sales trainer is better than no training at all.

However I have noted before that many times the representatives leave the training, practice what was taught for a couple of hours and then go back to what they were doing before. Then they start griping that the sales training was worthless.

When I got into the sales training business in Atlanta, Georgia I wanted to make sure that I was training to the representatives needs.

Look at it this way, we teach to “sell to solve needs,” why don’t we “teach to solve needs?”

My approach is to interview everyone I can get my hands on. Spend several hours learning what is needed and then devise a sales training course to solve the representatives current problems. My sales training in Atlanta courses are designed to fix what is broken, and to fix it today!

If you fix what is broken in your sales process you will succeed in closing more business. Focus your sales training like I do on what you can fix today to be more successful.

David Peterson: President of Atlanta Sales and Consulting

Posted in Atlanta Sales Training | No Comments »

24. April 2010 by admin.

The fear of every corporate executive is when sensitive, private company information is compromised. You hear about these stories every couple of weeks.

It’s one thing to have your company’s information compromised from the outside, or to have an insider help to hijack your sensitive information. It’s an entirely different “thing” to have your information lost due to stupidity.

How easy is it to lose your sensitive data? It’s as easy as misplacing it!

Today with the use of portable USB Flash Memory your company’s sensitive data is probably spread out on 1000s of these devices being carried around by 100s of your company’s employees.

You get the picture, everyone has about 2 or 3 different USB flash memory devices in their possession and they often mix work, school, and their own personal information on EACH device.

Now that we know you have the picture in your mind (or to say it another way you KNOW you have a data problem) what are you going to do about it?

Here are 8 simple rules you need to implement concerning these devices this Monday morning.

1. Ask your USB Flash Memory supplier to imprint your logo on every device.
2. Have your supplier “serialize” every unit and set up a process internally to record which employee is responsible for which device.
3. Have your supplier password protect each device. Don’t just password protect a portion of the drive by partitioning it, protect the entire drive. If you don’t do this your employees will use the unprotected portion - every time.
4. For “super secret” information have your supplier implement a data encryption service on the drive.
5. Outlaw with immediate disciplinary action all non-company memory devices.
6. Create a data destruction action plan just like you have for your sensitive paper documents that you are currently shredding through an outside vendor.
7.  Put your data plan in writing, train your employees on the plan, and have them literally sign off on the plan.
8. ENFORCE YOUR DATA PLAN!

If you are looking for a company for the custom logo imprint, serialization, password protection, and encryption my advice is to look at JDP Digital, Inc. They have been  doing this type of work since 2001 for the USB Flash Memory community.

David Peterson - President: Atlanta Sales and Consulting.

Posted in Sales Management | No Comments »

15. April 2010 by admin.

I have a member of my local Chamber of Commerce for about a year. On top of that I am also a member of a few other network group including an inventors group.

I would say that I do spend a tremendous amount of time networking.

Networking is a great place to find leads, however being in the sales training and consulting business like I am for a number of businesses it may not produce enough leads.

Some businesses need to cast a wider net. As an example my own Sales Training in Atlanta classes need a larger net than just the Chamber of Commerce. The reason, most of these businesses are fairly small in terms of the number of sales representatives employed.

The Chamber is an excellent source for me to find vendors. I have found a bunch of vendors that are now doing everything from producing my business cards to checking on the insurance premiums for my local Home Owners Association.

But for producing leads to support my Sales Training in Atlanta that particular group isn’t a great fit. Also I have notice that a lot of the members understand this point… most local business need more leads.

The traditional place for local lead generation has been the yellow pages, but with so many people turning to the web for everyday products and services the old yellow pages is quickly losing its luster.

The new tool for local lead production is local search. Local search is a method of Search Engine Optimization or SEO that allows your website to be found when someone types in a service you provide in your local area.

As an example here is one that my Atlanta Internet Marketing company produced for a Remodeler in Lawrenceville, GA. I created a site called RemodelingLawrenceville.com and then submitted it to Yahoo.com. The result… my local customer in Lawrenceville is now #1 on that search term.  Google and Bing will ultimately pick up on this keyword search term as well.

It takes time to produce a good local leads using SEO practices but it can be done and should be done as the Internet quickly replaces the phone book and its yellow pages.

Posted in Sales Leads, SEO, sales training | 1 Comment »

12. April 2010 by admin.

Conducting classes on sales training in Atlanta, GA I get a chance to hear and see a variety of sales techniques. I have mentioned before that often times these techniques are lacking some basic fundamentals. This isn’t to say that everyone is lacking the fundamentals but on average or collectively there are a few things that most average reps miss.

Here’s one: Did you leave something behind on your last sales call?

There is an entire industry dedicated to you leaving something behind. This industry is huge, typically made up of small mom and pop shops that cater to local businesses. The industry is called… Advertising Specialty.

The entire industry is built on the premise that you  need to leave something behind in order to be remembered.

Now salespeople in general can be a bit arrogant and they often think that their 1st impression is enough to guarantee a callback. I beg to differ.

It’s not that the sales call didn’t go well, it could have gone terrific. But in the hectic world we live in today the purchasing manager you just met might remember that you had a solution to his/her problem but that is about all they remembered.

Here’s a great example to prove that point, how many follow up calls have you made in which you find yourself starting at the beginning of the conversation. As an ex-sales manager I know I have heard enough of them. So leave something behind to help you be remembered.

These don’t have to be expensive they just have to be useful. One of my favorites is USB Flash Memory. These  little devices run around $10/each for a 1GB model and everyone needs them. If $10 is a bit much try a Water Bottle Carrier. These little things run around $3 each and secure your water bottle while you are exercising. What makes advertising specialty items terrific is… you get to place your logo, phone number and web address on EACH unit.

On your next sales call leave something behind. You, your company and your products need to standout. If you have a marketing budget try one of these advertising specialty items.

David Peterson: President Atlanta Sales and Consulting. He conducts classes on sales training in Atlanta, GA.

Posted in sales training | 1 Comment »

5. April 2010 by admin.

Posted in Sales Consulting | 1 Comment »