Are you struggling to generate a steady significant stream of home based business sales? Are you tired of not having enough home based business sales to offset your costs?What I’ve realized learned from some of the best retailers of home based business sales products is that you need to do this one thing really well to boast your revenues. It could be true that you may be an excellent one-to-one salesman and can probably sell ice to an eskimo. However, that is a very difficult skill to duplicate down an organization. Let’s face it: super salesman do not grow on trees, and very few amounts of people that you will come across will actively and passionately go out and sell for the sheer love of it.The truth is that most people are deftly frightened of sales.They don’t like it, they secretly feel embarrassed of the products they have to offer, and they feel sleazy for selling to people. So as a team leader, you must find a resolution that will take the individual pressure off of them but still be able to tap in to their networks. And what do the top retailers do?The best home based business sales retailers run events!OK… maybe that’s not a well-kept secret, but there’s a science to how you run events that determine whether or not you leave with a sale or empty-handed. Here is what separates a typical event from a selling event:1) You must provide value -Our most effective home based business sales events occur when we dispense valuable information to our target customer base. Case and point, my wife is a great retailer. She specializes in cosmetics, and as a company trainer, she is also a certified makeup trainer. She invested in herself to make herself in to a makeup expert and uses her expertise to boost her sales. She conducts general education classes and makeup workshops that target ladies who are interested in learning professional-grade makeup techniques that are simplified for everyday use.By providing this value, she is able to attract a larger volume of guests, which increases her chances of completing a sale, a powerful form of attraction marketing.2) Product Demos – If you’ve never done a product demo for your home based business sales events, you are losing valuable sales opportunities. One of the lessons that I’ve learned being in network marketing and seeing so many affiliate products, mine and others, is that most products are top-notch. Very few network marketing companies carry inferior products, but the downside is that they also don’t invest in mass market advertising, which is why you are involved in your home based business franchise. You are the marketing mechanism for them.Think about it: if demonstrations weren’t powerful, why would infomercials, Costco, department stores, and kiosks at the mall all utilize this strategy to draw you in?When you host your events, you should always focus on doing some sort of demonstration of your product after the general information has been covered. Make sure you pick products that have symmetry with the topic that you are covering at the event, else it loses its value.When doing your demonstration, be sure that if you are promoting a health and nutrition product, have a control piece as well. What that means is that you should have a demo without using your product to demonstrate to the audience the difference of using your product, and what it means to not use your product. For my website company, we have programmers sit down with the prospect and show them the capabilities of the website via live webinar to demonstrate the ease of use of our platform website builder.3) Have Roles -A well-run home based business sales event needs to have team unity where each team member knows their role in the sales process.- You always have a presenter who gives out the information. That person also does the demonstration.- Another team member sets up the demonstration while the speaker is engaging the audience.- A team member needs to greet the guests as they come in and help them get situated by filling out a questionnaire to extract extra information (i.e. “What question do you wish to address in terms of health and nutrition?”)- You need to designate a sales person. That person should be the “closer” that collects the payment and is responsible for upselling packages and promotional items.If you have a team that is well-versed in these tasks, then you will watch your sales revenues spike because it’s not reliant on one person doing everything.4) Build Packages and Promotions – Sales sell in a traditional business, and so too in a home based business sales event. Try to create promotional packages grouping several products together, or run a special on promotional items to entice customers to buy at the event. Make sure you stress that the sale is ONLY for this event so it creates a sense of urgency.Promotions that work best for us are bundles of several low-end items, as well as offering tiered pricing and incentives for purchasing a certain dollar amount. In comparison to events that don’t have packages, sales for packaged items always increase overall sales by 33-50% at our events.5) Always Promote the Next Event – We have a saying in our company: “Who’s the best speaker? The next speaker!”What that means is that one of the keys to genuinely strong home based business sales teams is that they always promote the next event before the current event is over. It opens up the opportunity for you to book your guests for the next appointment. It also allows your team to provide incentives for guests to invite their friends to the next event, which will organically grow your retail audience and increase potential of sales.Make simple, effective, and professional flyers for the next event and have them ready to distribute to the attendees. Give them a few extra to give to friends. If you use that incentive suggestion in the previous paragraph, they will no doubt be motivated to promote the event for you. We offer discounts for customer from the current who attend our next event.Conclusion: At the end of the day, it’s all about teamwork and commitment. When you have a group of entrepreneurs that are dedicated to generating significant revenues for yours and their home based business sales events, then you will have the beginnings of a fantastic lasting formula of success. If your speaker does a good job, they will have already done half the sale because they stressed the importance of why the product is needed. The demo moves the customer to want to buy, and the closer comes in and finishes the job. It’s a fluid sales process.Now that you have learned an effective mechanism to boost offline home based business sales, let me introduce you to a way to leverage the internet sales aspect too. Would you rather have only one channel of distribution, or two? Multiple streams of revenue are always a plus, especially if they work in unison.There are a lot more tips that we can share for running events, but to go on and on would take all night. If you can’t wait until our next piece for more retailing tips, then reach out to me via my blog and I will be glad to help.
Transforming Education to Meet the Needs of a Business Climate
Seeing Education Differently
At one time in California, education was a two-track structure. One track led to college, the other track to a vocational career. Of course some students, after exiting high school with vocational skills, entered the work market and chose to return to college. But, what of those students who never learned a vocation because they were on the “college” track? When California went to a one track system, it failed to recognize that students who had a vocation were more likely to succeed in college. And, that students who had no vocational training were very likely to fail in the business arena if they dropped out of college (as many do). However, for some reason, we have continued to minimize the importance of such skills as balancing a checkbook, paying taxes, maintaining focus and a work ethic in lieu of raising our academic bar.
With the economy in a major dip, as happens every few years, education in California is taking another hit in terms of rising class sizes, fewer educators available to meet student needs and fewer vocational subjects being broached because vocational skills do not get the school the scores they need and many schools are barely able to provide the minimum services that students need.
Education as a Business
Whether one wishes to acknowledge it or not, education is no longer an organism that just lives and feeds and thrives because “it should.” As with any business, if education does not adapt to meet the changing needs of their customers, not only will the students suffer, but our long term economic health and vitality will also suffer.
If a student does not learn a focused work ethic, they may eventually graduate from school with a doctorate. The degree will be of little use to businesses who need that individual to arrive at work on time and be able to work within a company budget. I have seen countless companies hire graduates who, on paper, had received a multitude of accolades in academics. Then, when it was time to put that education to work, find an apartment, make commitments, etc., they had no idea where to start. Needless to say this created a very challenging learning curve for both the company trying to survive visible inadequacies and individuals trying to adapt to the needs, vision and goals of the venture they had entered.
Education is not a black and white issue. Within the gray area of these extremes there is knowledge that will profit both the student and the business world they will eventually enter. In order for our education system to begin to prosper, we must begin to look at that gray area and adapt some of those vital characteristics that will provide the synergy between education and business that is needed.
Comparing Value Systems
It is important that we understand the disparity of education and business from some of the core elements that are a daily reminder of where we need to start.
- A student is fifteen minutes late to class everyday, but aces papers and tests. This goes on semester after semester. The price the student pays is that they get a “B” instead of an “A.”
- The student then graduates and is hired in a prestigious position because of their degree and GPA. However, they are still fifteen minutes late to work everyday and out the door when their mental bell rings.
How long will that employee keep their job? Would they last for four or six months being late every day, even though they were smart and could produce the expected work? Of course not, my company cannot afford to lose fifteen minutes daily when I am paying someone top dollar by the hour to produce and excel.
- A student, through their entire academic career, has found it easier to pay for papers to be written than to write them on their own. Having never gotten caught the student has excelled.
- Again, my company hires this student who is an absolute brilliant writer. After the honeymoon is over two things will happen. The new employee will find that there are not a lot of co-workers willing to write for them and the company will find it has hired someone who couldn’t put two words together sequentially if they were cut out and glued to a page.
The loser in both of these instances is the business, education’s customer. Education systems should not, in addition to providing academic challenges, fail to provide those tools that students will need to succeed in the real world. Otherwise, we will continue to have very over-educated people working at menial jobs because they were swept away by the culture shock when they entered the real world of work and found that they 1) had to produce every day whether they felt like it or not; 2) had to be on time to work and meetings; and 3) actually had to prove themselves and their skills at some point in their work career.
What Students Deserve and Business Want
Students deserve an education that will transition them smoothly from an academic environment to a business environment with minimal adjustment. They deserve to learn how the interest on credit cards can impact their future and how balancing a checkbook or keeping records is important. They deserve the right to be expected to excel and overcome challenges proactively and be leaders. In other words, students deserve coursework that will actually apply to the business world they will spend the better part of their lives participating in.
As a business owner, speaker and trainer, I learned long ago that if a person has the ability to see obstacles as challenges, has the wherewithal to think out of the box to solve problems and the willingness to learn and share information, whether or not it will make them the focus of attention, they are an asset and can be taught any of the skills necessary to do an outstanding job.
Final Thoughts
It would be to the advantage of schools to ask businesses through surveys or consultants, what they are looking for in students; not just one study every four or five years, but regularly. In this way education processes could be adapted to meet the current and future needs of the companies and businesses that will be hiring those students when they graduate. In addition it would be more advantageous for school systems to develop a “business” mind. To expect excellence, a work ethic and promote real life application to educational theory.
Many students today must pass several exams during the course of their academic career to move from one grade level to another. I liken this to exams required by some companies to get a job or be promoted. Businesses have been doing this for a lot longer than school systems, and if nothing else, we do know that just because someone can pass an exam, does not mean they can do a job.
There are some very bright students out there who just can’t pass a darn exam whether it is because they freeze up or just can’t put pen to paper on demand. These students now have been given fewer choices and options to succeed. It is important that if you are a student who cannot write, cannot pass an exam, or have difficulty in a class, that you get the help you need before you get so frustrated that you quit or find that even if you do manage to get a degree you can’t get a job that will last.
If you are a company who is trying to develop policies and procedures to address the inadequacies of the interviewees you are coming into contact with you do not want to spend valuable dollars on training basic skills. It is not cost effective and has no long term return on the investment that you put in.
It is time for the school system to start functioning like the business it is, meeting the needs of it’s primary customers (the students) and long term customers (businesses). Without a synergy of effort of the part of education and business, we will continue to find that the gaps between educational theory and business needs is a chasm that is very difficult to jump.
The Finer Points of Internet Auctions
WHAT IS A PENNY AUCTION?
Penny auctions have exploded in popularity with the massive growth of the internet. However, few people know the true origins of penny auctions.Beginnings actually stretch back to the Great Depression. Those were hard times for everyone, but even harder for farmers. Farmers struggled to bring in steady income because of droughts and crops not selling as well as they had previously. As a result, the banks would foreclose on the farmers who couldn’t keep up with their mortgage payments.
The banks weren’t satisfied with just repossessing the house, they wanted to raise as much capital as possible, so they resorted to selling off the possessions of the owners of the repossessed houses. There was not much the farmers could do about it so they began bidding ridiculously low prices, pennies, on the items while threatening others who dared to bid higher than a few pennies.
The auctions of today hardly resemble their tremulous beginnings. Being part of a penny auction today is exhilarating, fun, and addictive. It combines the selling format of auctioning with a little bit of chance factored in.Auctions are a game of strategy but also a game of luck.
The premise behind penny auctions is giving people the chance to win an item at a drastically reduced price.Auctions make that possible by spreading out the cost of the product among multiple bidders. In order for a person to take part in an auction, they must pay a set price for each bid. For example, if a person wanted to bid on a fifty dollar Amazon gift card then he would spend a dollar for each time a bid placed. If he ended up winning the gift card, then he would only have spent a few dollars for a fifty dollar gift card. Usually penny auctions sell bids in packages.
HOW PENNY AUCTIONS WORK!
The main foundation of penny auctions is the pay-per-bid format. It is the key that allows bidders to win items at the fraction of their retail value and allows the auction owners to keep their site profitable. Most y auction sites run on the same premise: people pay a set amount for each bid, whenever a person places a bid within the closing seconds of the auction time will be added, the last person left with a unique bid after the clocks runs out will win the item. There are a large variety of items that can be won, but they tend to be popular electronics or gift cards to popular stores.
There are two types of auctions: lowest unique bid auction and highest unique bid auction. Lowest unique auction sounds confusing but it is actually quite simple. A unique bid is when only one person has a bid at a certain price. Bids usually start at one penny, a bidder can then place a bid at two pennies. Until another bidder places a higher bid, the most recent bidder will be the lowest unique bid because that was the only bid at two cents and nobody bid higher. However, penny auctions generally don’t stop at one penny. It is not uncommon to find auctions that end up at a couple hundred dollars based on the popularity of the item being auctioned. However, the same principles apply for those auctions. Highest unique bid auctions follow the more traditional auction format such as eBay. The person with the highest bid at the end of the auction wins the item.
Auction site owners turn a profit by selling bids. Say twenty people are bidding on a ten dollar gift card at one dollar per bid, at the end of the auction if there were twenty bids placed in total then the site owner would have made twenty dollars with a ten dollar profit.Auctions do seem like a win-win situation:The site owner makes money while the bidder gets an item for dirt cheap. However, not everyone wins in penny auctions. The people who paid one dollar each bid but left with nothing to show for their investments will not be so happy.
HOW TO WIN!
Penny auction has a lot of chance mixed into it, but one can incorporate strategy that will help raise the chances of winning. Playing smart can make all the difference between gambling and auctioning.
The first crucial tip to winning penny auctions is to know how to manage your bids. Your goal should be to win as much as possible without spending a ton of money buying bids. Managing your bids means that you should already know how much you are willing to risk in order to win an item. The amount of capital you are willing to risk will determine how many bids you can use. Once you know how many bids you have to spend on an item, then you will be better able to manage how and when you place a bid. That will keep you from blowing away all of your bids in the first few seconds of the auction.
The next tip is to practice time management. When fighting in the trenches of penny auctions, you have two enemies: other bidders and time. Knowing when to bid is a must if you want to have success. Placing a bid when there is a lot of time left on the clock is never a good idea. You have to remember that the key to winning a penny auction is being the last one standing when the clock runs out and that each bid increases the amount of time left. It would be a good practice to wait until the last few minutes of the auction before you begin to bid.
The final tip for successful auctioning is to keep your emotions under control.Auctions have a lot of similarities to gambling, and just like gambling, your spending can get out of control. If you keep your emotions level, it will keep you from making rash decisions and blowing loads of cash. Keep your mind clear so that you can gage the behavior of the other bidders and outsmart them.
HOW TO AVOID SCAM SITES!
Penny auctions are a great addition to the web whether you want to win an item that otherwise you wouldn’t be able to afford or if you simply enjoy the thrill that comes with bidding in auctions. Unfortunately, scam sites have tarnished the reputation of the legitimate penny auction sites. However, there are ways that you can protect yourself from scamers and enjoy your auctioning without having to worry about losing your money due to dishonesty.
Checking the reputation of the auction site before you start spending your hard earned money is always a good idea. Chances are other people have tried the site before you and some of them have left reviews. The reviews are your way to gage whether a auction site is trustworthy or not. If a site is getting overwhelmingly negative reviews, then that is a clear indication that you should steer your business elsewhere.
Another tool you can use to protect yourself is checking the Alexia ranks of the auction sites. Alexia rank will give a solid view of how much traffic the auction is getting. If you see a huge difference in the amount of traffic Alexia is projecting and the amount of active bidders on the site, then warning signals should be ringing in your head. Some auction sites have been known to set up robots that automatically bid on projects in order to keep the auction going and inflate the price. That is known as shill bidding. You can sniff out those sites by comparing the traffic the site should be getting to the amount of users using this site.
CONCLUSION!
New legislation may come out later down the road that will officially make penny auctions gambling, but until then, it is a fun, exciting auction that allows one to win the item they’ve always wanted but couldn’t afford.Auctions are also quite lucrative for the site owners because of the pay-per-bid strategy they’ve incorporated. Penny auctions had humble beginnings with farmers who just wanted to get back at the banks who kicked them out of their house. More recently, auctions have enjoyed an explosion in popularity with the rise of the internet.
There are two main formats fora auctions, lowest and highest unique auction, however they both run on the same premise where the last unique bid wins the item. Winning a penny auction will require a certain amount of mental tactic and a bit of luck. However, you can increase your odds of winning by practicing certain techniques such as managing your bids wisely, learning how to work with the time, and keeping a level head and your emotions under control. When you combine those three strategies to your bidding plan, you will find that you win a lot more often.
It is important that you do your due diligence to protect yourself when participating in auctions. Not every auction is run by honest and trustworthy people. There are people out there who just want to take your money. You can protect yourself by ensuring that you only bid on sites that already have a very positive reputation from real users.