What are the FIVE ESSENTIAL SKILLS?
Sep 7th, 2011 by dhyan
What are THE FIVE ESSENTIAL SKILLS?
Dear Business Owners:
The Five Essential Skills You Need To Find Clients are:
- Strategic Planning and Goal Setting
- Business Communication
- Marketing
- Sales
- Organization and Time Management
The number one reason people come to me for help is because they have not mastered these skills and are subsequently not closing enough business to thrive financially. Some people are spending A LOT of time marketing, but doing it ineffectively… most people simply are not doing enough and don’t know what else they should do.
While it appears sensible to start at the top of this skills list and work your way down, most people need to be improving their marketing and sales skills ASAP. For this reason, my programs tend to move “up and down” the skills list rather like the way you tighten lug nuts when you are changing a tire. (You don’t tighten one completely and then move on to the next. You tighten all of them a little, and then tighten all of them some more. You should master your business skills this way!)
However, there are certain aspects of these skills that are consecutive and which you would best do in order. For example, Strategic Planning includes:
- Defining your products and services
- Identifying your target clients and
- Pin-pointing the compelling reasons your clients have for buying your product or services
You need to do all three of these things before you work on Business Communication such as your Marketing Message, your 30 Second Commercial, your Business Card, and the text for your website.
Before you begin designing Marketing Strategies you need to ask yourself key questions like:
- What are my revenue goals? What percentage of my goal am I currently reaching? How quickly do I need to bring in additional revenue?
- What are the demographics of my community? Are my customers looking for me? Or do I need to educate them about my products and services?
- How much time do I have to spend on marketing each week? (At least 15 to 20 percent of your time will probably be spent marketing.)
- What is my marketing budget? (“Zero” is not an acceptable answer here! Marketing “feeds” your business so you can’t have a zero marketing budget any more than you can have a zero grocery budget and expect to survive!)
- Which strategies will get me most directly in front of my target clients or people who can refer them to me?
- What are my marketing activity preferences? (It is okay to have preferences but learning how to overcome reservations or aversions is a big part of growing as a business owner.)
- How quickly can I get started?
Sales is not an intuitive process for most people. Just like you wouldn’t get into the cockpit of an airplane and try to fly it without any training, it is unreasonable for most people to think that they have a great product or service so doing sales, without any sales training, is going to be a piece of cake! And what a pity to work hard on your marketing and then lose a sale because you didn’t know how to have a professional sales conversation with a client!
Finally, most of the people I work with are more used to being employees than business owners. It is easy for them to do the parts of their business they like. It is also easy for them to avoid doing the parts of their business they don’t like. I teach simple Time Management and Organization Skills that help business owners do all the things they need to do easily and efficiently – so you can spend more time doing the parts of your business you love the most!
On the encouraging side, these Five Essential Skills are not rocket science and an average, persistent person can master them all. All of my training programs, my business consulting and coaching are designed to help you!
If you haven’t already: Please download my free e-book on ”THE FIVE ESSENTIAL SKILLS YOU NEED TO FIND CLIENTS” from my homepage. This will give you lots of information you need to get started!
INTERESTED IN A FREE 20-MINUTE PHONE CONSULTATION ABOUT YOUR BUSINESS?
Click DHYAN to schedule.
Tell me about your challenges and your business goals!
You can take my FREE BUSINESS SKILLS ASSESSMENT and we will see if there is anything I offer that could be of help to you.
