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Chapter 7: Communication Skills

As you already know, communication is vital to both the growth of your business and the ability for your company to sustain its growth. Communication is also important for developing trust with your business associates and with your employees. Good communication skills can help you to motivate employees, drive change, repair conflicts and become a better leader. Listening skills are extremely important for accomplishing these tasks, but there are other communication skills that all entrepreneurs need to have.

Better Ways to Communicate

While you are probably pretty good at communicating with other people, there are some better ways to communicate when it comes to running a business. These are evolutionary skills- meaning you develop them over time as a result of your experiences. Learning about some of these skills in advance will help you to incorporate them into your business life sooner.

#83- Good communication skills allow you to influence others.

The ability to influence others is vital for any entrepreneur. You will need to sell your employees your business’s principles and goals if you want them to get on board. You will have to convince investors and business partners to take a chance and support your business ideas. You will have to influence your customers through marketing and advertising. In order to get your point across and achieve your goal of influencing others you must be able to communication your ideas well through discussions and offer clear explanations of your thoughts.

#84- Learn how to manage questions well.

As a boss and a leader you will have to answer thousands of questions. Some of these questions will be simple while others will determine the success of your company. It is your job to answer these questions by making convincing arguments using the art of well-versed speaking. Your words must not only answer the question, they must also convey your meaning, desires and principles at the same time. If you take the time to learn the art, and it is an art, of managing questions well now it will have a positive impact on your career forever.

#85- Holding the audience’s attention.

All of the speaking skills in the world won’t help you to convey your point if you cannot hold the attention of your audience. Learning how to capture the attention of your listeners is vital, especially in the workplace environment. In order to master this skill you must learn how to read your audience, how to project your voice in a pleasing and attention getting manner and how to manage your speaking time. If you cannot make people pay attention to you it will be hard to get them to follow you to success.

How to Create Dialog

In addition to using your communication skills to motivate and convince others, you can also use them to capture new ideas, incentives and concepts and use them to your benefit. The best way to accomplish this is to create a dialog. This dialog can be between your managers, employees, peers, customers and even your competitors. Learning how to get a dialog going is another great communication skill that all entrepreneurs should have.

#86- Hold face to face interactions.

Getting your employees together for face to face interactions is a great way to get a dialog going and to get the creative juices flowing. Face to face interactions encourage brainstorming and the sharing of ideas in a way that e-mail and telephone conversations simply cannot.

#87- Provide avenues for your employees to communicate.

If you want to encourage dialog between your employees it is essential that you provide a way for them to do so. You need to give your employees a way to offer their suggestions and ideas.

#88- Make sure you and your management team are approachable.

All of the communication avenues you provide for your employees will be useless if they feel like they cannot approach you or the rest of your management team. Use your communication skills, your actions and your positive attitude to show your employees that they can come to you with their ideas and feedback. Your employees will come to you if you let them.

#89- Act on what you hear.

If your employees see that you are willing to put their ideas and suggestions into action they will be more likely to share them with you. Also, encouraging a dialog among your workers will help you to develop concepts and ideas you may have never considered before. These breakthrough ideas may never have come to you if you didn’t encourage dialog with your employees.

Chapter 8: Marketing

As an entrepreneur you will have master many skills, including management, communication and decision making skills. One of the most important aspects that all business owners need to understand is marketing. This will be how you sell your business to its customers and therefore will represent how you will create profits for your business. There is a lot to understand about marketing and plenty of ways to make mistakes. All successful entrepreneurs have mastered the art of marketing themselves and their company.

Creating a Marketing Plan

Companies that are successful in marketing themselves start the process by creating a detailed marketing plan. The size and scope of your business’s marketing plan will be determined by several factors, including the size of your company and how many potential customers you will attempt to reach. It is a good idea to create your marketing plan and then refer back to it on a monthly basis to ensure that you are still on track. A lot of things can change for a business as the year progresses.

#90- Your business’s marketing plan should cover one year of time.

The ideal amount of time to plan ahead for marketing, especially if you run a small business or a start-up business, is one year. There are a lot of things to cover in a year’s time. Your business will gain and lose employees, the market will evolve and your customer base will (hopefully) grow. This represents plenty of time and factors to consider. Once your business develops and grows you can switch to a marketing plan that covers a period of time two to three years in advance.

The process of creating your marketing plan will be the most difficult part. Actually implementing the plan will be easier than creating it. Expect the process of developing a marketing plan to take several months. The plan should be created using your field of hired experts, including people from your finance, supply, management and personal departments.

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Chapter 5: Presenting The Offer

Synopsis

The way you put together your offer makes or breaks your product launch, so you have to make it irresistible. A well put together offer will make your customers excited about what they're receiving, thrilled with the pricing, and hungry to purchase what you're marketing.

In this part of the series, we're going to demonstrate how to make that occur.

If your offer isn't potent enough to simply convert readers into purchasers, you have an issue.

This will help you make your offer more likeable and "must-have," so that your customers view it as a chance to purchase something that they don't wish to miss.

Your offer isn't simply a little description of the product or service you're marketing - it's the sum of everything they get (the stuff) and the way that the sum package is delivered to them (payment plans, data formatting, guarantees, and so forth.). And the way you present everything.

Most individuals simply say "Hey, here's my stuff, would you like to purchase it?" and wonder why they're not bringing in the sales they had anticipated. What they have to do (and what you likely need to do as well) is get incredibly adept at communicating just how great your offer is.

Chances are this isn't news to you, but if it is, here's the general breakdown of a great offer:

The thing they're purchasing. This may be a product, service or experience ... but it's the core matter that gets their attention.

Extra bonuses. It's always a great idea to pack some bonuses into your offer to make it more likeable.

Any relevant up-sells. There's forever a great chance your buyers may be interested in picking up additional relevant products/services during their buy.

The data format you're delivering everything in. Audio, video, live events, downloads, tangible products ... the works.

The structure of the buy. This may mean payment plans, payment sorts accepted, and so forth.

The guarantee you're presenting them. Make it a great one. :-)

The conditions of the offer. These are constraints like limited time, 3 per buyer, and so forth.

There may be more in an offer if you wish to make it more complicated, but this is the general framework that a typical offer holds. Now let's discuss a few easy tweaks that will make your next offer much more likeable to likely buyers.

Each offer requires a reason behind it as it builds some story into the offer, which helps them comprehend more about what they're receiving as well as legitimizes the offer in the first place. It no longer becomes an "aggressive sale" but instead something that's there for a purpose.

It may be something as simple as a holiday sale - naturally the prices are falling, it's shopping season. Or it may be the opposite, as you see in pre-launch pricing - you are able to get it at a discount if you purchase it before it formally hits the marketplace.

In offers where scarceness is at play, you might see more things as in a tangible product where the first batch is at a lower cost than it will be sold later merely because the seller wants individuals to purchase it fast and get the word out. Passing on the reasoning behind the offer takes the customers' shields down a bit as they see a reason for the deal that adds up to them - and they're comfortably involved in a story. And each little way you make them feel easier brings you closer to the sale.

And bear in mind that the reasoning doesn't have to be founded on discount pricing. You are able to have a purpose for a higher price, also - particularly if your offer involves a short-notice or rush transaction.

If your target market tends to get tense considering pricing (as in, "Geez! That's a lot!"), then it's time to utilize a technique called "normalizing" to make them get more used to the notion of purchasing your stuff.

You don't want individuals to see a big number and get sticker shock, as they immediately raise the protest that they can't pay that much, or that a dealing of that size is unthinkable. (Curiously enough, you don't have to have a high price for this - a few individuals balk even at spending $10.)

However the real issue here isn't that they can't see themselves dropping the cash - they simply can't see themselves spending the cash with you.

So you've got to make them view their spending habits to remind them that yep, they spend cash all the time.

The easiest way to do this is to equate the purchase to something they're already spending cash on. Consider all the offers you've seen in the past that accomplish this:

"For less than the cost of a cup of coffee a day, you are able to support a youngster in (insert country here)"

This $299 all-in-one shopping system substitutes the 3 systems you're already paying $400+ for"

"For the cost of one dinner out a month, you are able to get (insert product here)"

"For the cost of 10 minutes of consulting with me, you receive a 112-page crash program in how to sell your ebooks ..."

The bottom line here is if you are able to compare the buy you want them to make with buys they're already making, then the resistance to purchasing goes way down. So view other offers you see on a day-to-day basis and be aware of how they're normalizing the buy for you - you'll learn a great deal.

Another basic objection to buying is that the price is too elevated (but you are able to defeat a lot of that by learning to compose a sales page that's designed for high-conversion). Luckily, you can utilize price positioning to defuse this protest.

If you break the sum purchase down into payments, like the 3-pay, 6-pay or 12-pay choices you see out there. This is a simple way to handle 2 distinguishable objections:

"I couldn't possibly pay that today." - If you're marketing a $2,000 package, not everybody has that. Breaking it down to, suppose, four payments of $250 may get a lot of customers to jump on board.

"It costs a bit much." - If you were to break a $500 product into twelve payments of $50, it no longer looks like a $500 product. It looks like a $50 one - and that's a big psychological difference.

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RocketHub is a unique system, because it allows you to raise funds without worrying about whether or not you meet your goal or paying huge fees. They are a lot more friendly to smaller ventures.

Here are some facts about RocketHub:

Free to launch a project.

You keep all the funds you raise, even if you don’t meet your goal.

Fastest payouts in the industry. They pay on the first Friday after your project ends. It takes approximately 5-10 business days in most cases.

Lower fees than most other sites. 4% success fee if you reach your goal, or 8% if you don’t, plus 4% credit card processing fees.

Potential to have A&R fund your project.

Setting Goals

Setting your goal is a critical element of any crowdfunding campaign, because most sites require you to reach that goal before releasing any money to you. If you don’t meet your goal, you get nothing, and backers receive their money back.

Why do they do this?

The main reason is to ensure that only quality projects get funded. For example, if you ask for $5,000 to publish a short story, they don’t want that to get funded, because there’s no reason anyone should spend that kind of money to publish a short story.

They also want to ensure you don’t ask for more than you really need. You might need to ask for $500 to publish your short story (to hire an editor and cover artist and maybe a bit more for initial marketing), but asking for $5,000 would be completely unnecessary.

When you set your goal, figure out, in detail, how much money you think you will need. You can then add around 25% on top of that to cover any unplanned expenses and to cover success fees, processing fees, etc. If you think you need $1,000 total, you can ask for $1,250. If you think you’ll need $10,000, ask for $12,500.

Video Presentations

One of the most important things you can do to really generate interest in your project and increase your chances of meeting your funding goal is to create a really killer video presentation.

Projects with video presentations are much more likely to get fully funded than those without video, because video is interesting, engaging, and can present your project in a way that is much easier to understand than text and pictures alone.

Here are a few tips for creating an effective pitch video:

Focus on the most important elements of your project.

Keep the video between 1 and 5 minutes. People will get bored if your video is too long.

Let people know why they should invest in your project, and what you feel it means to the world to get it out there.

Try to be a little relaxed and fun. If you’re “all business”, people are less likely to be interested. If you’re friendly, more people will want to invest in you.

Use music and pictures to connect with your audience. Try to select media that really fits with your project’s theme.

Highlight the benefits you’re offering to backers, and let them know exactly what they’ll get if they fund you.

Explain that if you aren’t fully funded, you get nothing, so ask them not only to contribute, but to share your project with others!

Different platforms will have different requirements for video, however, in general:

Videos must be 500MB or less

Must be MOV, MPEG, AVI, MP4, WMV or FLV format