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Can A Business Coach Make You an Extra $50,000 a Month?

Business coaches are prized mainly for their business acumen. You can always count on them to give you sound third party advice when faced with tough decisions, something which can only be acquired after many years of building both successful and not-so-successful businesses. But that’s exactly why we turn to them.

A lot of business startups lack the knowledge and experience that a business coach can bring. Inexperienced business owners often come up with great business ideas, but have a difficult time executing them. This happens more often than not, even among well-established companies.

Every business owner makes bad business decisions. In fact, if they’re being honest, they’ll be the first ones to tell you to get a good business coach as early as possible so you won’t have to make the same mistakes.

Some of the world’s industry leaders who had business coaching include Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and former CEO of Google, Eric Schimdt. If these titans of industry find a business coach helps them make better business decisions, then what are you doing without one?

Your Business Coach Knows Where You’re Headed for

Seasoned business coaches almost have like a “sixth sense” when it comes to business. They can tell whether your idea will turn to gold or a failure waiting to happen. It’s not intuition, but a well-founded response based on experience, facts, trends, probabilities, customer psychology, among many other things.

Your initial conversation with your business coach is mostly about listening to you, taking in as much information as possible about you and your business. He or she will dissect your strategies, identify strengths, opportunities, and expose potential threats and vulnerabilities. He’ll ask some important questions and piece together crucial information to get the whole picture.

By then, he’ll be able to provide you with an accurate appraisal of your business. In most cases it can be one of two things – you’re on your way to the top or to the bottom. You’re either winning or losing to your competitors. Or, it could be you’re heading for a slowdown and you’ll have to look for better options such as downsizing or using automation. Sometimes it’s more about organizational matters such as dealing with your staff and employees.

Whatever it is, have an open mind and don’t let pride cloud your judgment. Remember, business coaches are more concerned with helping your business than trying to boost your ego.

Your Business Coach Provides Personalized Guidance

Books and online courses are great when it comes to learning the basics of starting and growing your own business. In fact, we have our own book, Small Business Profitability Secrets, which we highly recommend you get one. However, most books and online courses have limitations. They often deal with much broader issues common to all businesses and offer little help at solving specific problems for your specific kind of business.

Another problem is that these kinds of information tend to date rather quickly. Our markets and industries are dynamic, and technologies are changing at breakneck speed. What worked 3 to 5 years ago may no longer be as effective today and we need to adapt our strategies and our message to the here and now.

One of the best ways to get around this problem is to get personalized guidance from a business coach. Think of your business as your own body. When something goes wrong, your doctor will check on your medical history, allergies, and so on. You’ll go through several tests before your doctor writes his prescription, and follows up on you to see your progress.

Your business is unique in some ways. You can be a restaurant like a thousand others, but you have a different customer base, a different location, different competitors, demographics, economic conditions and so on. Your restaurant may not have the same set of standards as it is in Canada, Japan, Australia, or the Philippines. How do people learn about new businesses in your country? Do people search the internet or spend most of their time on Facebook or YouTube?

Your business coach will have to learn everything first about your business before taking a step further. This is very different from just looking for information over the web to get quick fixes or some vague, oversimplified solutions that doesn’t fit your business. But that doesn’t mean you can’t do your own research. There are thousands of valuable resources on the internet that provide great ideas for business, but ultimately, you need a business coach to help you in those crucial decision-making aspects of your business.

Having a Business Coach Could Be the Best Investment You’ll Ever Make

If you factor in the number of years it would take you to find the right mix and how much money you’d spend over the course of time playing “pin the tail on the donkey” with your business, and compare that with how much you’d spend for a good business coach, you’ll be amazed at how much you’re going to save in both time and money by having a business coach in your company.

Having a business coach cuts the amount of time and money spent learning everything on how to do your business right. It’s the same reason we hire coaches in sports, finance, or even self-improvement. It expedites the whole process, allowing you to reach your goals much sooner with the least amount of money and effort.

But more than that, we hire good coaches because we want to win in life – our businesses, careers, and our relationships with other people. Having a business coach is like standing on the shoulders of giants, enabling us to see further than we would otherwise see by ourselves.

So yes, definitely find a good business coach. What’s a good business coach? How does a small business profitability expert with over 20 years of experience and has helped launch more than 700 companies worldwide having a total turnover of $1.4 billion in revenue sounds to you?

Final Thoughts

By now, you might be thinking where to find a good business coach to help you grow your business like you’ve never thought possible. Would you be happy if we tell you we’re offering a 45-minute call where we connect you with our small business profitability experts at no cost to you?

We’ll identify all ways to increase your sales and profits and leave you with a step-by-step plan with details on how to implement and the tools you can use to accomplish each task. Visit us at Smallbizdream.com and take a closer look at our 5-step Rapid Sales Growth Blueprint today.

How Alexa Can Integrate With A CRM for Your Small Business

Amazon is making headlines in the business world (again) just a year after Alexa for Business was launched in November 2017. Echo’s lineup of smart speakers proved a commercial success with tens of millions of Alexa-enabled devices sold and over 50,000 skills (and counting) developed for Alexa by a growing community of users and developers across the globe.

Forward-looking companies have already seen the potential of deploying Alexa for Business particularly in customer service, productivity, and workflow. Companies like Air Canada, Telus Corp, Manulife, and TD Bank are working with Amazon in building company-specific skills for Alexa to create a seamless experience for workers and customers alike.

Alexa Skills in a Nutshell

Skills are essentially apps designed to work on Alexa to fulfill specific tasks. Amazon made it open for partners and third-party app developers to build skills which can either be used exclusively by the company who made them (private skills) or publish the skills for everyone to use (public skills) after being certified by Amazon.

Skill engagement has grown by 75% in 2017 and continues to grow by 50% year over year. This is key to Amazon’s success, outperforming tech giants Google, and Apple in terms of smart speaker sales during the 3rd Quarter of 2018.

Building a Smarter Workplace

Amazon goes beyond consumer electronics for smart homes to voice-activated workspaces for small businesses by adding a layer on top of Alexa’s basic features. Small businesses can do a lot more by configuring Echo devices to work with room profiles, calendars, conferencing systems and by creating custom skills to fulfill specific tasks.

Here are some examples of use cases of Alexa being used in the workplace.

Hands-free Conferencing

Conde Nast and Propel Insurance were among the first to use Alexa for Business to schedule and conduct meetings with co-workers. Alexa helps eliminate cumbersome steps when looking up for available rooms, scheduling meetings, and so on.

For instance, you may ask Alexa to schedule a meeting and it will pick a date for you, or have Alexa pull out your company calendar and choose one yourself. Join meetings on the fly by simply talking to Alexa to patch you through – no dialing in or typing passwords.

Owners of small businesses also like the fact that Alexa supports third party conferencing apps like Skype for Business, Cisco, WebEx, and Zoom, making it much easier to transition from screens and keypads to voice-activated systems (or have both at the same time).

Smart Offices

Wouldn’t it be great to have an AI who could tell your way around, pull out specific information for you, or ask maintenance to fix things around the office? Valence and General Electric were able to accomplish this feat by building Alexa skills and configuring Echo devices in a certain way.

What’s really interesting is how these companies came up with these ideas. Normally, they’ll have everything printed out on inch-thick corporate manuals/inventories or have them posted in their company website and people will have to search through them for answers.

But what if they can simply ask and have just the information they want from a voice-activated smart device like Amazon Echo? Using cutting-edge technology in conversational AI and voice recognition, businesses are able to build company-specific skills for Alexa, anything from answering specific questions, providing technical guidance, to sending out requests in a more natural way which is through spoken language.

Voice-enabled CRM

One of the best use cases of voice AI (which also feels more natural to use) is being able to interact with CRMs by speaking to it. Although there are some kind of voice-enabled CRM in the past, it’s nothing close compared to what Alexa for Business has been able to achieve.

Small businesses can now create their own custom skill or API for Alexa to interact with existing CRMs like Small Businesses Dream using their own voice. This can save them a lot of time looking up through each list or typing in new leads. So instead of switching back and forth making calls, typing customer information, inquiring about their leads and prospects, and taking notes on their last call, sales people can stay on their smart speakers and have Alexa and Small Business Dream do the rest of the job.

Stonehenge NYC is a perfect example of how a private real estate company was able to deploy Alexa for Business to create a seamless experience for their employees and rental customers by linking Alexa with their database and CRM service. They have over a hundred skills for Alexa and are continuously building more skills as they go.

Choosing the Right CRM for Alexa

Alexa’s extensibility makes it an ideal choice for a lot of third-party software solutions like Small Business Dream. It has been successfully deployed to work with some CRMs with a little help from the CRM providers, app developers, and Amazon.

Small Business Dream allows first time users to experiment with its email autoresponder, sales funnel, survey setup, landing page editor, and analytics. It’s especially important for small startups who need sales and marketing automation they can easily work on without spending too much on trainings and onboarding new employees. Small Business Dream will guide you through the whole process one step at a time, or you may reach them for consultations and mentoring on the best practices of using sales and marketing automation for your business.

Learn more on how you can successfully build your small business at SmallBizDream.com and start using our suite of tools to increase your sales and profitability like never before.

Customer Relationship Management Tools for Insurance Agents

While the insurance business is generally a traditional industry driven by referrals, more Millennials are investing their money and are demanding a technology-driven approach. As such, the insurance industry is adapting online trends like sales and marketing automation and Customer Relationship Management software (CRM) to get a leg up on their competition and to better serve their clients.

Adopting an online approach to growing your insurance business opens a world of possibilities for your company. We’ll explore some ways you can accomplish the task using Small Business Dream.

First, here’s why you should consider using Small Business Dream as your companion in the insurance business.

Ease of use. Small Business Dream focuses on crucial areas in business such as customer acquisition, customer communication, customer feedback, and customer education. It offers a simple, user-friendly interface and avoids unnecessary clutter.
Small Business Dream enables you to devise your own strategies with as many combinations and customizations as your creativity would allow. It offers a wide selection of themes, landing page templates and email autoresponders which can be customized to fit any kind of business.
Cost-effectiveness. Small Business Dream increases your profit margins by minimizing the overhead cost of acquiring new clients with cutting-edge technology in sales and marketing automation.

Online Customer Acquisition

Our long-held notion of a typical old-fashioned insurance agent is quickly being replaced by tech-savvy mobile users capable of reaching hundreds of potential clients from any place around the world with a mobile app like CRM. It’s not surprising why so many traditional insurance companies are also scrambling to learn CRM just to keep up with the competition.

With Small Business Dream’s Sales Funnel Setup, you can easily set up your first landing page about your insurance company for just an hour or two, or customize our generic sales funnel pages with your chosen theme and start creating traffic through social media, customer referrals, or sales funnel card. The system works whether you have a company owned website or want to have a micro-site right off the bat.

Opt-in Survey Form

Segmenting your leads and contacts from the outset can save you a lot of time sifting out your ideal prospects. Typically, insurance agents will have to qualify their leads based on the following information:

Personal information (name, sex, date of birth, email address)
Health information (height, weight, lifestyle habits, pre-existing condition)
Employment status (type of work, employer, length of service)
Financial information (income, net worth)

However, for our CRM, you might have to skip some of those during the initial opt-in survey and get to them later on after showing more interest. Instead, we’ll be focusing only on the basic information such as name, email address, sex, age, and the type of insurance they’re interested in. This might slightly be different from one type of insurance to another.

If your insurance company offers life insurance, your opt-in survey form may ask for additional information about the specific type of life insurance they’re interested in (term, universal, or whole life), and have them subscribed to a specific email series based on which option they’ve checked off. This method can be used in other types of insurances as well.

The idea is to have your prospects spend as little time as possible on your opt-in survey form and get just the right amount of information for your email autoresponder to work with. Eventually, you’ll be able to get to them via phone, sms, or email after showing up on your Action List. You’ll have a much better experience qualifying your leads using this method than having it done manually by yourself.

Upselling to Your Existing Clients

Insurance upgrades can help increase your income by as much as 30% or higher depending on the number of clients who opted for a policy upgrade. You need a follow-up tool like a CRM to update their knowledge about additional coverage offered by the insurance company through policy upgrades.

Again, Small Business Dream’s survey builder will come in handy. Depending on user response, you can switch them over to an email series about the advantages of increasing their coverage and specific situations where they are considered vital, as is usually the case with health insurance and long-term disability.

You can also upsell to your qualified prospects prior to the sale by showing some of the benefits of whole life over term insurance, or you may follow up on them from time to time for policy upgrades after showing some interest on it.

Offer Solutions through Customer Education

You can help your future clients save money on their monthly premiums by sharing some useful information such as avoiding risky behavior or by maintaining a good level of fitness prior to the insurance exam. You can also educate your prospects and existing clients about the pros and cons of choosing one type of insurance over the other and why people need to have coverage. One way of doing it is through your email autoresponder or through your company website or blog.

Conclusion

There are plenty of ways CRM can increase your productivity as an insurance agent. You’ll be able to come with more creative ways and develop new techniques as you gain more experience in the insurance business and with Small Business Dream CRM, or you can reach them on how you can use the system for your industry better.

Learn more on how you can successfully build your business through sales and marketing automation. Visit SmallBizDream.com and start using our suite of tools to increase your sales and profitability like never before.

5 Steps to Creating Your First Landing Page

Spending a ton of money on expensive ads is pretty much a thing of the past. Nowadays, you can setup your own landing page and have as much reach or even greater. One of the quickest ways in acquiring new customers in the digital era is by having a landing page for your business.

Getting to Know Some Basics

Traditional businesses find it much easier to build an online presence, thanks to vastly improved site creation tools designed specifically for people with little or no experience working with websites. Clickfunnels and Leadpages are some examples of DIY landing page builders for beginners, but some CRMs also have this feature as one of their customer acquisition tools.

These days, you don’t have to learn HTML and CSS since most landing page builders contain visual elements aside from the usual code. However, learning some basics allows you to make fine adjustments and have greater control on your landing page’s look and feel. There are basically two stages:

Laying the basic structure and content of your landing page using HTML (hypertext markup language)
Designing and applying styles using CSS (cascading stylesheets)

Using a landing page builder, you can simply choose a template or theme to work on and give it your own personal touch (changing the background colour, image, fonts, links, etc). Small Business Dream CRM allows you to use both methods for your landing page, sales funnel, and survey form. This, combined with a database management system and autoresponder makes Small Business Dream CRM a powerful tool for both old school and tech-savvy business owners.

Building Your First Landing Page with Small Business Dream CRM

Landing pages are some of the client acquisition tools you can use along with Small Business Dream’s survey forms, sales funnel, and card scan function. You may start with a simple landing page as your opt-in page and slowly build your email marketing strategy with Small Business Dream’s mailing list, email series, and autoresponder.

Step 1:

Sign up for a CRM Account. Small Business Dream has plenty of options for business owners, sales and marketing teams looking to gain a firsthand experience using the CRM. Upon subscription, you’ll be receiving updates which will guide you through the whole process and introduce you to the CRM’s main features and different functionalities including page and sales funnel creation.

Step 2:

Pick a landing page template. Small Business Dream has plenty of templates to choose from including restaurant, hair salon, facial care, auto repair – pretty much any kind of business. If you can’t find a match, you may choose any template and customize it by yourself (DIY), or you can avail of Small Business Dream’s Done for You (DFY) packages and have it set up for you (just provide your landing page’s ‘look and feel’ to facilitate the process).

Step 3:

Apply customization and styling effects. Start by putting your logo, images, and texts to your template. You can use your own images or get them free from Pexels or Pixabay. Match the aspect ratio of the target image to the page. Editing texts is pretty much like using a word processor on the page editor. You can then edit the links in your CTAs (call to action) by double clicking on the CTA button and inserting the URL or permalink to your sales funnel, survey, opt-in confirmation, or any other page you’ve made on the CRM. You can also change the background image for templates that utilize scrolling parallax effect (faux 3D) using the CSS editor; insert a video, modify background colour, or implement dynamic styling effects during mouse hover, etc.

Step 4:

Test your landing page. Small Business Dream’s templates are responsive both on PC and mobile. Modifying the templates on the surface level won’t have any effect on those. However, if you choose to move things around with the CSS editor, (float, aside, etc.) it’s good practice to check on the PC and mobile browsers if they’re positioned correctly. Also, test the CTA buttons if they lead to your assigned page URL.

Step 5:

Promote your landing page. You can start acquiring new leads with your landing page and watch your Action List fill with new contacts from time to time. Create more traffic to your landing page by using social media and encourage your friends and followers to share it with others (shorten your landing page’s URL using Small Business Dream’s Shorten URL feature to make it easier to remember). You may also try promoting your landing page through Facebook Ads for a limited time or have two versions (split tests) running at the same time – the possibilities are endless.

Final Thoughts

Spending some time working on your landing page pays dividends for your small business and really allow you to target niche markets. You only have around 8 seconds to make a good impression so you need to have good graphics and good copy on your landing page to make each second count. Make some improvements from time to time. See what works and update your knowledge on how to better use landing pages or have Small Business Dream assist you in reaching your goals.

Customer Relationship Management Strategies for Financial Planners

Creating wealth and being financially secure later in life should be on top of everyone’s priority. However, most people know very little about the ins and outs of financial planning and probably need professional advice to help them with their short-term and long-term goals.

Financial planners are the go-to persons for people hoping to maintain the kind of lifestyle they want beyond their productive years. In the busy age of social media, technology, and shrinking attention spans financial planner need a way to educate and communicate with current and potential clients about the necessity of financial planning in these uncertain times. The best way to stay in touch is to automate using Customer Relationship Management (CRM).

Why Financial Planners Need CRM

Financial planners usually start small, often with very few results during the first few months. You’ll have to gain traction and build your name over time.

People who want to learn more about financial planning will come to you for answers. Most of the time, they can be dealt with in one or two articles (if you have your own blog or website), on your FAQ, landing page, or having an automated email response for each set of questions and related topics.

Autoresponders works perfectly in these situations, allowing you to stay in touch with your current and potential clients with less work. CRMs makes it easier to create your own pages, set up an email series or sales funnel, and have the system do the rest of the job screening out and acquiring new clients for you.

Strategies You can Implement Using Small Business Dream CRM

Let’s take a look at how CRM can be used to grow and succeed in this particular business.

Share your Expertise on Financial Literacy.

Most people shy away from financial literacy because it seems too complicated. You should start with an email series based on which plans your prospects would be interested in, say an email series about 401k’s, mutual funds, annuities, etc. Or you can have them sorted out based on a particular age bracket, net worth, long term/short term plans, and special cases such as illnesses and disabilities, and so on.

With Small Business Dream, you only have to do them every once in a while and have the system do the rest like switching from one email series to the next based on user response, or how often they’ll receive updates on their newsletter subscription.

Use Networking to Build Reputation and Trust.

Financial planners should work on building trust and establishing good reputation in the community. People want someone they can count on with their life’s savings, esp. one who is qualified to manage people’s funds. They want to know you really care about them and that you’re not just doing it for personal gain.

Networking events are a perfect opportunity to tell others how they can benefit from you. Whenever possible, make some preparations ahead of time building your own landing page and sales funnel, so you can present your business at a moment’s notice. Small Business Dream incorporates these features in the CRM and made it easier for the averager use to make one.

Follow up on your clients about their plans and recent changes in the market.

Inflation, market fluctuations, tax laws, etc. canimpact on your client’s portfolio. You need to be able to notify all of your clients as quickly as possible.

This can be done using Small Business Dream’s email blast feature, targeting specific segments in your email list that belong to a particular category of clients. This feature not only simplifies tasks for you, but it also helps build trust and confidence with your clients.

Conclusion

These are just but a few examples of how Small Business Dream can help financial planners succeed using CRM as their marketing and follow up tool to achieve phenomenal growth in the financial planning industry.