Whether you’re a seasoned business owner, or a novice who wishes she knew more, one of the key ingredients to business—and to life—is the ability to sell your products, your services, yourself.  

Here’s a simple five-step process I work through with my clients to be sure that they’re not skipping an important element in the sales process.

 Considering all the time you’ve spent in prospecting, sales calls and developing a proposal, don’t sell yourself short on the follow up. In fact, a formal follow-up process should be a part of your proposal process. 

Here are five specific steps to include in your proposal follow-up process. 

You’re probably familiar with the Pareto principle, also known as the 80–20 rule. This principle explains that roughly 80% of the effects in business or life come from 20% of the causes. The question you might ask yourself is, “How can I better control the 20% that results in the 80% of my results?”  Here are some thoughts on that.

Wouldn’t it be great if there were some tried and true method to convert every prospect to a customer? Well it’s not quite that simple, but here are a few ideas that have worked for others and just might work for you.

Writing to sell is different from any other kind of writing. Rather than just presenting facts, your goal is to persuade and motivate.  

Look at your latest marketing copy, website content or e-blast and see if you’re missing any of the following steps. If so, I’ll bet you’re losing sales.

As you prepare for an important sales call—and you should think of ALL sales calls as important—plot out the meeting in your mind. You can gain a lot of insight and really give yourself a leg up over the competition by being able to answer these five questions in advance.

Many of us use hard and fast formulas to provide pricing for our products or services, while others consider pricing a variable that we adjust on the fly. Regardless of which school you fall into, here are five ways you can use pricing to close a deal.

The bottom line to all business is customers. In today’s marketplace, you need a strong online presence to get and keep them. Here are five approaches to cement your online connection with customers. 

If you think you can ignore Social Media, you’re wrong. 

Facebook recently overtook Google as the #1 site in the US. And, Twitter is moving so fast it is hard to keep up with it.

As a result, companies are moving ad dollars from search engines like Google to social media sites like Facebook. They’re doing this not only because of the sheer numbers of users, but also the amount of time that people spend on these sites.

 The biggest sales mistake many women make is describing their product or service before clarifying the prospect’s situation. You have a real opportunity to turn every introduction into a sale by presenting five quick pieces of information in the right order.