Every entrepreneur should learn how to maximize every conversation or interaction with customers and prospects. It is quite easy to forget this objective particularly if we enjoy chatting with them. Don’t forget that the purpose of these relationship building efforts is to promote your business or your brand.

This is where selling script comes into play. Having a well-prepared script will help you deliver consistent message and create strong first impression. Sometimes we get nervous causing us to commit mistakes and say weird things in front of them. Most importantly, it will help us prepare answers to their questions or objections without getting sidetracked.

Delivery is very important when you are using a selling script. In some cases, people who use scripts tend to sound robotic, making more damage than good to your business image.

Writing a marketing or selling script is one of the most useful things you can develop for your business, if done right. One way to make your selling script sound natural is to simulate actual conversations with your customer. Try to make your opening line interesting and brief. The first thing you need to accomplish is to grab their attention and establish rapport.

Don’t start by selling or promoting your brands to your prospects. Instead, try to find out what a particular client wants or needs before you start talking about what you can offer. Open-ended questions are great in gathering insights.

Well-prepared answers to objections and questions about your product or services can lead to good conversations. Aside from that, your selling script can help facilitate closing – an area where many entrepreneurs and even salespeople are weak. At the end of the day, you should achieve a specific objective – it can be appointment, leads, sales, or even vital business information.

Complaint is one of the most dreaded words in the business world.

If you or your employees don’t know how to manage these issues carefully you will end up losing a hefty portion of your profits.

Solving a problem, no matter how complicated, can be summed up in 3 steps:

1. Listen attentively. Most complaints are simply misunderstanding between sellers and buyers. The worst thing you can do is to defend your company without understanding the real issues. Resist the temptation of cutting customers off in the middle of their complaints. It will only worsen the situation. Hear beyond their angry tone to uncover the real problems at hand. Let them get it all out of their system. Only then can you start turning this to conversation.

2. Mind your nonverbal gestures. Some studies show that communication is 60% body language, 30% tone, and 10% verbal. It means what you say won’t have much impact if your body and tone are not aligned with it. You may “sorry” but your gestures might indicate lack of sincerity. Try to empathize with your customer and be genuine about it. Apologize if the company is at fault and acknowledge your shortcomings if any.

3. Solve the problem. At the end of the day, you must settle the problem once and for all. Words and compassion don’t mean a thing unless it’s backed up with action and commitment. Ideally, you should have a ready standard answers to different problems. This should be a part of your brainstorming sessions.

But decide quickly. Depending on the nature of the problem, you can offer a refund, discount or replacement of product. Don’t hesitate to return the money if the complaint is valid. Give your business card to reassure that you really want to help solve the problem. They might not call you but at least they will feel at ease.

These 3 simple steps when applied efficiently and genuinely to your business can become a strong competitive advantage. Master the art of defusing anger and you will get rewarding returns on your investment.

What separates great entrepreneurs from the rest is their power to conquer fear, take risks, and act on their plans. A lot of people dream of becoming big someday but don’t do anything about it. Others are victim of this dream-killer called procrastination. A dream is just a dream. Stop analyzing and start working. As the old adage goes, practice makes perfect.

Fear is the enemy of greatness. Of all kinds, unfounded fear is the worst. Nowadays, most of us are easily discouraged to start a business because of the gloomy economic forecast. Sometimes, we take too much time analyzing different scenarios that we end up doing nothing.

There is no perfect time to start a business. Every year is worse than the previous one. There are different ways to lessen your fears and minimize your risks before launching up a business:

1. Have a clear plan about the business that you want to start. In the words of famous military strategist Sun Tzu: know yourself, know your enemy, and know your terrain.
2. Assess the resources you have and match it with what you need to start a business. Is it enough? Where can you get extra funding or business partners? Do you have the right skills to succeed in your chosen niche?
3. Prepare an action plan so you can break down all your thoughts and implement them immediately. Have a priority list of things to do in order to manage your time efficiently.

These things will definitely help you gauge the viability of your business idea. The key is not to analyze too much. Find time to do the planning and a separate schedule for putting them into action.

Great entrepreneurs are not born, they are made.

Some years ago when the dot com boom was in full flow, everyone thought that the internet was a sure fire way to become a millionaire overnight. Then came the big crash which left most of the start ups with burnt fingers, or worse. There are many reasons why this happened, but the biggest one was that people were so involved with the potential of the internet and the incredible business opportunities it offered that they forgot the most basic issue.

Success cannot be based purely on technological capabilities or potential or on exciting business models. Any enterprise, be it on the net or an old fashioned brick and mortar operation needs to know the basics of its business – how to produce products or services, how to sell them and how to make money of this effort. The ways of doing this online may be different, but the same principles apply.

The first thing you need to do is know yourself – your strengths and weaknesses. Make a list of all your strengths. Then add all your weaknesses to the same list. Now forget looking at them as strengths and weaknesses and instead look at them as qualities. What you think of as strengths and weaknesses may change places depending on your business. For example, you may list impatience as a weakness but it could be a strength if your business requires tight turn around, deliveries or customer responses.

Look at the qualities you will need to succeed in your new business and compare them to your list. This will give you a good idea of how suited you are for it; and even if you find this is not the business for you, doing this exercise will help you better define the kind of business you should be in.

Identifying the right business is something you need to spend time on. It not a question of what you want to do (although that is important) but on what has the best chance of success. The way to do this is to make a business plan and circulate it to those you trust and who’s opinions you value. Ask them for improvements, but more importantly ask them to knock holes in it – anything and everything, no matter how small. Plug all the holes and answer all the objections in as detailed a manner as possible.

Then do a SWOT analysis of you proposed business. SWOT is:

• Strengths – what do you have that give you an advantage over others?
• Weaknesses – what are the weaknesses in your proposed plan that could cause it to fail? What can you do about them?
• Opportunities – What are the opportunities that your qualities and business plan will be able to exploit (perhaps better than others) to get you success.
• Threats – What are the external threats that could cause your business to fail? Things like changes in technology that could make your product or service out of date, a sharp rise in costs (rising fuel prices are an example), changing lifestyles and so on. Weigh the threats. Look at ways of protecting yourself and then decide if you want to go ahead.

There’s a lot more to look at but if you have completed these first few basic steps, you will have made a good start. For more information on what a brand is or what quality management is, check out our company blog. Also check out an article names, What do you need to start an online business.

Before you take the plunge into online business, you need to be aware of the complexities of it. It may appear to be as simple as setting you a website and offering goods for sale, but it is not. It is a business and you need to run it like one. Everyone thinks of marketing and sales, but people often overlook the procedural basics of running an online business.

ACCOUNTING

It is probably the most distasteful part of running a business for most people, but it is the most important. Besides the fact that you need to maintain proper accounts for legal and tax purposes, you need a good accounting procedure to tell you if you are making money or not. It’s easy to get carried away at the end of the month when you see you have made sales of $10000. But unless your accounts are in order, how will you know whether the cost of running your business and selling was $9999?

Even if your margins are good, how will you know if they could be better unless you know if the amounts you are spending on things like marketing and promotions are providing you results that justify the expense? Should you be looking at other ways of using your money? Understanding accounting is not easy and if it is beyond you, it’s worthwhile to spend and hire a part time accountant to help you out.

LEGAL MATTERS

There are a multitude of laws that govern all internet activities, especially online businesses. You may want to look at the tax benefits of incorporating your business. There are laws on domain names. You may have to sign with the suppliers of products you plan to sell online. And product liability and warranties – yes even though you are not the manufacturer, you may be involved in any problems that arise on these issues.

Another issue often overlooked is the quantum of intellectual property laws that affect online business. If you feel you will not be able to understand all these issues yourself you could retain a lawyer specializing in internet law or else buy on of the many books that help laymen understand their legal obligations in running an online business.

GUARANTEES YOU NEED

What about the people you depend on to run your business? Have they guaranteed their performance? If you have used a web designer to create your website, has he given you a maintenance guarantee for the first year? And will he offer a maintenance contract for the future? Having problems with your site will cost you business. Have the manufacturers of the products you are selling guaranteed to meet the quality and delivery schedules you have stated on your website? If there are quality problems or delays in delivery, your customers will come to you and you can’t pass the buck off on your suppliers.

The internet offers you 24/7 visibility. If your server company is unreliable and suffers from frequent down time, potential client looking for the products or services you are offering may not find you. Does your server company offer you the security you need to accept credit card and other online payments? You need to have someone that you can depend upon, as your customers will be depending on you for security and protection of any information that they provide.

Take for example, Ringgle™. They have some cool features that they provide with their web hosting solutions. They have the Secure “Member Only” Areas, whereby customers are guaranteed online security. One thing to keep in mind is that while guarantees and compensations are fine, falling back on them is a last resort. It is always worthwhile to pay a bit more work with reliable people.

I have been blogging on this site for quite a while now. I never had any particular goal for this blog except for posting what ever caught my fancy. But of late I began to feel that a blog with out direction was one that was doomed to fail.

I do not have too many visitors to this blog (around 10 a day) and practically no subscribers (2 RSS subscribers as of today).

So I have decided seriously to dedicate this blog (at least for some time) to the all important topic of starting and running small businesses online. This is a topic dear to my heart. I have started and succeeded in a number of online ventures. I have successful websites that provide graphic design, branding, website design and software/application development. I have been doing this since 1999 and believe have gained some experience.

I believe it is now time to start sharing this experience with would-be online entreprenuers. I will also be positing occassional posts on other topics such as movie reviews, travel and photography. But the main focus will be on starting and running online businesses.

To help me achieve a professional blogging system, I have signed up for Yaro Starak’s Blog Mastermind. I will also be posting about my progress with this course as I implement what ever I learn from that course on this and my other websites.

Seth Godin, one of my favorite authors and marketing experts, is launching a new book called “Tribes” in October of this year. He has also posted a kind of membership sign up on his blog related to this book.

The membership is to an exclusive website or tribe of like minded marketers where they can share thoughts, ideas and even coloborate on projects. Using one of the principles from his up coming book, Seth has invited people to pre-order his book and then email him with the reciept. He would then add you to his tribe.

A fantastic way to drum up interest in his book. He says that this is not a ploy intended to sell more books but rather to set a hurdle to any one interested in joining the tribe. His tribe is not open for all and he says that when there is exclusivity and some sort of a hurdle, the right people will join.

As always, I like the way Seth thinks. Can’t wait to read his new book and get into his tribe.

Just wanted to do a quick post today. Ringgle is going strong. I have completed the website, the new design and also the system in record time and after a week, I can see no issues. 31 Trial sites have been created in the first week and the traffic is doing ok.

On the movies front, due to the insane push to launch Ringgle the last few weeks, I have not seen many movies and did not have time to review the ones that did see. I will hopefully resume movie review in a couple of months time.

Oil Canvaz has come to a halt. I am in the process of building the OilCanvaz site on the Ringgle system and hope to have it completed in a couple of months. The design is done but the main issue is that I have more 8000 paintings that I need to upload as products on the system. Ringgle does have a bulk product upload (via a CSV file) feature but I still need to write description for each and every painting etc. I am planning on outsourcing this work.

I have also resumed work on Dinozaur.com and will hopefully launch it in 2-3 months. Again the design part is ready but since this is going to be a sophisticated print t-shirt order system, I need to work out the feature modules and ensure it all works well before launching it.

Sorry for not being in touch the past few weeks. I have been up to my neck in my latest venture – Ringgle™!

I am working on launching a platform for the next generation of websites for my customers. Till now, most small business were dependent on a number of tools to help them run an online business. But with Ringgle™ we will design the site and the client can manage and edit it as they see fit. They can open an online shop in 2 easy steps, accept secure card payments, set up a business blog or news or announcement section, an online product image or photo gallery and much more.

But the best part would be a feature called the Ringgle Scope™ which would let the customer have a bird’s eye view of how their online business is doing both in terms of tracking sales, customers and orders but also the traffic (who is visiting the site and what are they doing). This tool will help the customers to decide on how the different pages are performing on the website and then take the nessasary action to rectify any issues.

But with the launch of Ringgle™, I hope to bridge the gap between expensive and often quite difficult to run content management tools and the plain static web page.

I have been working on the brand name and development seriously for the past couple of weeks and have finally decided on Ringgle!. Since what I intend to launch is a “web 2.0″ service, I thought a name fitting that trend would be suitable.

I am in the process of desiging the website. I should be launching Ringgle! in the next couple of weeks.

The other website I am working in is the oil paintings online shop. The actual brand and the site design are all in place but the actual product entry is turning out to be a pain. With over 8000 images of oil paintings and with the need to write a blurb for each of them it just might take forever for me to launch that one!

In this very competitive business world where cutting through the clutter is the name of the game, many entrepreneurs are trained to sell, sell and sell. They would rather talk about their products or services. No wonder active listening is often referred to as a lost art.

Shut up! Gag your mouth if you can’t help it. Then go out or pick up the phone and talk to your customers.

Contrary to popular misconception, marketing is not all talk. It’s about paying attention to WHO really matters – your customers and employees (if you have). Researching about your customers need not be expensive. But it should be well-planned. Otherwise, it will lead you to the wrong direction.

The first and most difficult thing to do when listening is to remove all your faulty impressions about your target market. It’s unfortunate that some brilliant entrepreneurs believe they know their customers by heart. Start with an empty mind and try not to contradict the insights. Clarify but not contradict.

Basic questions

In case you don’t notice, consumers like to talk about themselves as much as entrepreneurs love to talk about their products. If such is the case, why not indulge them by asking open-ended questions? This will not only create an impression that you care but also give you free access to multitude of insights. Here are some questions to break the ice:

1. How do you use this product? How often?
2. Are there similar products you’re also buying?
3. Where do you buy these products? Why?
4. Where do you gather information when buying this product?
5. How different is this product to competitors?

Don’t act surprised. These are not magic questions that will direct you to the winning formula. Rather, they are so simple that many undervalue its importance in marketing.