Week 4: You’re now in business—start selling!
You’ve covered your bases. Now, you literally have no excuse! This is the time to get out and talk to people. Start selling, continue advertising, and follow up.
Day 22: Uncover your USP
Your “unique selling proposition” (USP, also called a “unique value proposition”) defines what makes you unique. You will need a USP if you’re going to start directly “selling your business” to potential customers.
Figuring out exactly what your USP is will take a bit of creativity and soul-searching.
As you have done throughout the planning and startup process, consider analyzing your competitors and other companies. How are they selling themselves? How do they portray themselves? What do they say makes them unique? If you’re not sure, take a look at their advertising and marketing messages. This is generally where you’ll find the USP or variations of it.
Don’t just analyze what they sell, analyze what they say they sell.
As you look to creating your own USP, put yourself in your customers shoes. What do they want? What do they value? What are the benefits of your product or of choosing to work with you rather than a competitor.
If you’ve already started your business, you can also uncover your USP by figuring out the real reasons that customers bought your product and not a competitor’s. And the best way to do this? Ask them! If you can’t ask your own customers, because you don’t have any yet, ask your competitors’ customers why they chose your competitor?
Day 23 and 24: Start introducing yourself on the phone, start pitching your business, start in-field sales, start reaching out
You do need to create a list of prospects before you reach out. This will help you focus on targeting the right areas and the right people. Do your research. If you’re selling a high-end product, you don’t want to target/cold-call customers in a low-income neighborhood. And, if you’re selling a product suited to children, should you really focus on the section of town that all the college students live in?
Even if you don’t win immediate business in this step, you’re actually marketing your business and spreading word. When people later do need to use your service or buy your product, they may well remember you from that initial call you made.
Tim Berry suggests making 50 calls in 150 minutes. That means no longer than 3 minutes per call. This will help you stay on target.
If you’re doing in-field sales, it may be wise to first research a customer before reaching out and asking to visit them. This will save you both time and money.
Day 25: Follow up on prospects you’ve reached out to, people you’ve pitched, and so on
If someone expressed interest or gave you a very specific reason for not taking up on your business offer, there are a number of follow up approaches that may get them to reconsider their initial refusal.
This could include:
- An endorsement from a mutual friend
- A meal/meeting in a non-business environment
- An invitation to visit your facility
- An article about your company—something that will give you credit or that they will find relevant
Remember, the key with following up is to consider what new information you can share that may change this person’s perspective. What might they be interested in that you missed sharing on that first call?
Day 26 and 27: Figure out how you’ll maintain an ongoing relationship with customers/clients and then build, maintain, and engage with your customers/audience
Now you’ve build up an audience or won your first few clients or customers, you’re going to need to maintain the relationship. For many businesses today, this happens in the form of social media accounts, which can often stand in for a customer service team.
That said, you should still have a way for people to get in touch with you or with someone in the company when they need to resolve an issue. And you should make this clear so that they don’t do it publicly on social sites and so that you don’t sour the relationship.
Other things you could do to maintain your relationship with customers/clients includes:
- Wishing customers a Happy Birthday when it comes around
- Offering discounts for loyalty (perhaps for being with your company for a year?)
- Sending seasonal greeting cards
- Congratulating customers on business or personal achievements (maybe highlight a customer’s success on your site/social platform—with permission of course)
Regardless of what you choose to do to maintain the relationship, remember that as with advertising your business, this isn’t something you do “once off.” This is ongoing work. But it is also work that will help you understand your customers and adapt to their needs based on feedback.
Day 28: Choose your accounting software/online bookkeeping application
The main benefit of using good accounting software is that it will make your costs and expenditures visible which will ultimately result in more responsible financial decision-making.
Beyond that, if you are accountable to lenders and investors, these statements will prove you’re trustworthy and help you avoid financial damage.
A few top-rated accounting applications worth looking into include:
- QuickBooks Online
- Freshdesk
- Xero
- Sage One
- Zoho
Take some time to familiarize yourself with accounting principles and statements as well. Do you understand which statements are important when it comes time to file taxes? Do you understand how to log your costs and expenses?
If not, speak to your accountant, or to a bookkeeper. They should help you get up to speed. Eventually, you’ll consider it second nature!
Bonus:
Day 29: Use LivePlan
I’ve also allocated a day to getting set up with a LivePlan account, partly because I recommend the software having used it, and largely because the Scoreboard feature in LivePlan will make managing your business a lot easier.
Scoreboard is a business dashboard that will give you immediate insight into your state of affairs. How much cash do you have on hand? What are your expenses? What are your profits? How do these things stack up against your forecasted data?
Scoreboard is most powerful when linked with your accounting software. As it integrates with many of the major accounting platforms, you shouldn’t have a hard time drilling down into key metrics to figure out how you’re doing.
If nothing else, familiarize yourself with your key financial metrics from the start. You may have to put in a bit of time to learn more about what is most important for your business, but at the very least, you’ll need to keep a close eye on your cash flow. Without cash on hand, your profitable business could still fail.
LivePlan is also a good place to keep the live draft of your business plan. If you set this up earlier—in week two—you should find it easy to simply spend the day learning Scoreboard and your key metrics.
Day 30: Rest
If you’ve followed this 30 day guideline, give yourself a day of rest. But, don’t be surprised if you can’t. While running your own business will allow you to decide what you want to do, it will also be a full-time responsibility and you’ll be in charge of making sure everything is going to plan.
Conclusion (and Disclaimer):
Much of the structure and logic behind each step is thanks to guidance from Tim Berry’s book, “3 Weeks to Startup.” However, I have reordered a few steps and added a couple to give you a bit more time to get set up. I have also added an additional week for two reasons:
- Most people are comfortable with chunking to-dos and challenges into 30 day segments. I wanted to do something that felt both “familiar” and manageable.
- I can’t imagine writing a business plan and getting hold of funding for a business idea in a day. I’m sure it can be done, but if you have never started a business before or are unaware of the funding opportunities available to you, you may want to spend more time doing research and speaking with business development associations in your town.
Now: tell us how you’re doing? Have you decided to take the challenge? Share your thoughts with us in the comment below or on Twitter.