photo by Ernst Vikne

Sometimes the hardest part of this whole business thing is getting them to move!  Have you ever had the situation where you’ve had good meetings with potential prospective clients…and then you wait?

They know who you are.  They know what you do.  They need what you do, but for some reason they don’t move and you end up waiting for something to happen!

I’ve got a couple of clients facing this very situation – they’ve put a lot of time and effort into marketing, they’re getting initial meetings with what looks to be the right kind of people (qualified and in need) but things are moving slowly…or really not moving at all!

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  photo by dimnikolov

Being a business owner often feels like being in a race…only it’s a race that never ends and it seems like you have to keep running harder just to keep up as you go!

The one thing that most business owners fantasize about, maybe even more than having more money, is having more time!  Think about an average week for you – how much time did you have to just sit and kick back without your mind racing, or the phone ringing?  Staring at a list of 100 things not getting done doesn’t count!

Imagine if you could find a way to free up 1 hour of your week while still getting the same amount of things done?  What about 10 hours a week?  What would you do with the extra time?

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  photo by Nina Matthews Photography

Free your mind…and the rest will follow!

If you want to be more successful you have to open up your mind and be willing to keep learning!  Obviously there are a lot of great books out there, SmartBriefs are an invaluable tool, there are a huge number of great blogs and if you haven’t checked out TED by now you are really missing the boat.

Along the same lines, another resource you should also check out is MindTools.  Mindtools has been around in some capacity since 1996 and they have a strong focus on helping people develop leadership and management skills…which is something everyone can benefit from.

Mindtools is a membership site (with a very reasonable cost structure) but they also have a lot of great tools and articles that are completely free.  Stuff ranging from Running Effective Meetings to a Burnout Self-Test.

You can eventually find anything on the internet, but MindTools gives you a great place to start if you’re looking for help or just some new ideas.  It’s a well done site with a lot of helpful business (and personal) development ideas – definitely worth checking out.

Have you used MindTools before?  What did you think?  What other sites are out there like MindTools?  I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

Shawn Kinkade  Kansas City Business Coach

Sales is the lifeblood of small business success.  You can have the best product, the best service in the world, but without closing a sale, it doesn’t mean anything.  Unfortunately it can be difficult to get that sale closed, people may like to buy, but they don’t like to be sold.

With that in mind, there is one thing that you can do that will greatly increase your chances for selling success.  It’s counterintuitive and it can be really difficult to pull off, especially if you have a lot riding on closing the deal.  But it will work for any industry and any selling situation and it doesn’t really matter what your sales technique might be.

What’s the one thing that can make such a big difference?

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  photo by peggyhr

Sometimes it can really help to look at things upside down…or backwards if you want to find some answers!  The change in perspective generates a lot of ideas and be a valuable tool.

I’m talking about Reverse Brainstorming – a simple and powerful way to spark ideas that might get overlooked if you were coming up with a list of things you could do. 

The process is simple – isolate a problem that you’d like to solve…in the article above they used the example of ‘How can we improve patient satisfaction’.  Then you simply reverse the idea and brainstorm possible answers on ‘How can we make patient satisfaction worse?.

The reversal opens up all sorts of possibilities and often puts you closer to the situation.  Let’s try a different example hits most small business owners:  “How do I get more effective marketing”?

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