After getting caught up with my own challenges, I wondered, what is everyone else up against? So I emailed around 50 peers in diverse industries: payroll, software, advertising, consulting…
I asked one question: “What are your biggest business challenges?” Here are the most common responses, and strategies for overcoming them.
“My biggest challenge has always been balancing client service and sales.”
The reason this is a big problem is that doing sales never seems urgent until it’s too late. It’s extremely difficult to rush around and make sales happen out of thin air. Instead, sales has to be an ongoing exercise. You have to work at it everyday, knowing that you will rarely get any short-term satisfaction. It’s not much different than going to the gym.
Client services, on the other hand, can be handled with quick bursts of work if it comes down to it, especially with the aid of colleagues, subordinates, and outsourced help. You can crank out that report in 8 hours if you have to, but the giant, year-making deal will take a lot more time.
To keep up with both duties, you have to manage your time and keep an iron wall between sales and client service – don’t respond to client emails during sales time, and vice versa.
“My biggest challenge is leveraging my network. I belong to some really powerful groups. I simply don’t know how to use them for my business.”
This was a big hurdle for me. From attending many groups and events in New York over the years, I realized that less is more when it comes to networking. Now I get most of my referral business, helpful advice, constructive criticism, and other benefits from 5-10 people.
Who makes up these elites? It started from a large group of people in similar industries who could pass leads my way. Over time, however, this group was whittled down to the people with whom I hit it off. You get the best returns from networking when you’re having fun. After all, it’s too time consuming to be a drag.
When it comes to leveraging your network, adopt a helpful mentality. Keep referrals, intros, and advice in mind for your 5-10 best peers. And next time you need advice or knowhow, look to you network, even if Google is faster. When you reach out to your peers for help, you keep top of mind when referrals come up. Also, you will get better insight than you will from some blogger (excluding yours truly ;). Above all, your peers will be honored that you value their perspectives.
“My biggest challenge is getting paid appropriately for my efforts. I continually bump up against what we know we’re worth versus what the market will pay.”
If you’re confident of your value but the market can’t pay it, one strategy is repackaging your offering for a different market. If you sell to small businesses who can’t afford your true value, ask yourself, how big is the barrier preventing me from selling to medium or large businesses? If the barrier is your own preference for working with a certain type of customer, then consider that privilege a type of payment in itself.
Alternatively, you can repackage your offering to the same market in a different way. Make your product cover a larger swath of your customer’s pain – if you’re “a small business consultant”, make yourself an “outsourced COO”!
“My biggest challenge is actually closing the deal. I hold the client’s hand the whole way and I lose them at the 11th hour.”
There are lots of crafty closing tricks out there, and they rarely work. Closing is simply the last logical step of your goal-oriented conversations. That being said, when you have a long sales cycle, or you’re selling a complex product, it gets hazy when consulting ends and paid engagement begins. You have to cross a line with your prospect by telling them it’s time to buy.
In my experience, simply defining what “closing” entails is enough to tip many over the edge. That’s assuming you understand the buying situation and ask at the right time. Asking the following question dramatically improved my close rate:
“To get started we will need sign off on our services agreement and an engagement payment of 50%. What are best next steps for you?”
Regardless of your position, experience, or industry, there are challenges that will come up time and again. Thankfully, the experience of others will usually give you the answers you need.
What are your biggest challenges? Let us know in the comments.
