companies house made easy

Have you ever heard successful business owners / entrepreneurs described as dogged? If you run or are starting your own business, it’s an attribute that you’d better learn fast.

Here’s a tip to help you along the way: Dogged doesn’t have to mean chipping away at a problem until it crumbles, it means using your imagination to find an alternative way to get the result you want.

Here’s another tip: No doesn’t always mean no, it quite often means “not like this.”

Example: Cold-calling. I don’t care what you are selling, how cheap it is, how much I could save, how easy it is to switch or how soon you can meet. If you cold-call me, I probably won’t do business with you. Maybe a change of marketing channel is necessary.

It’s a common behaviour for business owners to start altering their prices and business model until more people start saying yes. But as shown in the example above, it’s not necessarily that your model is wrong, it might be the way you are trying to do business.

I used the example of cold calling randomly of course and it can be incredibly successful for some people. I could equally say the same about business networking events, where people are so eager to prove their credibility they can end up scaring potential customers away.

Example: You get approached by someone at a small business networking event who want to tell you about their new business coaching company. They tell you about the big company they used to work for, and the leading companies they worked with, and their great success that took them first class to all corners of the globe.

Sounds expensive, I’ll pass. In this instance maybe a change of script rather than marketing channel is necessary. Perhaps one that focuses on how I can benefit rather than how successful you are/were. Maybe you need to play a waiting game and get to know me over a period of months (building trust). Maybe proving your knowledge with an insightful presentation at an event will allow me to draw my own conclusions about your credibility.

This isn’t a post about how not to do business, so don’t pay too much attention to the slightly extreme examples of poor selling above. Pay attention to the idea that when somebody says no (in one of it’s many forms!), they don’t necessarily mean no to your service or product. They often just mean, no I don’t want to do business based on this encounter.