One of the biggest fears for any future entrepreneurs is how to manage the start-up sales. While most of the companies start with a clear focus to satisfy a demand, sometimes the sales goals are too hard to achieve. This usually comes from competition, bad services, bad people or an unclear target setting.
While I’ve already talked about the quality of the services (that has to be good enough to be sold even to your family and friends the other points need a little support.
Lets see about of the targeted customers. If you are a small company (providing IT services for example) its a complete non sense to target every potential person that might need such service. Instead, pick a niche, lets say dentists, and make your best to cover as good as possible their needs. This will help you: gain good references amongst dentists in your area, deliver a customized solution to their needs and spend wisely your resources. This is niche positioning. Here is a post from MicroISV that might explain the trick.
Competition. Competition might be strong, might be good. But the key to fight competition is differentiation. As no 2 companies are the same, focus on the aspects that might bring your the biggest competitive advantage. It might be a feature in your products, it might be your price, or maybe location. It might even be your looks or your voice. And you can fight with guerilla marketing – small marketing actions performed as the opportunities come and go. A press release there, a logo there, a promotion.
People. If you are providing IT services, the most important asset your company could ever have is “people” Hire now a cheaper specialist, and you will start loosing money tomorrow until the moment he will go away. This is more than a paying a good salary. Go for the best specialist you can afford.
And keep up the good work!
Another advantage of affiliate marketing is that you can build a great home business model, simply by advertising products to others, I suppose the key is to build a good relationship with your readers, they need to know they can believe you, when you provide honest information about products or services you have used.