Sales

Business Idea: An Online Course You Start and Scale in 30 Days

This post by Bryan Harris offers a detailed playbook of how to approach starting a new online business. The process of coming up with an idea and how to get your first sales is very valuable. He provides a doable plan for:

creating a $997 course
finding the first customer with a discounted version to get a testimonial
getting the next few customers
getting a mailing list with 1000+ subscribers and selling 10 courses a month

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The Best Cold Email I’ve Ever Received

Whether you are looking for interview opportunities, funding for your startup, or new customers, mastering cold emails is a skill that will serve you well.

“If there are five people who you think would make great clients or an advocate for your brand, go research them as a person. Once you figure out something unique or hard-to-find about them, include it in your e-mail. Offer them some value in the form of a care package that’s relevant to them.”

Business Opportunity: Do you have a daily practice of cold outreach. How much would your business grow if you contacted 1 new person a day every day?

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Trends.vc Guide to Lead Generation

Lead generation is covered on this week’s edition of Dru Riley’s Trends report. There are dozens of links related to helping your business get more sales. I recommend giving it a quick browse to see if anything jumps out at you.

Business Opportunity: One great idea I discovered is subscribing to lists of newly funded companies on CyberLeads or GrowthList.

These companies sell a weekly list of newly funded companies that have lots of cash and need to grow their businesses. This is a great opportunity to sell content marketing, advertising, SEO, development, etc. to startups that need it.

There are business opportunities compiling this data for different industries, as well. Nathan Latka does this for Saas companies. He does a daily interview show where he gets sales and growth data from CEOs. Then he sells print reports of all this data to companies for $30 per month. I believe he said he has more than 1000 subscribers for his magazine. This idea can be done for almost any industry.

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Why Doing Things That Don’t Scale Is A MUST In B2B Sales

“The most successful companies didn’t automate and scale every single action from Day One. They started by doing things that don’t scale in order to generate momentum.”

“When someone agreed to try Stripe in the early days, the founders didn’t just send over a link—they took the person’s laptop and set up the software on the spot”

“Wufoo sent each and every new user a hand-written thank-you note”

“ProductHunt actively reached out to contributors and respected product people while building their MVP to gather feedback (and build hype for their launch)”

via top10in.tech

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Why Selling Marketing Services Is Stupid

This podcast episode is about performance-based marketing services, where you take a percentage of the sales generated, rather than a fixed fee.

Jake Jorgovan of LeadCookie talks about how one deal like this has already returned 7 times the amount they would have charged and will continue to generate more profits into the future. He has created a new company to focus on this opportunity at Bridgetac.

Business Opportunity: While it’s difficult to build the level of trust needed to make partnerships like this work, it does seem to be a big opportunity. It’s much easier to close sales if there are no upfront costs.

soundcloud.com

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The System Every Creator Needs To Figure Out To Build A Successful Career

“Every successful creator’s system contains the same three elements: Discovery, connection, and monetization mechanisms.”

Simple frameworks like this can be very helpful in prioritizing your key tasks.

Discovery
‘If you don’t have something designed to attract the attention of new people on a consistent basis, your discovery mechanism needs some work.”

Connection
“Turning that person into an email subscriber is typically the most powerful connection you can have, but your connection mechanism could also be to get them to follow you on social media.”

Monetization
“If you don’t have a specific path to eventual monetization, you won’t be able to build a sustainable creative career and will wind up a creative hobbyist instead of a creative pro.”

joshspector.com

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The Entrepreneurs Fundamental Superpower: The Conditional Close

“If you can master this, then the world is your oyster”

“The Conditional Close looks something like this:”

You: “What would you need to see in order to make an investment in our company?”
VC: “I’d need to have a discussion over a pretty detailed financial model, and I’d also like to see your customer usage data.”
You: “So if we were to have a conversation about our financial model and customer usage data, then you would be willing to invest in our company?”
VC: “Yes, then I would be willing to invest.”

via founderweekly.com