I hesitate to blog on this topic today but I think I should. I really want to share my own experience with you when I started my business. Believe it or not, even with all my qualifications and experience in business management issues, I did find the issue of marketing daunting when I started for a variety of reasons. Firstly, I have no track record in business and many prospects will ask for testimonials and trade reference.

Secondly, my role from being a finance employee to becoming a business owner was a significant change because I was responsible for my own income and dare I say my salary. Where do I start? Will people take me seriously? What if no one buys from me…………..? These were all the questions I silently asked myself. It is funny, because the truth is, I experienced a mixture of excitement and anxiety all at the same time.

One of the biggest challenges that many entrepreneurs will find when they start a business is the practicalities of selling their own products and services to the target market they really want to serve. Making that first sale is important to boost your motivation to continue. Being able to sell is a skill no entrepreneur can afford to be average at. True, you may be average when you start your business but you should not be content to stay at that level, unless you want to have an average performance in your business. In my case, I had to utilise the expertise of gurus who have helped others in the field and with strong market reputation. I utilised Jay Abraham’s ‘Marketing Mastermind and 93 Extraordinary Referral Systems’ which I used and quite honestly my income grew by more than 300% in twelve months just putting some of the tools shared by Jay Abraham. It is funny when I think about it now but I remembered when I started putting the techniques learnt and seeing the results. I remembered how I unwittingly sought advice from people who are not in business on a subject they know nothing about and sure enough they guided me towards the wrong directions. Thank God, I was wise enough to recognise when to put a break on their proposals. Remember, that it does not help you in any way to get someone who is not running a business to be advising you on this subject. If they know how to market they will be in business. Marketing is not just textbook stuff, it involves your interaction with yourself and others and much more.
Here are my top tips for start-up businesses trying to get their first sales and growing their business by at least 50% over eighteen months- consider them as my top tips.

• Start spending more than 25% of your time per week on marketing activities

• Recruit and utilise the skills of associates and joint venture partners to leverage time and boost sales income

• Seek ways of understanding your existing clients needs and develop solutions for them so that you can increase the average spend per clients

• Develop a marketing system using the likes of Jay Abrahams Marketing Mastermind System and be prepared to invest the time and money to put the system in place. No business will succeed without a solid system to support its success.

• Monitor the performance of all your marketing effort and do more of what works and less of what does not work.

• Seek expert advice and never take advice from people with no track record of doing what you are doing or for that matter with poor results in the area you are trying to master.
• To find out more about tools to assist your business in effective marketing, please visit www.businessservicessupport.com/marketing-strategies