The Easiest Formula for Forecasting Sales (Just 2 Steps)

If you want to sell well or to pitch for funding, you need to forecast your sales well.

It can be especially challenging for any startup or small business owner. This was especially frustrating for me too, because there was no reference which was readily or easily accessible.

Step 1

To start, I learned that to find out what is the sales potential of any business I had to understand which key factors affected how customers purchase from my business.

Do the customers of my business need to visit my store to purchase from my business or can they purchase through the Internet?

These factors are segmented into 2 categories.

1. Sales Limited by Geography = Customers needing to visit my store to purchase from my business.
2. Sales Not Limited by Geography = Customers are able to purchase through the Internet.

These 2 categories helped to organise a complex problem to become an easily understood 1st step.

Step 2

Lastly, identify customers which would be a good fit for the business and multiply that number by the average value each customer would contribute to the business.

This helps you to form your total Market Size. This tells you the potential sales your business is able to earn.

How does Step 1 help with Step 2? The 2 categories mentioned earlier in Step 1, helps you to identify customers which would be a good fit for the business.

For example,

• You own a cafe located within the city center. 
• You know that your customers need to visit the Cafe to purchase from the business. Therefore, the Cafe's sales is limited by Geography.
• You learned that there are 2 office blocks which are within walking distance to your cafe. Within each of these office blocks there are 20 floors which has 1,000 employees.
• If each customer of the Cafe on average spends RM15 each for lunch, this means the total Market Size for the Cafe is RM600,000 per month (RM15 each for lunch x 1,000 employees x 2 office blocks x 20 business-days).

Conclusion

When estimating your own Market Size, consider reflecting your business against Market Size. This will help you to know how much you are currently contributing to the customers around you.

Following the previous example, if your Cafe makes RM30,000 per month this means your Cafe owns 5% of the market (RM30,000 / RM600,000). This to you means, you can focus your efforts knowing which activities are likely to increase your Market Size.

Additional resources:

How to estimate, number of employees in an office building? 

• A great way to make an estimate of how many people are within the surrounding buildings of your business is by searching about a building's capacity and current tenancy from popular websites such as iProperty, Propwall, and Propsocial. For 1 employee on average the space allocated is 250sqft. Here's a great article here about space allocation for employees.
• Be sure to reserve 25% of your total office space as open areas for walking and other furnitures.

For example, if on average an office is 3,000sqft - you can safely estimate 9 employees (3,000 sqft x 75% active area after open areas for walking and other furnitures / 250sqft per employee).

How to estimate, number of people in an apartment or home?

• There may be homes surrounding your business too. If you come across advertisements for homes of 800sqft or 1,000sqft, these usually house a family of 4 people.

Focus your efforts to increase your Market Size. Do this through SMS and Email (learn more here), which are cost effective tools to help you reach more customers in your Market.

Separately, learn how a sandwich store employs a tactic to leverage on SMS as a way to promote their business.

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Case Study: Restaurant Continues to Engage with Customers Resulting in More Repeat Sales

Customers come and go, and it is hard to keep in touch and continually engage with them. There's a lot going on in their lives.

Social is a big pull for business owners because of the reach it gives and potential it promises. However, there is a constant need to develop content to keep current.

A more direct solution to this would be to employ 2 tried and tested marketing tools to keep customers engaged.

SMS and Email.

SMS and Email has many benefits as they are both affordable tools where business and customers can choose to interact directly with each other.

Both being synonymous and come together like bread and butter.

The sales journey for a potential customer is much longer compared with customers that have already positively interacted with your business.

Ideally, you are providing the customer with an option to maintain the positive relationship they have had with your business.

Examples of engagement include options for customers to consider when choosing their preferred choice to be notified of any offers or promotions your business can offer them.

Restaurant uses this to their advantage by capturing customer's information quickly through a text message.

The benefit is to reduce any challenges customers may face to opt-in. SMS helps to make the process quicker compared to the need to physically write down on a paper form or have them go to a website to fill out a subscription.

All the customer has to do is submit a text message containing a keyword and email to a short-code and the server would respond to their email indicating subscription has already been confirmed! 

This reduces the barrier with customers who are not technologically savvy. Everything can be done straight from their mobile phone with a  simple text message.

What efforts are you making to capitalize on repeat sales?

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3 SEO Secrets To Make You Become An Organic Powerhouse

SEO is everything to being discovered through search. What is the secret behind the search behemoth?

This continues to be elusive to most businesses embarking on their content development journey. Inbound lead generation seems to be a myth.

It can be demoralizing when your traffic sources start continues to be in a decline, that so much so it is in a plateau that never seems to go past zero.

Rather than hitting the eject button, we decided to scour the Internet for a solution and to find the culprit.

What we discovered is that our editorial strategy of brainstorming topics and relying on our intuition did not work.

We decided to pivot and focus our energies on the channel organic search. 

Here in this post we will share with you our 3 SEO secrets we've employed in our updated strategy as we deliver more relevant content to our readers.

Below is a brief outline of the 3 SEO Secrets:

1. People First, Search Engines Last
2. Link-Build
3. Compress Images

1. People First, Search Engines Last

Although the algorithm does dictate the result of search, you must remember that search engines reward for the best content on the internet, not for the best algorithm.

The 1st step we took is to understand the intent behind the keyword we want to target.

To do this we analyze a keyword's search engine's result and determine the problems that the users were trying to solve.

After which, we tried to find the best solutions to find the best steps to solving it. Finally we create engaging copy with clear, concise, and compelling copy.

We try to highlight findings, data, and include images that keep our readers stimulated for more.

2. Link-Build

Crucial to improving your domain authority, it is imperative for you to earn high-quality inbound links from websites and pages with high authority scores.

The main method we are currently using to earn high-quality links is by networking with other websites that have a higher domain score.

We are making every effort to also make sure our content is relevant to the referring website's content.

3. Compress Images

A basic rule for optimizing for search engines that often gets overlooked is compressing of your image files.

This may seem rudimentary and not a top priority but file size affects your website's load speed, which is 1 of 10 most important ranking factors for Google.

A great place to start on optimizing your page for Google is the guide prepared by them: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide.

In a previous article we've covered a hidden trick to quickly and easily to enhance your SEO in Malaysia - this is a no brainer and can be done within 1 day.

Conclusion

These are the 3 secrets that we are currently devising as our SEO strategy, and continues to break records for us.

It's entirely possible that they could be outdated quick as SEO keeps changing and improving for the benefit of the users using the search engines.

How fast are you employing these new tactics?

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5 Sales Pitch every Malaysian Salesperson Should Know in 2019

To start we start with the basics of a sales pitch. It's basically a salesperson's attempt to persuade their audience to buy or believe what they are selling. It might be a chance at another meeting, more information about your product or service, or a personal pitch which has you as the subject matter. The key to most sales pitches are the speed, to the point and the need for it to grab attention.

This isn't new, but the concepts have adapted over time. At the core a sales pitch is just a way to share more information or explain what your product or service can do for the interested buyer. What value it brings to the table.

What's new with doing your sales pitch in 2019? Gone are the days when a sales pitch is long, product-focused, and boring.

With the advent of technology and social media, our attention span has shortened greatly. If anyone has any time to hear your sales pitch at all, it had better be compelling or at the very least to the point.

Now it's just as important to translate your product or service's value proposition into one most appropriate.

1. The One-Word

What's your presentation in one word. Obama did a fantastic job during his re-election campaign as "forward". Think of a single word that represents your offering and use it as a punchy tagline.

2. The Question

Use this when you're confident that your buyer completely understands the value of your product or service.

Formulate a question instead of making a statement. For example:

Strategic outsourcing will reduce your company's costs.

Would strategic outsourcing reduce your company's costs?

3. The Subject Line

If you have mastered the art of crafting an intriguing subject line, take that expertise and apply it to your sales pitch.

It should be useful or mysteriously intriguing. It's also important to note that the more information buyers are considering, the less effective curiosity-provoking subjects become.

4. Twitter Sales

Try limiting your pitch to only 140 characters. This forces you to think critically and creatively about your main offer. It can also help you to trim the unnecessary jargon from your presentation.

5. The Pixar Sales

This is the narrative template. Once upon a time ___. Everyday, ____. One day ____.

By phrasing your pitch this way, it automatically becomes a story which top salespeople know remains in the minds of the people they are selling to much better than a dry recitation of facts.

Great sales tips for Malaysian sales professionals are written here in this blog. Learn more about sales here.

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4 Free Ways to Promote Your New Content

Placing greater efforts on crafting a killer header and writing great content would be worthless, if you do not promote the content that you create.

It's similar to planning for a Friday night party, but not inviting anyone to the party. If you take the time to promote and build excitement, you might attract people who are interested in attending.

This is the same with your content and gives you the best chance of success.

Here's a big tip. Don't promote your content to everyone. It's like inviting your mom to a guy's night out. You should target each of your content that you create to a specific buyer persona.

Hubspot has a great guide on how you can easily and step-by-step identify your buyer persona. Start this first before you begin to promote your content.

Below you will find the 4 free ways we use to promote our content. 

1. Promote Consistently on Social

At every possible time, we promote our content through our social channels to keep each post fresh. Make sure you include an image, link and a hashtag.

2. Notify Current Audiences through Email

Email is often overlooked as a source for inbound leads. We've covered interesting points on Email Signatures and what to avoid here.

Another great read is some neat tricks for email you can implement here.

One other use for your content through email is to approach new prospects by providing them with valuable information, and establish authority to assist with your sales efforts.

3. Recycle Content

Old content can be repurposed, with a new header, improved more in-depth content to make it more helpful for new readers.

It can cover more resources and provide better value to the readers.

4. Repurpose Content Into New Formats

A great trick to increase your content's reach you can repurpose your content into other formats, such as a slideshare deck, Pinterest post, or podcast.

Are there any other free ways you currently use to promote your new content?

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Cheat Sheet on Which Website Changes to Prioritise

There are generally two ways websites change, either big or small.

There is the revolutionary change requiring a periodic 4 to 5 year redesign and there are the little evolutionary changes that happen in between the revolutionary change that are the enhancements, and support handling.

Some changes to websites are simple content changes, while others are serious maintenance normally requiring new features and integration.

There are millions of things you can do with a website and each of them has a cost and benefit:

1. The time/effort/costs needed to make changes varies in time. It can be finished quickly or can take months of planning, programming and testing.
2. The results of the websites changes also vary wildly while some have a huge impact on marketing outcomes while others have none at all.

Adding a new title tag or modifying it, adding a new section or dropping a video has a return (benefit) on investment (time and cost).

Together they can be plotted on a chart showing the relationship between benefits with time and costs.

Time and Money: The costs of website updates

Websites are magic, it allows anyone to interact with your business globally. However, it still does need time, and money or both.

If you have an in-house marketing team, with a solid content management system (CMS), then changes to texts and images don't incur additional expenses. These are basically free website enhancements to the company.

Big design and programming changes normally mean calling your web developer.

Here is a quick overview of possible website enhancements and whether marketing time or there is a required investment into design or development incurred:

Relationship between traffic, conversions and website changes: the benefits

Before making any changes to your current website you should ask this question.

What is the outcome you expect to achieve out of this change? Is it to enhance your brand, gain better conversions or you are responding to feedback you have received from your users?

Each and every investment into your website should align with a goal.

These business goals lead to website needs, where commerce sites are usually higher sales transactions or information sites are for lead generation through better traffic and a higher conversion rate.

That's how essentially websites make money.

Here are some main goals of websites that people use as a benchmark:

1. Increase conversion rates: Maximize the percentage of visitors who visit the site to take action through the website that align with the visitors' perspective and psychology.
2. Increase traffic: Grow brand awareness and top line traffic levels through better alignment between website, search, social, email and paid marketing activities.
3. Easier management: make the website more efficient marketing tool with more flexible templates and tools so no update takes longer than expected and the ability to integrate actively with other systems when practical.
4. Website uptime: Ensure that the website is up during critical times when customers meet most often. Find out more about great hosting here.
5. Internal politics: Keep people happy, especially highly-opinionated people, and people with power. Some website changes don't have any practical marketing purpose.

Beware of opinions! When an opinion is stated look for evidence to support or refute that opinion. You could probably find it in Analytics which is a great tool for making better decisions about website updates.

Below are some examples of website changes that align with goals mentioned above and we see how the benefits matchup according to our experience:

There are a few updates to your website that could potentially hurt the marketing results (yes this is true and can happen to you too!) and here are some common examples:

1. Adding a design element that pulls the visitors attention from the call-to-action.
2. Building an expensive feature that isn't rarely used.
3. Updating the title tag of a page that already ranks high for a valuable phrase.

Set priorities

Things by now should be clear.

Look at every possible change to your website in context of costs and benefits and you should be well on your way to determine objectively what business goals need to be solved and what changes potentially have a negative impact on the site or could potentially hurt marketing results.

Create a worksheet with some of the points above that is simple. The most important aspect of this exercise is to have a clear statement of purpose. The risks of action without outcomes without a clear direction can be bad.

Not sure? Test.

There is no certain answer to every method. You can still be clear about the goals and look carefully at the costs that might be incurred.

If costs are marginal then try quickly and measure the impact of the change over a fixed time to compare with other changes that occur on the site.

If costs are high, weigh the risk and proceed with the test or you can choose to prioritize the lower cost updates, only making the bigger changes after you've exhausted the smaller, simpler updates.

When Updates Reach Limits

Eventually you will hit the point where updates have reached their limit and it is possibly a time for a redesign.

An updated website has a lifespan of around 3 to 5 years depending on the business and the industry, and updates might not be keeping in line with market trends.

This should be a clear indication to stop making updates and proceed with plans for a new redesign.

What do you prioritise for website changes?

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4 Tips to Boost Your Marketing Campaign with SMS

There is an ongoing buzz on Social, PPC Ads, and Digital Marketing that often a tried and tested method get's drowned out.

Give a guess what is the most used data service in the world?

According to Nielsen, it's SMS. Marketing through SMS is not surprisingly different from any other campaign.

This is often confused with other data and metrics but SMS sends short transcripts of information in a straightforward, direct, and quick way.

Black Friday data shows, SMS is still relevant to marketing efforts and should not be overlooked. For example, it's a great way for customers to opt-in to receive latest information on deals and upcoming holiday products.

Below we will provide you with the tools you need to hit a home-run with your SMS Marketing.

Marketing (the Secret Bonus)

To understand the role of SMS in marketing, you must first understand what marketing is and how it contributes to your business.

Essentially marketing is how you plan to tell someone more about your product. Whether your product is great, or how it can improve their lives.

The added bonus if your marketing is done right: Selling becomes easy for you because your customers would have already been familiar with your products, the advantages and how it can help them.

For example, you have a product which helps households save 90% of their electricity. This is a fantastic product, however, because your marketing was not done right not many people know of your product.

It was a product that did not live up to its potential, not because of poor quality but because of poor reach.

1. Speak 'English'

As with everything marketing, more often than not, businesses get caught up in industry jargon.

For example, in the tech industry it could be RAM, HDD, and others. Instead it could have been the speed your computer responds to your instruction, and how many photos, files, and music you can store.

70% of targeted customers don't know in-depth information. This doesn't mean you should disregard technical information all together, rather consider catering your campaigns to specific customer groups.

Targeting your customers is known to deliver great results. Convey a message with the intent of speaking to your customer on a personal basis

2. Don't just write

Although writing may seem to be a daunting task, you do not need to be an expert writer to convey your message.

Your writing can be done just to convey the information that the reader is looking for. For example, it could be just factual data, or it can be a communicative piece where the reader and writer both have a relationship together. 

Keep in mind, that to have an engaging conversation is more valuable, as compared to giving a notice.

3. SMS Marketing Inspiration

4. Targeting Customers

As mentioned, in the 3rd tip, convey the right message to the right person. You need to put together a simplified process to understand the size and attractiveness of the target market.

Key areas to identify include: 

1. Your ability to service, and 
2. Compete within your chosen target market.

2 ways you can properly evaluate the market potential (sales opportunity) is through identifying your market size and what is your current market share.

Updated: The easiest way to forecasting sales (just 2 steps).

When you have identified this you can then plan marketing activities to carry out your promotion efforts.

How to launch a SMS Marketing Campaign?

How to start? Would you have someone sit down holding a phone and slowly sending messages out to your clients?

Send SMS like the pros and have an automated service at a reasonable price

Learn ways you can send SMS to your customers based on geographical area with EVERWORKS.

Conclusion

To successfully deliver a marketing campaign you have various tools at your disposal, and SMS is one tool to consider. It is cheap, always delivers, and direct.

Would you consider using SMS as an additional tool for your marketing campaign?

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