The 5 Things All Great Salespeople Do

Early in my sales career, there was a day when my boss watched me in action. I was a little nervous, but I still felt confident that I wouldn’t disappoint. Unfortunately, that’s not exactly what happened.

Without hesitation, he let me know that he felt I was just “sailing” by. It was enough to survive, but it wouldn’t make me successful.

That struck me to my core. I didn’t want to be good enough to survive. I wanted to be so great at sales that I put my competition to shame.

After that honest conversation, I took the time for some self-reflection to see where I could improve. I also did some research and asked other successful salespeople how they gained their competitive edge. It took some time — along with some trial and error — but I eventually came to the conclusion that great salespeople do the following five things.

I personally feel that this is one of the most important elements of success — whether that’s in sales or launching your own business. When you’re prepared, you’re better suited to handle every question, obstacle, or rejection thrown your way.

Of course, you can’t anticipate literally every setback. But you can start by jotting down a list of every question, obstacle, or rejection that you believe prospects will have. In other words, create a list of every worst-case scenario you can think of. Then, develop a clear, convincing response to every objection or question.

Reclaim Your Creative Confidence

Most people are born creative. As children, we revel in imaginary play, ask outlandish questions, draw blobs and call them dinosaurs. But over time, because of socialization and formal education, a lot of us start to stifle those impulses. We learn to be warier of judgment, more cautious, more analytical. The world seems to divide into “creatives” and “noncreatives,” and too many people consciously or unconsciously resign themselves to the latter category.

And yet we know that creativity is essential to success in any discipline or industry. According to a recent IBM survey of chief executives around the world, it’s the most sought-after trait in leaders today. No one can deny that creative thinking has enabled the rise and continued success of countless companies, from start-ups like Facebook and Google to stalwarts like Procter & Gamble and General Electric.

Students often come to Stanford University’s “d.school” (which was founded by one of us—David Kelley—and is formally known as the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design) to develop their creativity. Clients work with IDEO, our design and innovation consultancy, for the same reason. But along the way, we’ve learned that our job isn’t to teach them creativity. It’s to help them rediscover their creative confidence—the natural ability to come up with new ideas and the courage to try them out. We do this by giving them strategies to get past four fears that hold most of us back: fear of the messy unknown, fear of being judged, fear of the first step, and fear of losing control.

Invoicing Mistakes That Most Startups Make

Each Startup proprietor knows the battle and significance of managing solicitations.

Cash is the center component of your business and you would prefer not to foul it up, particularly when you are simply beginning off, isn’t that so?

Everyone conveys a manual of all the correct things to rehearse in their business however it’s similarly critical to comprehend what to keep away from.

Invoicing isn’t an assignment that gives much incitement or energy, it’s an errand that gives a consistent stream of salary. It is essentially insufficient to convey records to your clients. Following up should be an innate piece of the procedure. Numerous clients will push your record to the side until the point that they require your administrations or you continue bothering them. Obviously, this isn’t by decision by and large but instead a matter of conveying their approaching accounts.

What Are Fixed Assets & How To Account For Them

Companies acquire fixed assets as long-term tangible property. These assets are used in daily business operations to generate income for the business. Often referred to as the ‘capital’ of the business, they include items such as machinery and plant equipment. Their defining feature is that they are not converted into cash in the first year of acquisition. Firms tend to invest in fixed assets for the following objectives:

  1. To enable the production or supply of business goods and services
  2. To act as rentals for third parties
  3. To be used in regular organizational workflows

People often ask how fixed assets are different from inventory. Business inventory is defined as any current asset in the financial database of your organization. Goods classified as inventory signify the company’s worth and can be easily cashed out to cover up any existing debts. For simplicity, inventory can be divided into four categories:

  • Raw materials needed for manufacturing items
  • Goods and services in progress
  • Finished goods
  • Maintenance, repair and operating supplies

As you can see, this is completely different from a fixed asset, which is often a finite, long-term investment. Another point that must be clarified is that fixed assets don’t have to be ‘fixed’ in the sense of being stationary or immobile. They can easily be moved around from one location to another, with vehicles and computer equipment being good examples of this.

10 Cashflow Mistakes That Can Kill Your Business

Small business owners are often overloaded with tons of activities revolving around their business, and they have very little time left for managing cash flows or scratching their heads on company’s finances. On the other hand, mismanaging your company’s funds might lead to total failure of your business.

Even though you have the brightest of ideas and your company is on the growth ride from the very first day, it is often seen that 80% of the businesses, big or small, fail or close down, just because they cannot manage their cash flows.

To add to the injury, certain hidden costs or expenses have an adverse impact on the cash flows, which are very tough to manage since they cannot be perceived.

In this article, we run through some of the deadly cashflow mistakes that can really hurt your business. Find out if you are making one of these mistakes and learn how to avoid these.

What Is Bharat QR Code & How You Can Benefit From It

Post demonetization, the BharatQR payment mechanism has set a new benchmark being the world’s first interoperable payment acceptance solution. The integrated payment mechanism leverages the Quick Response (QR) code system for accepting payments from customers directly into merchants’ current accounts. It has been developed by National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) in collaboration with Visa, Mastercard, Amex and Rupay.

According to industry estimates, non-cash spending is expected to overtake cash spending by 2020. At Pine Labs we are committed to help merchants adopt digital payment methods. To drive electronic transactions, one of the biggest needs is infrastructure. And BharatQR essentially eliminates the requirement for capital and operational expenditure.

Here’s how your business can benefit from this method of payment:

Enable cashless transactions for customers without cards

Customers can carry out cashless transactions without any physical credit or debit card. Payments are made through smartphones having BharatQR-enabled banking apps. This payment system supports Visa, MasterCard, American Express, and Rupay cards, and BHIM-UPI for wide acceptance. You can link multiple cards to your BharatQR supported bank apps and select any one of them based on your need.

All that customers need is an app with the BharatQR payment feature. To make a payment, they need to click the BharatQR icon, scan the QR code at your store, enter the amount and their 4-digit passcode. Viola! The payment is done. Once the authentication is completed successfully and on settlement, the amount is transferred to your account.

How To Calculate Depreciation In Your Business

A business that owns capital assets such as real estate, vehicles, equipment and furniture must calculate depreciation expense on those assets in order to deduct the cost of the assets. According to the IRS tax code, capital assets like equipment and furniture should be initially shown in the balance sheet of the financial statements and they would appear as equipment and furniture at their original cost. The deduction for depreciation expense is then taken over some specified period of time. There are several depreciation methods that can be used for this calculation. All depreciation is shown on Form 4562, and this attaches to the individual federal tax return.

Select straight-line depreciation if you want your business to have an even deduction for your capital costs over a longer period of time. For example, a piece of machinery that cost $70,000 is considered an asset with a seven-year life, and if the straight-line method of depreciation is taken, a deduction of $10,000 will be taken each year for seven years.

Select accelerated depreciation such as the 200-percent declining balance method if you’d like to take a larger deduction the first few years. This method is determined by taking the straight-line figure and doubling it. For example, if the straight-line method showed a depreciation deduction of $20,000, the double-declining balance method would allow $40,000 ($20,000 times 200 percent).

3 Important Financial Statements For Business Owner

Small businesses must be well informed to survive in a competitive environment and one of the vital competency they must develop is to read and understand important financial statements. Understanding essential financial statements such as ‘Trial Balance’, ‘Balance Sheet’, and ‘Profit and Loss’ statements is paramount as these are very important reports for small businesses to ensure their competitiveness in the market.

Running a business without understanding these financial reports is like driving a car without a dashboard. Let’s look into each of these financial reports in detail..

Businesses engaged in financial activities need constant information on a variety of parameters such as market demand, market share, price, competitive activity, cost of production, investment, cost of capital, and statutory levies. Of these, one of the most vital one is financial information such as revenues, costs, capital, salaries, loans and investments. If you take an example of a household, information on items such as salary earned by the principal wage earner, expenses incurred on running the household, school fees and price of vegetables would be some of the information required on a regular basis and this would constitute financial information.

One of the methods of collecting and storing financial information is the double entry method where for every amount of money transacted there will be a debit entry in one account and a credit entry in another account. All the accounts will either have a credit balance or a debit balance.

Dublin Tech Summit in April

Since the Web Summit left Dublin, it left a void that was waiting to be filled and Dublin Tech Summit was created to fill that void. For the first two years of its existence, it was held in Dublin’s National Convention Centre but if it was to expand or grow it had to be held elsewhere and this year it is been held in the RDS.

When you mention the words RDS and Tech Conference, the first thing you will be thinking of is Wi-Fi especially with around 10,000 attendees attending over two days. But bar a few minor hiccups there has been no major Wi-Fi issues and more importantly no long queues for some of the talks.

One major criticism the Dublin Tech Summit faced was having major speakers speaking at the same time, which forced you to decide which speaker you wanted to see. Thankfully this is no longer an issue and with various stages there are plenty of different talks that you can attend. Today most of the talks seem to be covering or mentioning two areas, AI and security. This is because AI is now powering a lot of the technology that we are using and will be using and GDPR has had a major impact on security.

eCPA is dead: Long live the incremental eCPA

Most players in the app marketing ecosystem have a very clear ROI model in place, but they launch campaigns without investing much time in defining attribution settings. They usually attribute conversions following the last impression or last click model, with some small variations regarding the attribution window.

So, what is the mistake many advertisers make? Trusting the attributed results without question. The problem also arises when those results are distorted and do not really show which partners or which actions are generating value and bringing in new users.

Current attribution models used by app tracking partners can be misleading because when you attribute to the last impression or the last click, you create an incentive for advertising players to serve as many impressions as possible or to generate as many clicks as possible. They can buy cheap and low-profile creative formats and low quality inventory, simply to increase their chances of getting conversions attributed to them. Some players might even go a step further and use illegal tactics such as forced clicks, click spamming, click flooding or anything that will make them appear as offering a fantastic ROI in the reporting tool.