Do you want to shake up your sales results? It's time to rethink you're approach and come up with a plan that will produce results. A strategic sales action plan provides an implementable quantifiable path to significantly improve your results. Let's begin by identifying the key elements of a strategic sales action plan. The key elements of your strategic sales action plan include: the value you provide, your unique market position, your marketing plan, your sales plan, and your follow-up plan. Each element is critical, but you want to develop or review them in a specific order.

You already carry a business card, why not start using it to actually generate leads? You know you should always have your business cards with you, but they probably aren't doing you much good at this point. That's because you aren't getting the maximum value from this little low cost marketing tool. What's the purpose of a business card anyway? You give out your business card so people can contact you and remember you, right? But that's presuming they want to contact or remember you, and it isn't creating an incentive to do so.

You should be selling your services rather than a product. So why do you market your products? You can almost immediately increase your sales if you'll just stop doing that. Dan Kennedy talks about the technique of selling money at a discount. That's exactly what you you need to be doing. Yet you're approaching it all wrong. Most of you use the approach of asking to quote your prospects insurance. There isn't a lot of interest in that approach and it's a low value approach. You would be much better served using the approach of selling money at a discount.

On sales training you should deeply interview the sales consultant just as you would interview any new employee: One of the best questions to ask a sales training candidate is to ask him how he will go about his job and improve sales. Many times your competitors will shop your company and ask many questions and before you get to into a long drawn out sales process and answer hundreds of hundreds of questions it makes sense to make sure the person you're talking to is a decision maker and actually is interested in your products or services. And the salesperson must also ask questions of his own in order to make sure that he is on the same page with the prospect and can continue the sales process.

Getting sales leads is vital to every business. Every business has to have customers; and prospective clients are what they identify as sales leads. Even the teenage girl who is eyeing some fashionable clothes in a magazine can be considered a sales lead...

Every business needs a list to prospect to, and the quality of that list will determine the success of the freelancer. Here's how to build a list of strong prospects...

How to shave months off your start-up marketing efforts by following this tried-and-true method of gaining new copywriting clients.

I don't know if you've noticed, but there seems to be an awfully loooooooong lag time between thinking of a new offer, creating the offer, and then finally having it in your grateful customers' hands. Most major corporations take, on average, 18 months to think of a new product and get it out into the marketplace. But it takes most small business owners between 30 and 40 years.

Your customer just enjoyed the heck out of your product or service. Now, it's a week later and you want to follow up- is it still working? Are they still getting value? A Heart of Money participant asked this question recently: "How do I follow up with someone like that? I'm worried that they'll think I'm pressuring them to spend more money with me."

Frequently the questions you ask are either way too general or way to personal to get a good response. You can tell you're asking the wrong questions when you and your prospects feel uncomfortable with the questions you're asking. When you ask the wrong questions the prospect withdraws and you have a very stilted conversation leading to either a "no" or "not now". In contrast, when you ask a good question the prospect acts interested and responds with a well thought out genuine answer. Plus they relax and open up willing to tell you more.