This week’s guest blog is from Tim ‘the RoadWarrior’ Culbertson, who has 20+ years experience in business travel having done so as a Sales Executive & Sales Director for such international brands as: American Express & MoneyGram International. His travels haven taken him to all Top 50 cities & every region of the country & he’s learned that business travel can & should be an exciting adventure not simply an endurance course.

Traveling for business has never been cheap but in today’s economic climate or shrinking travel budgets it is all the more imperative to; manage, control, & reduce travel costs wherever possible.

Today I’ll share 3 easy to practice tips that focus on 3 key elements of business travel: air, car, & hotel expenses.

1ST, air is a significant cost.  For years I used to go through a travel agent but this is no longer necessary & you may quickly reserve on line & pay less doing so. My favorite is Southwest which has on line fares that may be booked 1-3 weeks in advance & these fares are not available to their reservation agents.  The discounts are essentially leisure fares not normally purchased by business travelers.  Usually, these fares were 50%-70% less the normal unrestricted fares.

Also, Southwest does not ding you with any change fees nor do they charge for checked baggage which can run as high as $100-150 per trip.  This benefit alone on 40 trips per annum is a savings of between $4,000 & $6,000.

2ND, two points on car expense.  When arriving at your originating / home airport opt for long term, remote parking versus short term & typically covered parking.  Rates for long term are almost always 50% the close in rate & you actually benefit by the exercise of walking a longer distance to the terminal. Also, many airports have shuttle service to get you to the terminal faster.  Case in point at Denver Int. Airport the remote is $10 per day or a savings of $50 for a week & based on 40 annual trips a savings of, $2,000.

On rental cars the lowest rates are either in the budget or economy class.  Often the rental agencies will have limited stock of these cars & will upgrade you to mid size or full size at your original booked price.

3RD, on hotels I recommend sticking to one or two brands.  Look on line find the property you want but call them directly & explain that you prefer staying at their property but that a sister property is available at a lower rate.  Usually, the sister property would be $20-$30 less & I’d then ask them to try & match the price.  Usually they would or meet me somewhere in between.  Using this tactic nearly always worked & I would estimate I saved my company $100-$150 per weekly.  On 40 trips in a year that savings adds up to, $4,000 to $6,000 per annum.

In conclusion each of these steps if taken & taken consistently will add up to a significant chunk of coin & currency for your business.  Good luck & Happy Trails on the Road to Success.

There is so much talk about how to get through this difficult economy (rightfully so), but bottom line is it gets down to practicing the fundamentals.  Even sports super stars, who make millions of dollars, practice the fundamentals to get ready for the season.  Here’s a checklist from Steve McCreedy for sales leaders to insure you and your sales team are practicing the fundamentals to get through and excel in this economy.

Veteran software salespeople and consultants share their insight for improving sales efforts.

The key to being world class in B2B demand generation is this: Build a strong foundation first. Skip this step, you’re dead.

Recently, the CMO of a $108 million software firm told me his goal was to be “world class.” (He was later dismissed.)

A laudable goal, no doubt. Many CMOs and CEOs say the same thing. Everyone wants to be THE best. But it also caused me to do some deep thinking. If so many have a goal of being world-class, why do over 9 out 10 come up short?

Here are some stats that show how bad it is. (From presentation by Ardath Albee of MarketingInteractions)
• 64 percent of marketers with lead nurturing are dissatisfied with results
• Sales quota achievement is at the lowest level ever measured (CSO Insights)
• Without lead nurturing, 79 percent of leads never turn into sales opportunities
What’s going on here? If they all want to be the best, why are they performing so poorly? And why aren’t more salespeople making quota? For another experts take on the problem, please read The Unspoken ‘Real State’ of Modern B2B Demand Generation 2 of 4: Technology, Alone, Is Not Enough.

In my mind, it’s because so many companies look for the easy fix and skip the hard stuff. The article above points out that companies do the bare minimum to get marketing automation working, but not enough to provide an adequate flow of qualified sales leads.

It seems everyone wants a quick fix.
• Just buy marketing automation
• Hire a product marketing person
• Invest in search marketing
• Hire some salespeople
There’s nothing wrong with those ideas. But to become the best, you need to make a BIG commitment. You need to invest serious sweat and patience in the foundation of demand generation:
• Value proposition development—Specific business outcomes that result from the use of your products and services
• Ideal customer profiles—Who are the best prospective customers for us?
• Buyer personas—What makes them tick? What do they really care about? Where do they turn for information? (See Personas are critical, Mr./Ms. CEO for more)
• Problem to Solution story-telling—How can we tell a story about their problems and keep their attention as we show them how to solve their problems? As Ardath Albee said, “We need to answer the What’s In It For Them? question.” You also need to leverage Catch Factors to get attention and use Cliff-Hangers to hold attention (editor’s note: Credit Ardath for these terms) (See How to Use Great Story-Telling for Lead Nurturing as well as Ardath’s great book eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale for more.)
• Great Content mapped to Buyer variables—Content that is brief, interesting and
o Right format
o Right person
o Right time

Only by really working hard on understanding buyers, their issues, their problems, etc. will you have the insights to craft a world-class demand generation program. Don’t short cut this process. Nothing in life is easy.
Jeff Ogden is President of Find New Customers “Lead Generation Made Simple”. He’s also the author of two highly acclaimed white papers, How to Find New Customers and Definitive Guide to Making Quota, as well the ebook, Prospect Driven Marketing. Find New Customers helps businesses develop and implement programs to improve the way they find and acquire new customers using best practices in lead generation.
 

Original Post: Monster.com – By NicoleWilliams.com staff

Phone interviews are a useful tool for potential employers — the conversations help screen candidates quickly and determine who’s worth a face-to-face meeting. So when you’ve sent out and uploaded your resume online, it’s essential to be ready to kick booty when the phone rings. Here’s how:

Know what you speak of: Make sure you have a copy of your resume, the cover letter you sent and the original job description in a folder near your phone. It’s also nice to add information about the company, the person who may be calling to interview you and any potential questions you know you’ll want to ask. Be sure to be armed with a pencil and paper for taking notes.

Rehearse your responses: Prep for the conversation by thinking about the job and the qualities a candidate must have. How do your strengths match up? What are your weaknesses? Anticipate questions you might be asked and consider how you’ll answer them. Bounce ideas off a friend if you’re concerned about a particular aspect of the job description or use Monster’s Advice Forums to gain information from others in that industry.

Watch your language: In a phone interview, it is important to speak slowly and clearly. Remember, the quality of your conversation and your ability to answer questions is all the interviewer has to go on over the phone. Keep the “ums,” “ahs” and “you knows” to a minimum (think about the Caroline Kennedy debacle. Don’t use slang or other informal language.

Think before you speak: Take the time you need to answer the interview questions completely and thoughtfully. Be sure not to interrupt or begin answering the question before the interviewer has finished speaking; there may be more to the question than you realize. If the interviewer calls at a time that is inconvenient for you, while you’re at work or in a noisy environment, arrange another phone meeting in the near future.

Ask for a meeting: If you feel the interview has gone well, be confident and direct enough to request a face-to-face by saying, “Would it be possible for us to meet in person and continue our conversation? I’d really like to have the opportunity to meet you.” If the interviewer says no, or shies away from making a commitment, be sure you understand what the next step will be. Will they call if they want to meet you? E-mail? If you are out of the running, will they let you know? Taking the time to close the deal proves your competence once again. Understanding the next step will help you sleep easier at night — always a good thing when you are on the job hunt.

About Nicole:

Career expert and best-selling author of Girl on Top, Nicole Williams is redefining the world of work — making it glamorous, entertaining and relevant to modern women. Nicole founded WORKS by Nicole Williams in 2006 with the vision of building the first media and content company focused on career development specifically for the highly dynamic and powerful market of young professional women. Her Web site, Nicolewilliams.com, is the go-to destination site for modern working women.

It may be time that sales organizations re-examined a core belief that may in fact be limiting their revenue growth rather than helping it.  The question revolves around the need or practicality of having a dedicated sales force.  Tibor Shanto will state his bias right from the top, he doesn’t think it is always necessary, and he thinks there is very much room for alternatives.  In addition he also believes that success in sales come from ones ability to “sell” not their knowledge of “product”.

There are numerous functions in today’s corporations that are key, yet being executed by temps, contractors, or other non-employees.  Let’s be clear, we are not talking about people on the loading dock, but people in important functions such as finance, IT, marketing and more.  These people bring their expertise not just in their function, but they also bring a blend of “best practices” gained in their stints with other corporations they have worked with.  There are many top notch professionals in these fields who have either never worked full time for a given company, or not worked for one in many years, reason being that they have the sought after skills many companies need and are willing to pay for, even if their pay is above average, the total cost to the corporation (pensions, health care and other sundry costs considered).  So why not sales?

Tibor can hear the “Relationship” camp fidgeting, hang on, he’ll get to you here.

This week’s guest submission is from Kraig R Brown. Kraig has spent the last 6 years as the SVP SMB Sales for Premiere Global Services, a collaboration solutions company.  He is a writer, speaker and currently resides in Louisville, Kentucky with his wife and 5 children.

Times change, landscapes change and when radical economic change happens the vehicles we used to navigate the sales terrain will need to be adapted as well.  Selling is a lot of things, but at its core, selling is all about adapting to the dynamic and colorful scenery we find ourselves in.  Remember this key point:  without historic change periodically, selling opportunities would stagnate. 

Quick History

Selling used to be a game of feet on the street.  Covering a territory meant cranking up the combustible, revving the engine- cranking cups of coffee and seeing how many firm handshakes you could get going in a day.  Then, the firm handshake was slowly being supplemented by electronic “handshakes.”

And, the landscape began to be more about what you could get done with your feet in the seat.

The phone/computer dynamic duo meant new adaptations to garner and harness the power of doing much of the legwork with your legs stuffed under the desk.  The reach improved, productivity improved, cost of selling improved- and within a few short years the paradigm of the new selling forces included electronic engines that in many cases have replaced combustible ones.

Funny how the formal college education can cross disciplines and teach you things they never intended.  I had always been fascinated with language, and during one of the drier linguistics classes I had ever endured, a small nugget somehow lodged in my mind.  Languages, they taught, like rivers, will always be on the move toward simplifying.

Over the years, this principle in nature and in economies to find the fastest and least complex route to the greatest benefit at the least overall cost is the key driver behind the latest global shock that we call a recession, but in fact, is nothing more than a natural consequence of the changes put into effect decades ago.  My grandfather used to say, “Don’t be shocked if you plant corn seeds and get corn.  Be shocked if you plant corn seeds and yield wheat.”

So How Does Selling Strategy Need to Adapt?

There are three (at least) strategies that your company needs to bridge the latest changes that have occurred.  Even more so as the new landscape day by day emerges from the dust cloud it caused to become more visible as the new economy we are selling into.

First, every company must have a technology roadmap in place that includes an integrated video strategy for almost every aspect of the prospect/client/partner relationship.  One of the missing pieces to the evolution of the transition from “feet on the street” to “feet in the seat” is the all important face to face meeting.  At the end of the day, we are human beings and connecting face to face creates a tangible connection, if not an emotional connection with the company or person we are partnering with.

Secondly, there needs to be a full court press to install the “feet in the seat” forces at the center of your selling and sales support strategy.  It continues to amaze me the lingering bias continuously directed toward ‘inside sales.’  Most savvy CEO’s long ago understood the economic potential, but combined with the video collaboration technology today, the opportunity to transform the cost of selling and take it to the next level has never been more necessary.  In this new economy, your top and bottom lines will do much better once you set the course to a mature selling model.  Does this mean that field sales are over?  No.  It means that the fulcrum has tipped once and for all in this latest shakeup, and the convergence of technology all but plays directly into the needs the organization has to do much more with much less.

Thirdly, online sales must be a growing revenue engine that is constantly developing a personality to serve and sell to the global office park.  Contrary to some belief systems, this is where selling art and selling science have a clearly marked line of demarcation.  The potential of the dot.com bust meets the opportunity of the new economy, and this just happens to be occurring as the ability to tell your story in video revolutionizes how we sell online.  What is your online revenue stream directly contributing through converted sales today, not leads?   In the new economy, companies will be looking for this critical sales channel to become the key contributor in the next few years…and video is the river that will facilitate that transformation.

I realize that there are myriads of selling giants that have myriads of ideas and thoughts on the go-forward in this post-Armageddon economy.  But I see it as all opportunity, and the really smart folks have already pulled the old oily engines out and are toying around with ones that will make the whole company go greener.

“You are a natural-born sales person.”
“Are you in sales? You should be.”
“You could sell ice to an Eskimo.”

Long before Kelley Robertson got into sales, she heard comments like this and she always viewed them as a negative because the last thing she wanted to be was a salesperson. After all, sales people are pushy, self-serving, unconcerned with others, and focus solely on their own agenda. Right?

Many sales people are perceived as possessing the ability to manipulate a conversation so they can get their prospect or customer to agree. In fact, there are dozens of courses that teach people how to use words, questions, statements and approaches to influence someone’s decision. While Kelley finds these programs fascinating, she doesn’t believe that professional sales people need to resort to these tactics in order influence their prospects and customers.

Kineticast has some exciting new features they’d like to tell you about. Please click here for a brief two slide presentation. Please make sure your speakers are turned on!

By Donna Fenn – Inc. Online Magazine

If you are looking to increase your revenue per customer, here are some tips on getting your sales staff focused on inside sales, upselling, and marketing additional services.

Every business needs new customers, but don’t ever forget that your easiest and most predictable source of new revenue is right under your nose: It comes from the loyal customers who already know your company.  Acquiring new customers is expensive (five to ten times the cost of retaining an existing one), and the average spend of a repeat customer is a whopping 67 percent more than a new one.  So, sure, put some energy into new business development, but make sure your salespeople know that coming up with creative ways to sell more to your current customers is just as important. Here are 10 proven techniques to do just that:

1. Think lifetime value, not transactional value. To keep customers coming back to Zane’s Cycles (and away from the superstores), Chris Zane offers a wildly attractive incentive to parents who buy their children’s bikes from him: He’ll credit the full cost of last year’s bicycle toward an upgrade every year up to a 20-inch wheel. “We won’t make money until they buy their second bike from us at full price,” says the Branford, Connecticut entrepreneur. In the meantime, parents buy accessories for their growing children and, predicts Zane, are impressed enough with his commitment to service that they become customers for life.
2. Go for a no-brainer upsell. “We started noticing that our clients wanted us to store their media files because they had a habit of re-editing their sizzle reels several times over the course of the year,” says Scott Gerber, CEO of SizzleIt, a New York City company that produces short promotional videos. The process became time consuming and tedious for the company, so Gerber started charging clients monthly and annual fees to store their data. “This created a whole new revenue stream for the company,” he says, “not to mention it allowed us to get rid of large amounts of media files when clients didn’t want to pay.” 
3. Offer complementary products or services.  Put a little thought into what your customers are buying and the other needs that those purchases might trigger (think printers/ink cartridges).  For instance, Language International’s primary product is language study abroad programs.  “But very often, our customers also need housing and travel insurance,” says Karen Ong, CEO of the Boston-area company. Offering those complementary products has “helped us expand our gross margins from 21 percent to more than 25 percent,” she says.
4.  Stay in touch. Sometimes you may not see your best customers as often as you’d like, so you need to work extra hard to keep yourself on their radar screens.  Jack Mitchell, the CEO of The Mitchells Family of Stores in Farifield County, Connecticut, has his sales people contact customers by phone, email, and handwritten note “not trying to sell them anything, but letting them we’re available to do alterations, or to come to their home, look at their closet and see what is still wearable,” says Mitchell.  He knows that if he keeps in touch with customers in a low-pressure way, his best customers will find their way back his four luxury clothing stores when the economy improves.
5. Practice the art of the perfectly-timed pitch. What is a key day to reap additional revenue, and what can you do to capitalize on it? “We always have success with our yearly Black Friday e-mail blast,” says Zalmi Duchman, the CEO of TheFreshDiet.com, a healthy meal delivery service based in Surfside, Florida. So last year, on the day after Thanksgiving, the company sent an e-mail blast to its database of clients, and generated an additional $400,000 in revenue in three days. “For us it’s the best of both worlds,” says Duchman. “Everyone is looking out for specials, and it’s right after Thanksgiving so people are thinking about dieting and their New Year’s resolutions.”
6. Help your customers sell more to their customers. If you’re selling to other businesses, the best way to get more revenue from them is to help them increase sales to their customers. Nick Villaume, the CEO of The Dev Department, an Atlanta-based company that provides white label web development services to graphic design firms, developed a free credentialing system for the designers who are his customers. “This not only gives them the knowledge and confidence to sell more and bigger contracts, but also positions them as experts in their market,” says Villaume. He launched the educational program six months ago and has since seen new client requests quadruple. “We are sending out many more estimates—20 to 30 per month—and about two thirds are closing,” he says. “It not only provides more sales, but more profitable sales. We are spending less time coaching designers and less time doing non-billable revisions.”
7. Remind customers of everything you offer. Never assume that even your most reliable customers are completely aware of all the products and services you offer: you need to remind them regularly. Kelley Briggs, CEO of DesignWorks NY, a graphic design and marketing communications firm in Westchester County, New York, sends a personal letter to every customer once a year. She includes a list of her services with the ones they’ve used check off. “It reminds them of the types of projects we’ve worked on in that past year and shows them what services they did not use,” she says. “It’s an excellent cross selling tool.” In recent years, clients who received the letter have signed on for additional projects such as annual reports, website design, and marketing strategy.
8. Create incentives for in-house referrals. Scott Gerber’s video production company, SizzleIt, often works with large companies, and he has found a way to effectively turn one client into multiple clients. “We inncentivized our current clients to recommend us to the project leaders in other parts of the company by offering them steep cash discounts for successful referrals,” says Gerber.  At a time when corporate budgets are tight, that lowered the cost of doing business with SizzleIt, strengthened customer relationships, and generated more income without the cost of attracting new clients.
9. Give customers a say in what you sell. Last October, ModCloth (No. 2 on our Inc. 500 list this year), started an initiative called Be the Buyer, which allows shoppers to vote online on clothing samples. If a garment gets enough votes, the online clothing retailer will add it to its offerings, and then send emails to visitors who voted for the item.  The program allows the company to confidently gamble on items it might have thought were risky choices, plus it encourages a high level of customer engagement with leads to repeat sales.  Co-founder Susan Gregg Kroger says the initiative has also significantly boosted web traffic to the Pittsburgh-based company.
10. Put some skin in the game.  Greg Alexander, the CEO of Sales Benchmark Index, an Atlanta company that helps clients increase the effectiveness of their sales forces, says that the percent of his compan’s revenue that came from existing customers jumped from 20 percent to a whopping 80 percent in two years. His secret: he started writing performance-based contracts. “We said if we don’t deliver don’t pay us.  If we do deliver, pay us a percentage of the gain,” he explains. He also started compensating his team according to the results they delivered for customers. “The ‘skin in the game’ technique resulted in our firm doubling revenue,” says Alexander.

By Donna Fenn – INC Online Magazine

In your zeal to land new business, don’t overlook certain basic principles of sales management, or you may set yourself up for problems in the future.

Everyone makes mistakes, but missteps in the selling process can have especially serious consequences. Not only do they deprive your business of revenue, but they can erode confidence in your company among members of your staff as well as potential customers. The following mistakes are particularly common among start-ups, but even the most seasoned entrepreneurs can fall victim to them. Here’s how to identify them—and avoid them.

Neglecting to collect customer data. Every time you make a sale, it’s an opportunity to make another sale down the road. Remember that your existing customers are your best source of revenue. But you can only tap them if you have a method for keeping track of them. Sonny Ahuja, the CEO of Grandperfumes.com, learned that the hard way. “Five years ago I had seven stores selling designer perfumes and colognes in all major malls of Wisconsin,” he says. When he began losing customers to Amazon and eBay, Ahuja decided to close his stores and move his business online. But when he launched Grandperfumes.com, he had no money for online marketing.  “That’s when I realized that if only all my sales people had collected all the names and addresses of customers that came to my stores for the past eight years — imagine the power of that database! I could have been back in business in no time.” Now, he’s diligent about collecting and segmenting customer data on Grandperfumes.com.

• Dig Deeper: 10 Ways to Get More Sales From Existing Customers

Relying too heavily on the Internet. So you’ve been exceptionally clever with your web strategy and your organic vegan dog food is at the tippity-top of the relevant search engine rankings. The stuff is practically selling itself. Good for you! Until, that is, Google gives you a nasty smack down. That’s what happened to Christian Arno, founder Lingo24, an international translation company with offices in London; Aberdeen, Scotland; and New York City. “In 2006, our high Google rankings for key search terms suffered, probably because of Google changing its search algorithm,” says Arno. “We suddenly dropped on Google search results for terms we’d always ranked highly for such as translation services and translation agencies. We didn’t have any proactive sales strategy in place, so our revenue suffered.” Since then, he’s hired several outbound sales people who proactively identify potential clients. “And our Google rankings are back up too now, so we have two strong avenues for sales,” says Arno.

• Dig Deeper: How Google Cost Me $4 Million

Failing to qualify leads. “When I first started in sales, I was an eager beaver,” recalls Jon Biedermann,
vice president of
 DonorPerfect, a CRM fundraising software company in Horsham, Pennsylvania. “No lead went untouched or uncalled — I treated every opportunity as the sure fire next sale.” Big mistake. Early in his career, Biedermann got a lead from a large university. He called to assess their needs, customized the software for them, and worked on personalizing the demonstration for days. “The day of the demo came, and I presented our software in front of 10 people from the university. We had everything they needed — it was perfect,” he says. But when he asked about the decision-making timeframe, he was crushed.  “Oh, we aren’t going to switch software,” they told him. “We were thinking about using this for our smaller satellite campus and we were hoping you would donate it to us.”
Biedermann realized his error instantly. “In my zeal to get the sale, I completely forgot to ask the one crucial question: Do you have the authority and money to make this decision?” 

• Dig Deeper: How to Qualify Sales Leads

Delaying sales until your product or service is ready for primetime. There’s a lot to be said for doing market research for a new product or service by trying to sell it while it’s still in development. That way, you’ll find out exactly what customers want before you spend time perfecting your offering in a vacuum. “Entrepreneurs should hit the streets, and talk to ‘friendlies’ to sell your product or service even when its still just an idea, and ask people what they are willing to pay for it,” says Kyle Hawke, co-founder of Whinot, a Charlottesville, Virginia-based virtual firm of independent consultants who work on small business marketing projects. Hawke learned that lesson after spending $5,000 on web features that he says “no one cared about.” He now knows that he should have tested Whinot out on low-risk clients who were willing to sign on for a discounted price – or a free trial – while he and his partners worked out the kinks. “The best way to figure out how much something is worth is to get someone to pay for it,” he says.

• Dig Deeper: How to Build a Bootstrapping Culture

Accepting every sale. “No” is not a popular word among entrepreneurs, especially during the start-up phase, and most especially as it pertains to sales. But maybe it should be uttered more often, because the wrong kind of sale is ultimately worse than no sale at all. “It’s a big challenge as a small company to say ‘No, thanks, this isn’t a good fit for us, please give your money to someone else,’” says Michael Buckingham, founder of Holy Cow Creative, a Midland, Michigan, design and marketing company that works with churches and ministries. “In the beginning I said yes to everyone; financially, it felt like I had to,” he says. “Next thing I knew I was involved in a project that was not good for me or the client. We pushed through it, we met our objectives but our work is about more than projects and invoices. I learned that relationships are key to sales. It’s why I now turn down nearly every RFP; it’s void of relationship.”

• Dig Deeper: Getting to No

Offloading the sales function. When Tom Greenshaw first started Cashier Live in Chicago, he wanted to focus mainly on product development and support for the web-based point of sales software that he sells to independent retailers. So he built a sales channel with affiliates and partners, hoping to offload as much of the direct sales function as possible. “This seemed to be working well and we quickly signed up a number of partners that were interested in selling Cashier Live,” he says. “But those partners weren’t as well versed in the software as we were.”  Many of them over-promised customers regarding the capabilities of the software, or dragged Greenshaw’s staff into the sales process, which confused customers and ate up company time and resources. “I learned a lot from this experience, and we’ve since been very successful with our own sales efforts,” he says today. When he tries selling through channel partners again, he’ll make sure to train them thoroughly on the company’s software.

• Dig Deeper: Sales: When Is it Safe to Hire?

Fixating on big fish. When Scott Gerber first founded Sizzle It!, a New York City-based video production company, he admits that he “used to be obsessed with only going after home-run clients—those that had big names and huge wallets.”  But selling to very large companies is time consuming and often frustrating since decision-making is slow and payments even slower. Sizzle It! ultimately landed big clients like Procter & Gamble, but closing sales would sometimes take six months or more. And frequently, Gerber’s staff would put months of effort into sales that never materialized. “The pursuit of these titans often put us in cash flow crunches,” says Gerber. “My biggest mistake in guiding Sizzle It!’s strategy in its earlier years was not going after more base-hit clients. Now, we have an even split of clients, which has not only helped us to spread the word about our company faster, but also helped us to maintain a healthy cash flow.”