I am looking for some feedback on a series of workshops aimed at helping small business owners increase sales and margins.

Would you benefit from having:
- More ways to generate leads
- Converting more of your leads into sales
- Having a clearer understanding on who your ideal customer is
- Finding out how to get your customers to choose you over your competition
- Increasing the number of times your customers buy from you and increasing the amount they spend each time
- Having a bigger Gross Margin Percentage?

What else would you like to focus on in a workshop?

Please make suggestions, and I’ll see if I can incorporate them.

Thanks,


Mark

Is lead SA going to work in South Africa????

For many small business owners the question is how far will you go to achieve your dreams...

When you are starting out you should spend about 80% of your working time on marketing/new business activities. The importance of marketing during the first few months is underestimated!

I am always suprised with how little my clients are acually doing to attract leads. Most businesses rely on only 1 or 2 channels for attracting leads. Work on getting more!

Then work on converting the leads you get!

Mark

With an ever changing business environment in South Africa today young business always face the risk that market penetration through advertising alone simply wont bring in new business.

The question then arises,
How far do you have to go to get new business? Any thoughts?

Here it is again:

If you want your website reviewed, follow the link below and click on NEW THREAD.

www.mysmallbusiness.co.za/forum/website-reviews

Nope - I wouldn't pay too much attention to the Alexa ranking...

Junior webmaster might look at a high Alexa rank and be impressed - it's not going to help you get more business in.

Rather focus on writing quality content for your website.

I had a quick look at your websit and I'd recommend that if you are wanting to improve it and drive more traffic to you site, you post in the Websit Reviews section:

www.mysmallbusiness.co.za/forum/website-reviews/

Is it important to do marketing and communications during a recession?

Nokukhanya recently ran a workshop with young entrepreneurs who raised this question which raised very interesting debate and we hope that this may assist with the answer.

While marketing and advertising is very beneficial to the growth of a business it comes at quite a high cost, and usually is a cost that most business cant afford, and this really served as the crux of the debate. Nokukhanya obviously took a pro marketing approach whilst the financial colleagues tried to quantify and denounce the spend. While we tried our best we had to concede that the answer really lied in between. The reality of the South African market is that it relies heavy on large corporates to deliver product and no matter how hard you try our recessionary times may not effectively grow your business.

In true entrepreneurial fashion, Nokukhanya has decided to launch a cheaper marketing and communication package offered to the market which primarily is the setup and creation of free media over the internet using social networking and business listings, this effectively means you grow brand awareness and in order to maintain your business.

What do you think