ChaChing

We would like to welcome the following businesses to ChaChing! 2bscene, husse, forttechnologies, steinstudyabroad, grangewebdesign, splashtac, mamut, brightspark, simpleassemblymehole and finally redoaktaxrefunds.

2bscene Limited – Online Marketing & Internet Services – www.2bscene.ie

2bscene are an online marketing and web development company based in Dublin, Ireland. We design, develop and market websites for companies of all sizes in Ireland and the UK.

Husse Ireland – Super Premium Pet food – with free Home Delivery – www.husse.ie

Europe’s biggest supplier of home delivery pet food.

Fort Technologies – Professional Service, Flexible Solutions – www.forttechnologies.com

Fort Technologies is an IT services company specialising in managed services, business continuity and network services delivered in virtual and dedicated colocation environments.

Stein Study Abroad – European Language Courses – www.steinstudyabroad.ie

Stein Study Abroad is a newly formed, wholly Irish owned company. The company has been formed by Michael and Rosalind Stein, founders of Steintravel, Stephen Burke and Diane Kerrigan, owners of EISS. We are Ireland’s only dedicated and leading language solutions provider. Our schools are in a wide range of locations and offer an extensive selection of courses and types of accommodation. It is very important to us that you choose a course, location and type of accommodation that is right for you and we endevour to provide you with first class, honest travel advice. Learning a language is a practical skill, like learning how to swim, ride a bicycle or to drive car. As such, it is possible for just about anyone to learn a language, provided that you have the desire to learn and attend a course with modern teaching techniques, delivered by experienced and highly motivated teachers.

Grange Website Design – Excellent value websites designed for small businesses – www.grangewebdesign.com

Grange Website Design is a Cork based website design company that specialises in designing excellent value websites that deliver business solutions to you. We do not just deliver an attractive looking and well designed website (we do that of coursel!!). We work with you to get traffic to your web site that will ensure that your business grows and sales increase.

Splashtac – BePrepared on the water – www.splashtac.com

Online canoe & kayak equipment company, mail ordering items around Ireland

Mamut – To simplify the way small organisations do business – www.mamut.ie

We provice all-in-one accounting, CRM, e-commerce and stock control solutions to SMEs. We have over 400,000 customers across Europe.

Brightspark Consulting – Not only will you make money, but we’ll make you look good too! – www.brightspark-consulting.com

Whether you are starting out new to the web, or you already have a website and are looking for better results, BrightSpark Consulting can provide sound strategic advice on how to succeed online. And provide the full range of outsourced internet marketing services to make sure you’re easily found once you’re out there.

Simple Assembly Me Hole – The Site For IKEA Virgins – www.simpleassemblymehole.com

Flatpack furniture assembly. IKEA furniture delivery. Kitchen installation.

Red Oak Tax Refunds – Tax Refunds Made Easy – www.redoaktaxrefunds.ie

Red Oak Tax Refunds are Ireland’s PAYE tax refunds experts. With an average Tax Refund of €820, can you afford not to find out what you are due?

We haven’t had an update in a while so this post is simply to say that yes we are still alive!
We are working really hard on software to help make referrals happen!
So please bear with us we will be back in full swing in the coming weeks.

It’s been my observation in training sales professionals, that if there is any weakness to uncover in missing sales opportunities or not closing them at the last minute, it is the quality of questions! The quality of your questions will give you all the answers you need to make the right pitch to your clients and close the sale. It is a fact that the best sales people ask the most powerful questions. They take their clients beyond situational analysis, to the place where they make their buying decisions and explore that with their clients.

Developing Coaching Skills

If there is one skill to really develop in meeting the current climate head on, it questioning and coaching your clients. If you were a sales professional, who wanted to become better at coaching, how would you go about it now? Here are some thoughts on that and a few sample questions to use over the next month and see the difference it makes to your sales conversations and your sales close rate.

Coaching is all about asking very powerful questions. It gets right to the core issue of what’s not working for the client OR what they want more of from your product and service. It digs deeper than order taking. It opens up a whole world of possibilities for you as a sales person and for your client as the buyer. It helps you and the client understand what’s really going on in the sales conversation. It tells you the story behind the story the client is articulating.

Firstly, instead of telling a client how great your product is (which I am sure it is), you are exploring and getting curious and finding answers for yourself and client about how they are going buy a solution, hopefully yours, if you work in the right way.

With coaching, you bring their mind to a place they may have never been before – a new reality – out into the future where they have the answer to their problem, which if you do it right, should be your product or service! You, as a great sales coach, will work with the client from a solutions mind-set, rather than a problem mind set. Solutions mind set, changes everything, from your behaviour to the client’s decision-making process.

Using questions activates much more of your power of persuasion and your client’s engagement in the process. Not only does it bring you more confidence, because you ask the question; you can then sit back, listen to what you have heard and then ask more questions to uncover the whole picture. You become the facilitator of a decision-making process, rather than pitching for business. And it makes your sales conversation far more enjoyable, not to mention putting you ahead in your sales game.

I hope you are as intrigued as I have become by what a coaching conversation can do for your clients. The key point is, the client gets to experience you as a great listener, who truly understands their issues. You are doing more than going through the sales pitch, hoping that your pitch might just grab their interest. You are engaging them at a deeper level than most sales people would have the skill to explore. Asking coaching questions also puts you in a position of knowledge and authority. The client may unconsciously begin to think, “if you are asking these questions, then you must understand my problem, I am interested in exploring this more”.

Here are a few examples of powerful coaching questions.

1. To look at what you OR your client are not paying attention.

What am I not seeing?
What questions has the client not asked?
What’s my result from this conversation for my client/myself/my business/their business?
What haven’t we thought of yet?
What can I discover today that will confuse or enlighten me a little more about my selling techniques?

2. To get the client to think harder about the implications of their decision out in the future.

What will happen if you decide to implement this immediately?
What won’t happen?
What will happen if you don’t?
What won’t happen if you don’t … and what will that mean for your business?

3. To invite the client to imagine making the decision to buy and having their team on board, This is a great way to test for any objections the client may face with the organization.

What’s important to you about getting all your team on board with this new solution?
Who else need to be involved for you to make this decision?

4. To layer a question within a question and take the client into deeper level of consideration about the cost of making/not making a decision

If you think about what implementing a solution means to your business, what’s the one thing that’s missing/would make a difference for you right now?
What’s it costing your business in productivity, sales to delay this?

There are thousands of ways to frame questions, and as you frame them, you invite the client into a frame of mind that keeps them in their “world” where they need answers. It is in the power of your questions that you will find the answers to how YOU need to sell to your clients. The questions will give you the answers and help ramp up your sales. Then, the nature of your conversations becomes a value-added service in itself. You no longer do consultative selling, but begin a coaching conversation, which is far more enriching for you and your client. Happy Coaching!

This blog post was originally an article written by @SellingGenius Shiera O’Brien and appears on her website www.zenithtraining.ie. Shiera kindly allowed us to reproduce her work here. More of her articles are available here: www.zenithtraining.ie/zenith-articles.asp

Referral marketing can be the easiest way to connect with new potential customers. Many businesses assume their friends and colleagues will think to refer them lots of new business. So with this assumption why do many referral marketing programs fail?

Firstly businesses need to ask for referrals. If a business is not looking for referrals people can wrongly think they are too busy to take on new work and not actively try and pass them new business. This can happen because businesses make the assumption that people will “just know” they need new customers. Unless you ask for referrals you will not get them.

Many feel that asking for referrals is being pushy, or they feel they have not done enough for the customer yet to be in a position to ask for a referral. If that person is your customer and you have treated them well then you have already done enough to ask for a referral, if you have done your job then your customer will feel that by referring you they will be doing the person whom they refer a favour more so than doing you one. Everybody likes to share a great product or service, especially when they were first to find it. So make sure that people can refer your business with confidence with great products and great service, every customer is a potential sales person.

Always remember WIIFM? –  What’s In It For Me? Its not the best sounding acronym but it is an important one and it helps you look at things from your customers perspective. By going one step further and offering a cash reward to people who make referrals to you, you give a very compelling reason for people to keep you in mind. When you a new find people will happily share details of your service to their friends, however over time you will be less memorable as people think of your product or service as just part of the furniture rather than something new to show their friends. By always offering people a cash reward you will always be in some part of their mind, so make WIIFM work for you and give people who refer you a reward for doing so.

Remember to follow up and thank those who make referrals. Even if the lead turns out to be cold still take the time to respond and thank the person who made the referral, just because this one didn’t work out shouldn’t make you think they next one won’t!

Finally you need to make is easy for people to refer you. A quick overview of your services or your company being close at hand can only help this. Here at ChaChing we allow you to have your referral information published online in a quickly accessible format of www.chaching.ie/<yourbusinessname>, so for example www.chaching.ie/blueface would instantly get you to Blueface’s referral offering. Many companies have referral programs which they either don’t talk about, or if they do they make sure to bury it deep within their website practically hidden.

So remember if you want to get more referrals you need to:

1. Ask for them

2. Make yourself more referable by giving great service

3. Reward those who refer you

4. Always say thank you

5. Make it easy for people to refer you with easily accessible information

Just upgraded Wordpress, you have to love the one click upgrade. Thank God the days of manually doing upgrades of Wordpress are behind us. It would be great if all web apps upgraded so easily, Joomla could really do with this.

If anybody every wondered why there is a need for early adopters and the social proof they provide then check out this video on youtube.

The first two guys really do just go it alone, but the next batch of people, the early adopters, they turn it from two crazy guys dancing to an avalanche. Its a bit like watching a successful product launch, through the medium of dance!

We have a new logo for ChaChing! Company logos are very important as many first impressions can be made on a company logo, so we hope our logo can make a good first impression!

Our original ChaChing logo was created using web based tools, so for the redesign we decided that web based tools were just not effective enough and gave the work to somebody who specialised in graphic design.

We are happy with the result, our logo has changed to now having two colours and a little money pile for the ‘i’. Since ChaChing is, from a business perspective, about referrals and lead generation, and from a referees perspective, about making money, we think its a good fit!

We hope you like the new design as much as we do!

I have had a few discussions with different people about the usefulness of twitter. Alot of people have a negative view of twitter and can’t see any point to it.

Statements such as “I don’t care what somebody has had for breakfast” spring to mind when people give reasons as to why using twitter is pointless.

I have only recently joined twitter and so far have found it pretty useful. Firstly Fort Technologies found ChaChing via twitter and signed up. Secondly I found out about Christiano Ronaldo’s move to Real Madrid, thanks to Tom Doyle of 2bscene – @2bscene.

Without twitter ChaChing would not have a listing from Fort Technologies and I would have never have found out that Ronaldo had gone to Real! (Well maybe the second half of that sentence isn’t entirely true I maight have found out about Ronaldo eventually, considering I don’t live under a rock and all…)

When moving blog.chaching.ie to www.chaching.ie/blog we used a 301 redirect. The old site was hosted on Apache which allowed for use of htaccess files. A 301 redirect allows for a website to be moved from one domain name to a new domain name without getting penalised on SEO by search engines such as google. So to move an entire website from one domain to a new domain place the following in your htaccess:

redirect 301 / http://www.chaching.ie/blog/

The Alimentary Pharmabiotic Centre, University College Cork, ran a one day event –  ”Entrepreneurship – How to create a technology start-up” which I attended on Tuesday. I didn’t get a chance to post about it earlier, I did mention it on twitter earlier (@chaching_ie). Anyhow, I really enjoyed Chris Horn’s presentation, one thing he showed is just what is possible without any VC funding, and before the existence of Enterprise Ireland, IONA Technologies was started with £3,000 in 1991, with £1000 from each of the founders. They did consultancy in the early years to help pay the bills while growing their business until they could be product focused, a real example of bootstrapping and also of great resourcefulness. Instead of just giving up because they had no funding they just did it. Also Chris pointed out that because of the small and open nature of our economy that technology focused companies need to think globally from the start, which is both an advantage and a disadvantage. IONA were selling into the US well before they had any presence there, also Chris believes that the US are far earlier adopters of new technology and it is a key place for tech start ups to focus. Chris’ presentation is available online at his blog and its well worth taking the time to read.

While there were many good speakers another one that stood out for me was the talk by Dr Carl Jackson, on a personal level I understood alot of where he was coming from. Before forming SensL Carl had his own company working by himself in the company, I had a similar experience and it can sometimes get very lonely, also it really is not scaleable in that form. We both went on to start new ventures leaving the old ventures behind. Hopefully in a few years I can be giving a talk from the point of view of having a successful company just like Chris was!

I also ran into a couple of people I had not seen in a while, one of them was Tim O’Leary that I had not seen in quite a while, Tim is a sales ninja, really! He has a new venture BKD Consulting. Best of luck with it Tim!