Cold Calling Script: Make a Call That Works

While there are other (and usually more effective) ways to generate sales leads, many companies still depend upon cold calling. I've covered cold calls before, but here's a great cold-calling script from one of the world's top experts on cold-calling, Keith Rosen, author of The Complete Idiot's Guide to Cold-Calling.

5 Tricks to Boost Your Sales Energy

Why is energy so critical for success? Great football coach and motivator Vince Lombardi once said, "Fatigue makes cowards of us all."  We need a reservoir of energy to keep us at our best all the time. When we get burnt out and physically exhausted, our confidence begins to weaken--and that is the beginning of the end for real sales success.

If there's one thing that's been abundantly clear over the years, it's this: Confidence is crucial for sales success. And remember, you're the leader and confidence is contagious.

How to Sell: Value, Benefits, or Features?

Most businesspeople (including many who sell for a living) define "value" as "the most product for the least amount of money."  Wrong, wrong, wrong!
While that's how the term "value" is used in supermarket ads, it's not what "value" means when you're selling in the business world.

7 Most Powerful Sales Tools

The world is inundated with sales tools: worksheets, playbooks, sales scripts, software, brochures, and so forth. But all of those sales tools put together are insignificant if you don't have the intellectual and emotional tools that truly create success.

Here are seven sales "tools" you need to develop:

Why Startups Need to Control Their Own Destinies [Video]

Silicon Valley is finally starting to have a real impact on the health care industry, and Practice Fusion, an Electronic Medical Records (EMR) company, is leading the way. In addition to replacing paper charts, its free, web-based product helps doctors with everything from appointment scheduling to prescription management. With major VC backing and vocal support from investors like Peter Thiel, the managing partner at Founders Fund and former CEO of PayPal, the company is positioned to scale quickly and dominate the digital health care revolution.

The Really Big Guide Of Small Business Success Tips

In business, size does matter, especially if that size is small. Independent businesses with fewer than 500 employees represent 99.7% of all employer firms, according to the SBA’s Office of Advocacy. They employ about half of all private sector employees, which make up about 43% of the country’s private payroll. And more than half are based out of an owner’s home. Incidentally, don’t knock the domicile as a business incubator. After all, that’s where Apple, Hershey’s, Mary Kay Cosmetics, and Ford started.

9 Qualities of Remarkable Entrepreneurs

Good entrepreneurs make money. Great entrepreneurs make serious money.
But remarkable entrepreneurs do more than make money. They are the few who possess qualities that don't appear on balance sheets but do make a significant impact on the lives of their employees, industries, and communities.

Here are nine qualities of remarkable entrepreneurs:

Why Entrepreneurs Should Never Wait to Follow Their Dreams [VIDEO]

Alexa Von Tobel is CEO and founder of LearnVest, which she describes as “Daily Candy meets personal finance.” She started her company with a 75-page business plan that won a contest, and has since raised $24.5 million in funding for this female-focused finance startup. Von Tobel has become the specialist of personal finance of this generation. She regularly appears on such talk shows as Nate Berkus, Rachael Ray and Gayle King to comment on all things personal savings and spendings. In this interview, she breaks down her formula for a happy financial life, “the LearnVest method,” and explains why LearnVest’s success was only possible because she followed her dreams without hesitation.

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This video originally from Mashable

Want to Raise More Funds? Go Out and Tell Your Story—to Everyone!

Don't Overlook the Low-Hanging Fruit
When it comes to getting the word out about their organizations, the first things many nonprofits think of are marketing and advertising campaigns—followed by endless meetings on how they're going to raise the funds to pay for them.

They seldom stop to look at the low-hanging fruit just aching to be picked, namely word-of-mouth opportunities to tell their organization's narrative to those closest to them in their homes, neighborhoods, and communities.

But I'm getting a bit ahead of myself.

Find The Necessary Paperwork For Your Small Business With One Site

Starting a business is exciting, but notoriously stressful. In addition to thinking about your bottom line, you also have to complete boatloads of dreaded paperwork to ensure that, legally, all your ducks are in a row.

License 123 is a one-stop shop where small business owners can figure out what paperwork they needed to file based on where they live and what type of business they operate. A personalized report costs $9.95.

The Secret to Startup Success from Pinterest's First Investor

“I was Pinterest’s first investor.” That’s a sentence I bet you wish you could say. Here at SXSW, I find myself sitting opposite angel investor Brian Cohen who happily owns that distinction. In other words, he found, as he calls them, a couple of young guys from NYU (Ben Silbermann and Evan Sharp) at a business plan competition where angel investors “forage for new opportunities.” The rest is startup legend.

The One Skill You Need to Be an Entrepreneur

If you're an entrepreneur, what skill can you absolutely not do without? Selling might come up as an obvious possible answer—after all, every business owner regardless of their venture needs to persuade someone to part with their cash. Or in this high-tech world is it a specific bit of know-how, such as SEO optimization or website design? Or could it possibly be pitching and self presentation?

Flash Cards for Start-up Lingo

Working words like “S Corp” and “Jason Fried” into conversations doesn’t make you a good entrepreneur, a tech whiz or even a pretty smart guy. But failing to recognize a common tech term at the right moment can make you look like a nube.

Smart-flashcard startup Brainscape launched a new deck of flashcards called Tech Startup Genius on Wednesday that promises to protect you from this situation. The free iPhone app, personally authored by Brainscape founder Andrew Cohen, includes three sets of flashcards: people you should know, orgs you should know, company formation basics and fundraising basics.

8 Legal Steps for Starting Your Business

With each new year, budding entrepreneurs look to turn their vision into a business. These startups are often overflowing with tremendous ideas, energy and optimism — but don’t always have a roadmap for the legal aspects involved in starting a business. In the flurry of drumming up new customers, getting ready for a website launch and building the first prototype, it’s all too easy to put off some of the less glamorous, more administrative aspects of running a company.

Yes, company filings and regulations are not the most exciting parts of your startup. Yet they’re critical to the health of your business and personal finances. Here’s a quick rundown of eight administrative aspects you need to consider for your startup or small business. Of course, depending on your situation and type of business, hiring a tax accountant and/or good attorney with specific experience in your industry can go a long way to helping you steer clear of trouble.

How an Innovative Startup Turned Retail On Its Head [VIDEO]

While Harvard Business School grads Katia Beauchamp and Hayley Barna were looking for a business idea, they noticed that the beauty product industry was seriously behind the times on the online retail side. They discovered that some of the biggest pain points for customers included the overwhelming selection of products and the inability to get a hands-on experience with the items before making a purchase. With that in mind, they created Birchbox, a company that mails women a box containing four to five deluxe beauty products every month. Their customers can test out a handful of new products from home and brands benefit from follow up purchases when the samples run out.

Their unique approach to connecting qualified customers with deluxe brands got the attention of New York’s venture capital community and landed them a seed investment of $1.4 million, followed by a series A round of $10.5 million. Having hit their third year’s sales target in just seven months, Birchbox is now scaling their business model rapidly, as well as planning a new subscription offering targeted at men.

Check out the interview with Beauchamp and listen to her tips on what entrepreneurs should be thinking about before meeting a potential investor, how she and her business partner manage the personal dynamics between co-founders and a look at the logistics of rapidly scaling a company.
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This post originally from Venture Studio, in association with Mashable, which is brought to you by Square1 Bank. The show is hosted by Dave Lerner, a 3x entrepreneur and angel investor.

5 High Risk, High Reward Steps to Starting Your Dream Company

So, you want to start a company? That’s a very exciting decision. But first, you must cover all your bases.

For instance, generate a clear and simple idea, then determine what industry or market you plan to target, what type of corporate organization you’ll implement and where your business will be located.

Each is an important decision, but the main consideration when starting a company is how to manage risk. Risk is the heart of entrepreneurship — defined as “the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled.” Risk is the sole determinant whether you will succeed or fail.

Billionaire Sir Richard Branson follows a principle called “protecting the downside,” which means that by looking at any situation and determining all options before making a decision, one can identify the worst case scenario and work backwards from there to find the optimal route forward. Protecting the downside is all about identifying and understanding risk.

Here are five risky steps that will actually help protect the downside of a new company and, counter-intuitively, set you up for success.

7 Steps To Scoring New Business In A Bad Economy

Today’s economy is certainly lousy, but you might as well get used to it. Some financial experts think the de-leveraging process we’re now going through might last for another decade or two, with interest rates near zero for years to come. Ugh.

Commerce will still take place, however, and the most competitively successful companies can still prosper. But getting a prospective business customer to say “yes” when his own economic world has deteriorated so much requires a deft and nuanced sales effort. So if you sell to business customers, here are seven suggestions for improving your competitive chances:

Startup Revenue: From Zero to $1 Million in a Year [Video]

When Shane Snow co-founded Contently a year ago he had just 48 cents in his bank account. Fast forward to the end of 2011 and the startup is on track to clear over $1 million in revenue.


Watch Shane’s interview to hear about his experience going through the TechStars mentorship program, raising money and how his experience of losing a big sale helped him better understand Contently’s business model.

Venture Studio, in association with Mashable, is brought to you by Square1 Bank. The show is hosted by Dave Lerner, a 3x entrepreneur and angel investor.

What Every Entrepreneur Should Know About Asking for Help [Video]

Marissa Evans created her company, Go Try It On, as a means of answering that age-old question, “What should I wear?” Along the way, she recruited a technical team, launched her product at South By Southwest and was able to land $3 million in funding.

Check out Marissa’s interview to hear what she has to say about some of the challenges she’s experienced, how she relies on friends in tough times and what every entrepreneur should know about the power of asking for help.

Venture Studio, in association with Mashable, is brought to you by Square1 Bank. The show is hosted by Dave Lerner, a 3x entrepreneur and angel investor.

How a Harvard Dropout Raised $24 Million in a Recession [Video]

Since Alexa von Tobel dropped out of Harvard Business School to create LearnVest in late 2009, her personal finance startup has attracted more than 100,000 users and raised $24.5 million in funding


Venture Studio, in association with Mashable, is brought to you by Square1 Bank. The show is hosted by Dave Lerner, a 3x entrepreneur and angel investor.