Ninety percent of marketers surveyed say that social media is important for their business, with the self employed and small business owners with two or more employees “more likely to strongly agree,” says the 2011 Social Media Marketing Report, which surveyed some 3,300 marketers.

The No. 1 payoff: Generating more business exposure, say nearly 9 in 10 marketers. Increased traffic (72 percent) and improved search rankings (62 percent) were also top on the list. Improved sales was last on the list of seven benefits, with 43 percent of those surveyed enjoying success—but it was the self-employed and small business owners with two or more employees who were most likely to report that social media helped them close new business. The self-employed and small businesses also were most likely to find business partnerships through social media, with at least 59 percent reporting that benefit.

As almost anyone who’s ever updated a status (and then clicked around for another hour) can attest, social media is time-consuming. More than half (58 percent) of respondents are using social media for more than six hours per week, and about one-third (34 percent) invest 11 or more hours weekly. Fifteen percent spend more than 20 hours a week blogging, tweeting, and the like. The more experience respondents had with social media, the more time they spent: 63 percent of people with three or more years experience spend more than 10 hours a week on social media. Just 41 percent of those with one to three years experience spend that much time. For the record, about half of those surveyed have less than a year’s experience with social media marketing.

Wondering if you can (or should) hire someone to do this sort of marketing for you? Just 28 percent of businesses are outsourcing some portion of their social media marketing, says the survey.

Where, exactly, are efforts being spent? Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and blogs were the top four social media tools. Facebook overtook Twitter to take the top spot in the study this year (in 2010 it was Twitter). But some three-quarters (77 percent) of marketers plan to increase their use of YouTube and video marketing this year—a virtual gold rush.

1. Don’t just start the conversation.
Be an integral and evolving part of it. “Social media has one very important perspective to share with brand management—the conversation. Like branding, social media is all about the conversation and building effective relationships. They are perfectly suited to one another,” says Ed Roach, founder of The Brand Experts, a brand management consultancy in West Leamington, Ontario, the author of The Reluctant Salesperson, a free e-book available at www.thebrandingexperts.ca. The rules for brand messaging through new media versus traditional channels haven’t changed, but “the game sure got better and more interesting,” says Roach. It’s not enough to have a Facebook page or a Twitter account, you must participate in the conversation by making regular posts and replying to direct messages from your customers. Ron Smith, president and founder of S&A’s Cherokee, a public relations and marketing firm in Cary, North Carolina, agrees, adding that you’ll want to stay on top of what people are saying about you and your brand online. “Monitoring social media is a must for all companies. Social media has shortened the time frame for company responses to complaints or accusations. These days, companies need to acknowledge any issues and control the messaging in a matter of minutes instead of hours or days,” says Smith. Read more.

2. Either keep your personal brand out of it…
So you have 10,000 Twitter followers. Does it matter to your customers? Tim Ferriss, the entrepreneur behind the sports nutritional supplements company BrainQUICKENand author of The 4-Hour Workweek, told Inc.com contributor John Warrillow: “Unless you’re in one of a handful of businesses like public speaking, I think managing and growing a personal brand can be a huge distraction for company founders. I see all of these entrepreneurs trying to collect Twitter followers, and it reminds me of a matador waving a red flag in front of a bull. In this case, the founders are the bull. The bullfighter moves the flag away, and the bull comes up with nothing but air. Steve Jobshas a personal brand, but it is Apple’s product design that makes it such a valuable company. He isn’t jumping on Foursquare to develop his ‘personal brand.’” Read more.

3. …or dive in and make all the headlines you can.
Appearing in the media as a source of expertise can go a long way toward building your brand, Inc.’s April Joyner reports. To gain press, identify media outlets that are most applicable to your particular areas of expertise and send them targeted pitches. If you want to be a talking head on radio or television, it also helps to give producers a preview of your personality by referring them to video clips on your site. As with print, the Web has also democratized the world of radio. Through venues such as BlogTalkRadio, anyone can host her or his own broadcasts—or find a show on which to appear. After you have honed an area of expertise, you will find that there are plenty of opportunities to take your message on the road. Becoming active in professional organizations and attending conferences offer valuable opportunities for networking. As you become more familiar within a certain field, more and more people will call on you to share your expertise. Making an appearance as a vendor at an event can also offer long-term personal branding benefits. Read more.

4. Don’t favor edge over consistency.
Chris Russo had a healthy business. The only thing holding it back, he thought, was its name. Three years after its launch in 2006, Fantasy Sports Ventures’s revenue was increasing 40 percent to 50 percent a year, a pace that surprised even Russo. But by the fall of 2009, he was uneasy. Despite the heady growth, Russo felt the company’s brand positioning was pigeonholing the business and would soon limit further expansion. “Fantasy Sports Ventures was not a long-term, sustainable, public-facing brand,” Ed O’Hara, of the branding firm SME, says. “It felt more like a holding company and was too heavily weighted on the fantasy side.” O’Hara and Russo tossed around lots of edgy names, like Fanarchy, Fantology, and Gutcheck, but weren’t sure. Rebranding was on the table, but the company didn’t want to alienate its huge readership and large fan base. The solution? When the company acquired another brand, The Big Lead, and was integrating it into the existing portfolio of sites, Russo realized he struck gold. The name was consistent with the sites’ goals, as well as its existing image.  Read more.

5. Be persistent in finding and targeting your niche.
Even if you’re entering a flooded marketplace—and online is certainly a very crowded forum—you always have a chance to make your brand and company stand out. People used to think water was all the same; now stores carry half-a-dozen brands or more. “Marketers struggle with differentiation because they give up too soon,” says Derrick Daye, managing partner of The Blake Project. “They think that this can’t be differentiated, it can’t be unique.” Experts say the constantly shifting marketplace creates the need to be creative with your approach. The toothpaste market is one that professionals cite as a constantly changing product selection that requires vigilance on the part of brand managers. Additives like baking soda, breath freshener, or whitening strips are now taken for granted. Read more.

6. Excel at telling your customers “About Us.”
You may not be paying much attention to your About Us page, but visitors to your site are, writes Chana Garcia. And considering that your About Us page is where the world first clicks to learn about your company and the services you offer, it deserves a little more consideration and a lot more respect. Sure, you need to include all the basics. But a few simple tactics can make your About Us page a more exciting read and your company come across as more accessible, says Lorrie Thomas, aka The Marketing Therapist, a marketing strategist, educator, writer, web marketing expert and speaker. Avoid writing a soliloquy (too much text can be a turnoff) and focus on connecting with your site visitors. Thomas asked her employees to write their own bios for her company’s About Us page. Her only mandate was that in addition to providing a snapshot of their professional history, they include personal information, such as hobbies or their favorite activities. Some even set up links to their blogs and personal websites. This might also be a good place to include e-mail addresses for your staff. Readily available contact information shows customers that you want to hear from them and that you have nothing to hide. Read more.

7. Fully integrate social media into your site.
You’ll not only look savvy, but increase your connectivity, and gain traffic to you site from elsewhere. You don’t necessarily need to put out the next viral marketing video or hire an expensive marketing agency (although both would probably help) to achieve a high rate of traffic. All you need is a bit of elbow grease, a few tricks up your sleeve, and a commitment to making your site a quality destination for visitors. Add Facebook Like buttons, have a dynamic blog section, utilize SEO, and build your site heavy with links, for starters. More tips can be found in our guide to “How to Drive More Traffic to Your Website.” Read more.

8. Monitor your brand’s reputation, and be ready to respond.
Facebook, Twitter, and Yelp have become essential components of many companies’ online marketing strategies, but there are countless other sites on which customers rant and rave about their experiences. A question or complaint left unanswered on any of them has the potential to tarnish a company’s brand and scare away prospective customers. That’s why companies like Beachbody are using new tools to monitor what’s been said about them online. The most basic services, like Google Alerts, allow users to select keywords to track and to receive e-mail updates whenever they appear on the Web. Others, like Social Mention and HootSuite, specifically scour profiles on social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace for relevant comments. Nate Bagley, a social media expert at Mindshare Technologies, a Salt Lake City company that makes software that helps companies keep track of customer feedback, usesGoogle Alerts and Social Mention to keep track of references to his company, as well as news on its clients, competitors, and the industry at large. “It’s a good way to gather business intelligence,” he says. Some of these services, including Radian6 and Viralheat, detect whether a post is positive, negative, or neutral, so businesses can easily determine which mentions require the most attention. Those features have allowed companies to maintain greater control of their brands. Read more.

9. Showcase your best work.
In this new environment, a sturdy brand is all about trust and relationships. With that goal in mind, there’s no better way to build both than by posting testimonials or listing big-name clients you’ve partnered with. That will lend your business a good amount of credibility. You might consider incorporating your clients’ logos somewhere on your page as an added visual element. Mentioning awards and recognitions your company received, as well as community service work, green initiatives, and interesting facts, will also make your business more appealing. Additionally, timelines, company history, and major milestones are attention-grabbing.

Inc.com Magazine Resource

Holiday bonuses are a longtime tradition for industries like finance — think the big Wall Street firms that getChristmas bonuses the size of annual salaries — and theNational Labor Relations Board has allowed unionized workers to make holiday bonuses a contractual obligation. But small businesses operate in a nebulous realm of personal discretion, where owners set their own precedent for holiday extras.

Owners can establish gifts around the holidays as an act of goodwill or as part of employees’ pay package, saysHarry Dannenberg, chairman of the New York Citychapter of SCORE, a national nonprofit organization that offers small business counseling and advice. “It’s such a personal issue that there’s not a precedent for it,” he says. “Different industries have different attitudes about it. If you’re a mom-and-pop operation and you’re part of a business family, you might have a more generous approach to the holidays than if you run a chain.”

In a survey last December, Challenger, Gray & Christmas, an outplacement consulting firm, found that 64 percent of employers planned to give holiday bonuses, up from 54 percent in 2008, when most industries were strained by a bad economy. Greater economic conditions certainly play into whether to give a holiday bonus, Dannenberg says, but it’s good form to show employees appreciation for a successful year. “If I had a good year and people worked very hard for me, I might make a statement of how grateful we all are by presenting them with a nice gift,” he says. “But it’s very individual, especially with small businesses, and how you relate to the people who work for you.”

This year’s holiday bonus will set the precedent for subsequent years’, so structuring bonuses to be affordable yet considerate is key.

How to Structure a Holiday Bonus: Decide its Purpose

What role will a holiday bonus play in your overall, yearlong pay scheme? Is it a substitute for a year-end bonus? Is it a substantial contribution to annual pay? Or is it a token of holiday spirit?

If a business already pays a year-end bonus, a holiday bonus becomes more of a gift of appreciation than part of employees’ annual pay and benefits package, Dannenberg says. “If you’re in a business where you get year-end bonuses, usually Christmas becomes far less of a significant issue,” he says. “If you’re a clerk in the store and the owner wants to spread a little cheer and give some money, give families turkeys, it becomes a small thank-you. A big thank-you is a raise or a year-end bonus.”

Ben Hemminger, CEO of Fashionphile, a Beverly Hills company that sells second-hand luxury handbags, says he gives a year-end bonus around the holidays. The family-owned business has 11 employees, mostly part-timers, and the full-time employees “are all related to me,” he says. Full-timers get a $500 check — taxes deducted and all — around the last week of December, and part-timers receive a $100 cash card. “There’s probably a more intriguing way to do it,” he says, “but everybody would rather have the money than something worth the money.”

Dannenberg agrees that token thank-yous like cash cards belong at the general employee level, not the management level. “It should be given to employees who provide a service in a business,” he says. “In something like auto repair or retail, it becomes more of a gesture of recognition of service.”

How to Structure a Holiday Bonus: Budgeting the Bonus

Holiday bonuses meant as tokens of appreciation don’t belong in a business plan, Dannenberg says. Rather, he suggests looking at revenue from the first 10 months of the year to decide how to approach bonuses each holiday season. “Say it was a good year, I made money, therefore, on the strength of that performance, I can give ‘x,’” he says. But use generosity in moderation, Dannenberg warned. Being too generous in a good year could make for an embarrassing downgrade in a bad year.

Six-year-old Fashionphile spends a few thousand dollars on year-end bonuses and year-end gifts for its part-time employees, but Hemminger says everyone understands the bonus is a small token. “No one gets paid a whole lot to begin with, so it’s not like we have high expectations,” he says.

Start-up businesses should do some footwork before deciding how to approach bonuses, Dannenberg says. “The issue becomes what is the precedent,” he says. “If I were starting a new business, I would go around and chat with other similar merchants to see what they do. Get a feel for how other people make that evaluation and judgment.”

How to Structure a Holiday Bonus: Cash versus Gift

If a holiday bonus isn’t an established part of annual pay, a gift is just as meaningful as a little cash — sometimes more so if the cash gift is going to be small. “You give someone a really small amount, it’s insulting,” Dannenberg says. “But give them a nice bottle of wine and something that costs $10, it’s nice. With a nice note, it’s an expression of thanks, a matter of holiday spirit and cheer.”

Hemminger says he’s considering giving employees gift cards for the three restaurants they go to for lunch every day — a tax-free and useful gift, he says.

Blurb, a San Francisco publishing company where authors design their books online, during the holidays fields orders from businesses making books for their employees as holiday gifts. The employer designs the book from size and shape to content — photos or photos and text. Square books start at around $13.

When Dannenberg owned a chain of six retail stores, around the holidays he would give employees a big basket filled with fruit and a turkey. “They grew to look forward to it and enjoy it,” he says, adding, “I would stay away from giving money at Christmas because of the potential cost.

“I’d go with a nice box of candy and a bottle of wine, something that you can have uniformity that everyone can enjoy.”

So as you decide how to handle the holidays, keep in mind that whether it’s cash or wine, to employees, it’s your appreciation for their service that counts.

Inc. Magazine

For many companies, Twitter has quickly become an indispensable part of their business plan. The goal of Twitter isn’t necessarily to spend all of your time trying to get followers. Certainly, that’s important, but the quality—and consistency—of your tweets will have a long-term impact on how much traffic will be driven to your site.

For example, consider your tweet lengths. “If the end of the tweet is a link, as it often is, then your link will be lost,” says Tim Frick, author of Return on Engagement: Content Strategy and Design Techniques for Digital Marketing. This happens especially when your tweet is retweeted by someone else. To avoid the truncated tweet, make sure you’re keeping tweets short enough – under 120 characters if you can.

If you’re building your business or you’re launching a start-up, you’ll need to target potential customers who may have never heard of you in order to draw attention to your brand. “The biggest unused Twitter resource for small business owners is the search.twitter.com function,” says Alexis Wolfer, founder and editor-in-chief ofTheBeautyBean.com. “You can search for what people are talking about in real time, which is very powerful. I can search for ‘drugstore mascara’ and see the people doing anything using those words. So if someone is at a drugstore wondering what mascara to buy, I can say, ‘Hey, did you see this article we wrote on the best drugstore mascaras?’”

Getting retweeted is the goal of any good social media manager. Even if you only have a couple hundred (or even fewer) Twitter followers, you can face great exposure by crafting pitch-perfect tweets that are picked up by your followers. In other words, try to find something new, interesting, or funny to say. It doesn’t have to be about your product or service in particular, but it should be well thought out and carefully planned. A tweet with typos or factual errors will make people think twice about clicking to your site.

Dig Deeper: 5 Secrets of Highly Effective Twitter Users

How to Drive More Traffic to Your Website: Facebook

If your business doesn’t have a Facebook page, it’s time to make the leap. With about 500 million users, there’s really no better platform to drive traffic to your site. Consider that even if you get just a tiny percentage of Facebook users to look at your page, you have a good chance in driving a fair amount of traffic.

In addition to the page details that list your company’s address and website address, you need to utilize the Like and Feed tools to get as much traffic to your site as possible.

If you have your web designer program a Like button onto various pages of your site, it gives your current audience a way to tell their friends about something they saw – and liked – on your site. Once they click the like button, a link to your site appears in their Facebook feed, and depending on how many friends they have, it could means thousands of eyeballs on your product or service.

To get people to interact with your Facebook page, you need to create a virtual conversation that involves as many people as possible. Questions are a great source of interactivity.  Jeff Widman, CEO of Brand Glue, a consulting company based inMountain View, California, offers the advice to “Put the question first, rather than last” and to “ask a question where people don’t need to click through a link to give you an answer.” In other words, you need to make sure your questions are direct and relatable to your customers. Also, make sure you don’t confuse your followers with jargon or words your readers won’t understand. It’s best to keep it simple.

Dig Deeper: How to Optimize Your Facebook News Feed Presence

How to Drive More Traffic to Your Website: Blogging

No matter what service or product you offer, a blog will help drive traffic to your site. Blogs are especially helpful to get traffic from returning customers because you should have new content to offer, even if your product or service hasn’t changed at all. Inc.com blogger and award-winning Internet veteran Maisha Walker says, “The purpose of blogging in general is usually to establish and/or support an existing brand with an understanding of how that brand generates revenue.”

Here are few ways that blogging helps drive traffic to your site:

• Intimacy – Blogging can make your relationship with your customers far more intimate, and will help increase the amount of returning customers.

• Building Community - When you blog, you define your areas of expertise, but you also attract the relevant customers to your company or brand.

• Customer Research – Readers will inevitably leave feedback in the form of comments and e-mails. It’s a great way to understand who is reading your blog and what they’re interested in.

Dig Deeper: Blogging’s 11 Big Payoffs

How to Drive More Traffic to Your Website: SEO

All efforts to drive traffic to your site culminate with the idea of Search Engine Optimization. Everything that you do online, whether its social media, blogging, uploading photos, or naming products, contributes to your organic search ranking. Experts say that most, if not all, of your marketing energy should be directed at landing the top search engine rank for your keywords. Here are three tips to improve your Google SEO.

• Google places a lot of emphasis on links, saysChris Dawkins, CEO of Trace Media Marketing, a New York City-based SEO and Internet marketing firm. When someone searches on Google for a particular keyword, Google has analyzed how many other sites have your link on their sites, which increases credibility, and therefore heightens your ranking.

• Use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. This tool offers you keyword suggestions for your site, as well as providing stats on each keyword, like how many people search that per month, and which websites you’ll be competing with.

• When Google crawls your site, it’s going to want to know what – and who – you are. Creating meta tags and posting keyword-rich content to your site are essential. Don’t forget to name all of your photos with keywords, either.

Dig Deeper: 5 Secrets to Selecting Highly-Effective SEO Keywords

How to Drive More Traffic to Your Website: Link Building

This term is becoming less specific as more and more marketing techniques are evolving to generate clicks to your site. But essentially, the term refers to generating inbound links to your site from other sites on the Internet. The two major benefits of building your link-presence online are a) to introduce another site’s followers to your site and b) help your search engine optimization in terms of ranking.

There are a few ways to link-build. First, and perhaps the most common way, is to comment on an article, blog post, or message board and include your link. Beware, though. If you merely post a link to your site instead of a comment, you may be flagged as spam, which could result in your being banned permanently from posting on that site. The best way to include your link is to find articles that are germane to the product or service you are offering, or at least those that you feel confident in responding to intelligently, and write a meaningful post. At the bottom on the post, include your link with your signature. By doing this, the hope is that audiences will end up at your site after reading an article you’ve commented on.

Dig Deeper: Link Building – What not to do

How to Drive More Traffic to Your Website: Content Aggregators

Content aggregators are similar to link building in that they both help drive traffic to your site. They differ in the sense that you log onto these sites for the sole reason of sharing links to your site with the world. The most common examples of a directory or content aggregator are Digg and StumbleUpon. The best way to drive traffic to your site using these services is to have a popular third party post on your behalf, because they will have a devoted core of followers. Make sure your site is content aggregator friendly, too. For example, if someone visits your site and likes what they see, they should be able to “Digg” you, which will send a link of your site to their feed.

Here, are some of the other content aggregators you should know about:

o   Technorati

o   Alltop

o   Bloglines

o   Netvibes

Driving traffic to your site is an organic process that takes time and one that never really ends. You’ll always want to be working on your strategy in order to achieve a growing number of visitors to your site, because more often than not, that’s where you’ll be getting the bulk of your customers.  

Dig Deeper: Top 13 Ways to Drive Blog Readership

Inc.com Magazine Resource

1. Putting your brilliant design first.

“Whether or not the site is designed elegantly, what really matters to me is whether the navigation is intuitive, and whether the information is organized well. Design, for as much time as we spend on it, if it’s all about the visual elements, that can quickly get someone out of that site. I always try to focus on making sure the information makes sense before putting mouse on screen. Plan ahead. Get the answers before laying anything down. Get together with your project manager and design team, and get all the info from the client before start designing. It’s also important to get the navigation in front of people to make sure everyone can get that information quickly. Be constantly testing. Only then should you build the beautiful elements, the design of the site, around that. If that’s not there the site can be considered a failure. ”

— Andres Orrego, associate creative director ofChowder Inc. in New York

2. Going overboard with Flash.

“Flash is certainly a pet peeve. It has its place, for sure, but since the dot.com bust we’ve come a long way. Today our customers want to be found – they expect to be found – but what does that mean for us? We need to set the stage for search engine optimization, so we need to stay away from Flash. When I see a site overly done, you ask yourself, does it really make sense for you to do that in Flash? No.”

— Antonio Navarrete, president and creative director of SilentBlast in Toronto

3. The unwelcoming welcome screen.

“I hate everything about welcome screens. By clicking a link, I’ve already said that I want to go to visit your site, so there is no need to show me a ‘welcome’ screen with a quote. In fact, it is almost insulting to call it a ‘welcome screen’ – I’d almost respect it more if it was called a here-is-an-ad-so-we-can-make-money screen.  As it is, this intermediate screen just delays users from accessing your content and gives them an opportunity to leave before they ever arrive.”

- Andrew Cafourek, co-founder and digital lead of A022 Digital in New York

4. The boggling homepage.

“People who are using your site, buying from your site, are not going to stay there or buy from you due to your awesome design. Most homepages are completely overwhelming. There is so much there – people try to communicate everything to everyone, and the real content gets lost. That’s a design disaster. It should tell people in three to five seconds who you are and what you do. That’s it. We have a design philosophy that we take from architecture: form follows function. When you are building a building, you want right angles and perfectly usable space. If you go to our homepage, you will see cleanliness and simplicity. I say this left and right, and my designers say it left and right: Websites have to breathe.”

- Marvin Russell, creative director of The Ocean Agency in Chicago

5. Worshipping the fold.

“There’s been this maintained notion that everything has to be above a certain pixel dimension, and that everything below that gets lost. I don’t think that’s where we’re at anymore. People do scroll. They like portals. So especially with makingBarackObama.com, that was something we stayed away from: We knew people would scroll, and we really wanted to keep more information on the homepage, make it a portal, and allow for more content to be available on the portal page.  I think the key to making it work is making sure you present something and design with the pixel dimension in mind. On another site I did, there’s type interacting with an image makes you aware that there’s more going on below. Especially when you’re on blogs, they become very blah-y, and there’s no contrast in post styles. They don’t keep a variation that keeps readers interested. Variation in consistency lets you forget the fold.”

- Scott Thomas, a.k.a. @SimpleScott

6. Not addressing the user’s real need.

“Many companies organize the site around their own internal categories, which is different from what the audience is actually looking for. In other words, they’ll build a site around products, because they’re thinking they have to sell the product and the product needs to be front and center.  But when you think about it, you have to reverse it and first ask what need are you solving, and then present the product. I think there’s internal anxiety to make sure things get covered as a checklist, versus really stepping back and understanding what the users need. You have to have the perspective of an audience that may not know your brand, and there’s very often a complete absence of making people aware of your brand is, and why it’s relevant.”

- Sean Ketchem, strategy director of communication of MetaDesign in San Francisco

7. Hiding who you are.

“Transparency on the Web is the hottest and the biggest thing as far as getting people to purchase or relate to your services. Our portfolio page was always No. 1 for the seven years we’ve been in business. But then we created videos of each one of our employees talking about what they do and why they love it. That page is now No. 1. By far, the people behind the process, behind the product, are extremely important. We’ve had clients say ‘we went with you because we got to kind of meet everybody before we even walked in the door.’ The buying process starts with a relationship. That process can start with a video and tell you personally what I do rather than just a photo and a title. Really show them rather than tell them.”

- Marvin Russell, creative director of The Ocean Agency in Chicago

Inc.com Magazine

Landing a Million-Dollar Sale: Do Your Homework

To get started, you need to know who your target market is and what value you’re going to bring to the table, says Earl O’Garro Jr., President and CEO of Hybrid Insurance Group, which is based in Windsor,Connecticut. That means making a list of the big companies out there that you know will be a good fit for your product or service – not just a list of big companies with money to spend. “The primary tool needed in landing the million-dollar deal is believing you or your firm is deserving of the deal and can truly add value,” he says. “That doesn’t mean simply playing golf with the decision makers or by picking up a dinner when you see a potential client at your favorite restaurant. That’s not the sort of value I’m referring to. Landing the deal is a process that should begin well in advance of ever really knowing the players attached to the deal.”

O’Garro says that you should do thorough research on your potential target by not just doing standard online research, but also speaking to the company’s competitors to come up with potential solutions any potential weaknesses before ever meeting with the client. Then, once you score a meeting with the target company, you can impress them with your advanced insight into solving their biggest issues. “Nothing floors a potential client more than sitting in a meeting with a would-be service provider who has done their homework in anticipation of that day,” he says. “It not only shows one’s commitment, but it also demonstrates your aggressiveness and commitment which many million-dollar deals require.”

Dig Deeper: How to Find New Customers and Increase Sales

Landing a Million-Dollar Sale: Make Your Pitch

The truth is that big companies don’t really want to have to switch vendors unless they have to or if there is a really compelling reason for them to do so, says Jill Konrath, author of the books Selling to Big Companies and Snap Selling. “One of the biggest mistakes that entrepreneurial clients make is to fall in love with the product or service they are selling,” she says. “So they end up spending their time with the client talking about all the bells and whistles they provide rather than talking about the business case for why the product or service will help them solve a problem or ease a pain. They won’t change unless it’s really worth it.”

That means, Konrath says, that once you do get in the door, you need to orient every discussion, conversation, and presentation toward making the business case for why it makes sense for the client to go through the pain of switching to a new vendor. Again, the point is not so much to stress how good your product or service is as to demonstrate how it will make life easier – or more profitable – for your client.

Dig Deeper: How to Cold-Call a Big Customer

Landing a Million-Dollar Sale: Make it Safe

Once a big company decides that it will make a change to a new vendor, it will then begin looking around at its options. The bad news is that, as a small company, you will also be considered a far riskier option than your larger competitors, Konrath says. Clients might be worried that a smaller vendor won’t be able to handle the increased workload, to deliver on time or even that it will still be in business in two years. “When I first started my business, I had a potential client pick someone else because they were worried about what would happen if I got hit by a Mack truck,” she says. “It never dawned on me until then that I would be considered a risky option.”

To combat this challenge, then, Konrath says, you need to be proactive about the issue and be ready to bring up solutions and alternatives that will help make your pitch far less risky. “You can’t be scared to bring it up,” she says. “Just because they don’t bring it up doesn’t mean they’re not thinking about it.”

Not only will you win points for your honesty and forthrightness, you can then pitch the strengths that come with a smaller size – such as responsiveness to your client’s needs and a nimbleness to customizing products and services they wouldn’t find if they chose a larger competitor of yours. You can also line up partners who can fill in gaps in delivering the best value for your client. Konrath suggests showing your client a detailed roadmap of how you intend to deliver on your value pitch by emphasizing how you have done similar projects in the past, even if they were tailored to smaller clients. “You want to stress how you can deliver superior customer service to them than if they were the small fish in a big pond,” she says.

The good news is, no matter the size of your business, if you’ve been a part of helping them reach that decision, “you will be in a strong position because you will be considered a valuable resource that has provided guidance and ideas which gives you an inside edge in terms of which vendor they end up picking,” Konrath says.

Dig Deeper: Taking on Big Accounts

Landing a Million-Dollar Sale: Be Prepared

Even as you make the preparations to land your first million-dollar sale, you should also be working on lining up the necessary resources within your company to support your new client once they come aboard, says Eva Rosenberg, author of the blog The TaxMama. “I’ve seen it many times where a business finally achieves its dream of the big sale, only to learn they can’t fulfill it – or they lose their business as a penalty for not being able to meet the delivery targets,” she says. “Sears was notorious for including clauses like that in their contracts.”

To get ready for supporting your big sale, Rosenberg says you need essentially three things:

1. Financial resources. These are necessary to pay for the production or staff to provide the products and services. “Understand that you’re probably not going to get paid in full until at least 60-90 days after you deliver,” Rosenberg says.

2. Back-up resources. In case production facilities break down, have a problem, or something unpredictable steps in. “You might also need alternative sources of staffing if you are providing services or additional bandwidth, servers, duplicate/redundant sites to expand to quickly if traffic suddenly floods in,” Rosenberg says.

3. The wisdom and patience to understand that things may go wrong. Also be aware that you might need to be able to step in and move quickly.

Dig Deeper: How to Handle a Spike in Sales

Landing a Million-Dollar Sale: Keep Fishing for Minnows

While landing the big million-dollar deal, which many sales professionals have dubbed “the whale,” can be an exciting achievement for your business, it shouldn’t be your only focus, says Clifford A. Bailey, founder and CEO of TechSoft Systems, which is based inCincinnati. “Don’t focus solely on the whale,” he says. “Losing a million-dollar client can devastate your business, and it can happen by no fault of your own. A simple reorganization could put you on the street. A diversified client base can be your lifeline. So always keep fishing for minnows.”

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Mike is just starting out as a solo SEO strategist. He launched with a bang; two large projects that kept him busy and profitable for five months. While he has a few prospects in the picture, Mike isn’t sure what’s next.

Cynthia designs and manufactures a line of baby clothes. She’s got a smattering of boutiques, distributors and e-tailers who distribute her products but profits are slim.  It will be difficult for Cynthia to pull together enough money for her next large order from the factory.

All of these solo’s have something significant in common: lack of clarity on who their customer is, which results in lack of proper focus – and lack of profit.  When the phone rings or an email comes in, it becomes the primary focus and larger goals and tasks are forgotten. They all allow the external influences dictate their day rather than focus on the big picture. After all, one small sale or job is better than nothing, right? WRONG. These solo’s must focus on the defining their vision and ideal client to achieve the long term goals and success. Here’s what happened as we coached these solo’s to success.

Joyce was consulting with individuals, small companies, not for profit organizations and large corporations. She would facilitate any meeting or project that came her way. She lies in wait for the phone to ring; a peer or friend sending her the next lead. Where Joyce’s experience and track record defines her as an expert in her trade, she’s allowed herself to become a Jack of all trades and for her marketing message to become muddy, lacking strength and clarity.

Joyce now has a focus. She enjoys working with mid-sized companies facilitating meetings between strategic partners. Now, she knows who to reach out to, she turns down projects that don’t meet her criteria, and her website speaks to her ideal client. This was a scary move for Joyce because the tendency when creating a niche is to think that you may miss out on an opportunity. The reverse is true however; Joyce’s opportunities are growing daily and her fears have subsided.

Mike wants to help the “small guy.” This makes sense because he’s one of them. But it’s the “big guy” that pays the bills. To satisfy Mike’s passion to serve solo businesses, he is developing a product that teaches SEO basics in an easy to follow DYI format. He also does half-hour consulting sessions and provides a market analysis for a flat fee. Mike has defined how many such projects he will take on each month and has created projections to identify when these smaller projects can be outsourced, freeing him to work on larger projects.

Mike has also decided to target three very specific industries to market his SEO services to. These contracts are his bread and butter. Again, his marketing materials and efforts are now well targeted and defined and Mike doesn’t spend time on ideas and projects that fall outside of those definitions. He is now focused on his ideal client and knows when to say no.

Cynthia was spending an exorbitant amount of time catering to boutique owners, taking returns that weren’t selling in their stores, writing up small orders and negotiating pricing and shipping costs. She was spending time and money to visit store owners, trying to boost sales with costly point of purchase marketing materials. A glance at Cynthia’s sales reports quickly identified that her primary and most profitable customer is the large e-tailer, with the distributor in second place and the small boutiques falling in at a distant third. Cynthia was spending the bulk of her time and resources catering to her smallest and least profitable outlet. Now she understands that the e-tailer is her top priority and she is quickly increasing sales by prospecting in that arena.

Cynthia loves seeing her designs in the small boutiques and understands that as on-line sales grow she can resume her mission to grow boutique sales with proper boundaries in place.

Are your customer demographics all over the board? Spend some time writing a description of your ideal client. Why do they need you? What problems can you solve for them? What will the outcome of your work do for them? Why is that important to them?

Turning your focus to your ideal client will boost your profits – and save your sanity! Share your thoughts and questions here on the Successful Soloist!

INC.com Magazine

I got a wake up call at an industry event when I found out that, in actuality, small ad agencies with less than $5 million in revenue were lucky to get three or four times pre-tax profit—much of which was tied to achieving goals in the future.

Since then, I have started a couple of other businesses and gotten a bit better at estimating their value. It’s still tricky and ultimately a business is only worth what someone will pay for it. But I found I could cobble together a decent estimate through a few resources:

A fancy lunch with a professional

When I went to sell my research company, I bought lunch for three mergers and acquisitions professionals. Each had experience selling research companies similar in size to mine. Their back-of-the-napkin estimates all ended up being plus or minus 25 percent of the actual selling price.

Business Valuation Resources

Business Valuation Resources (BVR) gathers historical information about businesses that have sold recently and comes up with some industry norms.

I found BVR to be a good start, but oftentimes its descriptions of industries were too generic to make for good apples-to-apples comparisons.

M&A firm newsletters

Some mergers and acquisitions firms publish newsletters that will describe the kind of multiples being paid on deals they have done. For example, when I was preparing to sell my conference business, I looked at the newsletter from the Jordan Edmiston Group, one of the top M&A firms in the conference business.

I found that the problem with the M&A firms as a source for valuation data is that they tend to overemphasize their biggest deals. M&A firms get paid on deal size and spend a lot of their time trying to convince the world (and prospective sellers) they do big deals. It’s also the way they measure themselves and earn bragging rights over cocktails. Unfortunately, it ensures they (and their newsletters) boast about the one deal they did with a valuation of $100 million instead of the 15 deals they did for businesses worth less than $20 million.

Bizbuysell.com

Bizbuysell.com is the largest online marketplace for businesses for sale. I think of it as an eBay for businesses.  If you own a dry cleaning shop in Seattle, you can advertise it on bizbuysell.com. Likewise, if you want to buy a retail business in Nashville, you can query bizbuysell.com by industry and identify businesses that meet your specs.

The downside of bizbuysell.com is that it tends to attract smaller, main street businesses—which is great if you own a coffee shop or lawn maintenance business, not as helpful if you own a larger, unique business.

In the end, I have found using all four of these sources usually enables me to estimate a company’s value within 20 percent of the final selling price. Not perfect, but a lot more accurate than looking at what billion dollar public companies trade for on the stock exchange.

INC.com Magazine