1870 Coaching courses in Whetstone delivered On Demand

These days, entrepreneurs have more ways than ever to sell their products or services, including directly to consumers online. The trick is to identify which selling strategies will yield the right mix of profits and market share. While using direct sales methods enables you to pocket more of the margin and establish direct connections with your customers, indirect sales methods can spread your products far and wide quickly and help your brand gain a foothold fast. This learning stream delves into individual selling strategies, outlining the advantages and disadvantages of each, and provides a framework for evaluating which are most appropriate for your business. Tips for connecting your selling strategies to your marketing strategy and incorporating selling models into your company financials are also covered. Extensive worksheets and exercises enable you to identify the sales techniques that will win customers most profitably.

How are you going to create demand for your products and services? This two-part Learning Stream examines eleven marketing programs in depth, including email marketing, SEO, content marketing, and advertising, with examples of how you can apply the right ones to your business. Explored in this Learning Stream are tactics for deploying the marketing programs you choose, examples of their use, and their impact on your overall marketing budget.

Time to put pen to paper—or fingers to keyboard. Take a look inside the Prep Worksheet that prepares you to write the pricing strategy section of your business plan. The key to success is taking the time necessary to deeply understand your business and be prepared to run it—use this workshop and Prep Worksheet to do just that.

One of the most important concepts of your product strategy is identifying your minimal viable product or service (MVP or MVS). This walk-through takes you through a process for identifying what key qualities of your product or service comprise your MVP. Once you identify the minimum offering that addresses your customers’ needs, you can position your business for launch.

It may seem counterintuitive, but perfection is your enemy when it comes to shaping your product or service strategy. You may want everything to be perfect before you launch, but if you ever hope to start ringing up sales, you need to ruthlessly focus instead on just those elements of your offering that address the core customer need, and build a vision and a plan for development that tests your concept in the marketplace sooner rather than later. This learning stream offers guidance on how to shape a product or service vision, strategies for developing a minimum viable product, ways to create a roadmap you’ll stick to, and responses to questions about market defensibility. With examples of real companies cited throughout and workshop sessions for tailoring your own product or service strategy, this learning stream equips you with everything you need to build a product or service strategy that puts launch within reach.

To communicate value to customers, you need more than a list of features; you must communicate both the practical and emotional benefits customers will derive and create a story that calls out the most unique and compelling attributes you offer. This learning stream will guide you through the process of identifying which business elements to highlight in your unique value proposition. You’ll access tools for brainstorming how your offering satisfies emotional desires, alleviates fears or stresses, and addresses immediate practical needs, including prompts specifically for B2B companies. You’ll learn why your unique value proposition is different than your unique competitive advantage, while also surveying your competitors’ unique value propositions to better understand what sets them apart from each other – and what distinct elements your own business should highlight. Workshop exercises will apply the tactics in real life, so that you can better articulate your businesses most compelling and unique benefits and set the stage for success.

Contrary to popular belief, having plenty of competitors is a good sign – that's what makes a thriving market. This course delves deep into the competition, with strategies for identifying and evaluating competitors and classifying them to discover where opportunities lie to fill gaps in the marketplace.

Your market’s growth rate is out of your hands — but how you position your business to capitalize on it is entirely within your control. By selecting the most relevant growth rate for your market segment and aligning your company’s objectives accordingly, your projections will hold up under scrutiny and set you on the path toward profits. This course solves the challenge of projecting future growth with a framework for researching statistics, methods for calculating growth rates, and a list of pitfalls to avoid.

The Company Overview section of your business plan must excite investors. From the founders’ bios and company history to your business location and business model, it must be clear that you’re poised to succeed. This learning stream helps you navigate the five essential sections to include in your plan: company profile, team, staffing, business model, and current status—all with examples, as well as solid business mindset tips and how to talk to investors. The workshop provides a walk-through of the tactical aspects of the learning stream will be walked-through in the workshop step-by-step.

Your business was likely born out of an audacious dream; vision and mission statements invite others to share that dream. Tools form this course will empower you to create vision and mission statements that inspire excitement. We provide strategies for articulating the lofty aims of the vision statement, the concrete components of the mission statement, and the philanthropic pledges of the social mission.