Tag Archives: Invest

How Can You Ramp Sales With Limited Dollars? Six Suggestions

Situation: A company survived the recession by cutting back and using cash reserves. Business is now on the upswing with significant new opportunities. However, the company has limited resources to invest landing new opportunities. How do you ramp up sales and business development on a constrained budget?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Identify and focus on your niche market, and invest your limited resources closing qualified clients. This is a rifle shot approach, not shotgun. While seeing new business, make sure that you have sufficient production capacity to handle new business. You want your clients to be satisfied so that they will refer others to you
  • Cash is the most critical resource. Spend carefully and get the most from your investment in business development.
  • While marketing materials are important, they may not be essential if you have and can leverage excellent referral sources. Word of mouth and referrals from trusted clients are your top assets.
  • Leverage Linkedin as a free or low cost resource to identify key contacts in your top 100 customer prospects.
  • You can also use Linked-in.com to recruit additional sales resources who may be amenable to a pure commission sale. This can help you to augment your efforts so that you only pay for success.
  • Your most important current unused resource is leads and referrals from existing satisfied customers. Let them know that you are looking to grow and ask whether they know of contacts in other companies who could use your product. It is surprising how frequently they will share their contacts with you. Ask whether they would call the contact and provide a personal introduction.

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How Can You Best Use Excess Profits? Five Suggestions

Situation: A company, an S Corporation, produced substantial profits during the first 6 months of their fiscal year. This becomes taxable personal income to the owners if it remains profits. How would you advise the CEO and owners to make best use of these excess profits?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Use some of the funds to invest in new opportunities for the future growth of the company.
  • Prepay significant costs like software licenses multiple years in advance. Make sure that you attend to your accounting so that you properly reflect the ongoing profitability of the business. Otherwise, what you may believe is profitable in future years will not reflect true profitability because you will not be accounting for all of your true expenses.
  • Is anyone in the company deserving of a one-time special bonus for performance or a salary increase?
  • It may make sense to take dollars out of the company and to diversify owners’ investments by investing in real estate, stocks, etc.
    • Check out the current rules around 401K programs that may allow you to invest increased amounts per year per person. Talk to your financial advisor about the details and regulations surrounding these programs.
  • List your alternatives and compare the anticipated ROI, on an after-tax basis, of the various options. This will help you to evaluation options including:
    • Reinvesting in the business – various options.
    • Investing outside of the business – various options.
    • Talk to your financial planner about the choices.

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