Ensure That Your Upcoming Event Is Planned To Perfection

Ensure That Your Upcoming Event Is Planned To Perfection

Whether you're planning a corporate event for your business, or a personal event with your family and friends, in order for both your expectations and your guests expectations to be surpassed, you have to make sure you plan your event inside and out. Planning in anticipation of the event, will certify the success of the event. Why? May you ask? As Winston Churchill once said, “He who fails to plan, is planning to fail”.
But, before you do anything, you must outline the overall objectives of the event. Essentially meaning, what are your projected outcomes from the event? Objectives should be identified at the beginning of the event plan for a clear reason; so that you are completely aware of the direction of the event. If you do not understand the objectives of the event, you may be wasting your time as, the purpose of the event should always be clear!
Personnel should not be overlooked. More so for larger events, personnel is an element of an event that shouldn't be cast aside. If you are uncertain on what "personnel" denotes, in essence, personnel are the people or staff that are involved in the running of the event. They are a vital element towards the event success. Therefore you must clearly list your personnel, indicating whether you have employed them internally or externally. Hospitality staff, event managers, designers and caterers are just a few examples of personnel you should consider.
Do you know the location of your event? When contemplating the location of the event, there are several different factors that you need to take into account, for instance, you need to ensure that your location has sufficient capacity, make sure that you don't just focus on the looks of the location. If you disregard capacity, you might have a horrible surprise come the day of your even t when you can't allocate for all of your guests. Criteria such as car parking are often overlooked. You need to ensure that there are sufficient car parking spaces; as more than likely, most of your guests will travel by car, and if they don’t, then you need to ensure that your location is easily accessible by local transport links.
However, location is not you primary concern. Your guests are the most significant component of your event, therefore an up-to-date list of who from your invited guests are attending. If you don’t keep track of attendees, then you will be very surprised come the day of your event, and the attendance is a lot lower than expected. Furthermore, prior to the event, it is a good idea to keep your attendees up-to-date with any event news, updates or useful contact information. Keeping in touch with your attending guests will comfort them prior to the event, as it lets them believe that you are available for any enquiries regarding the event.
Have you decided the marketing aspects of your event? Which marketing methods you will be using to increase awareness of your event or boost ticket sales. There are many conventional methods of marketing your event, such as through your website, via a blog, pay-per-click advertising or even through social media; each method proving very effective dependant on the nature of the event.
Last but by no means least, have you set a practical event budget? To determine your event budget, you will need to detail all of the costs and expenses for producing and marketing the event. If the objective of your event is to turn a profit, then as the event budgeter, you must be able to recover production, marketing and operating costs and still make a considerable profit. Developing an event budget and managing cash flow pre-event, during, and post-event is quite difficult, so it is incredibly useful to have all of the major information noted down before you begin.

Fearless Cold Calling

Fearless Cold Calling

Lets face it, when getting into sales for the first time, the phone can be intimidating. This feeling of intimidation can stop you from making money and succeeding in sales. One thing to remember is that there are plenty of people out there to call about your products and services, if you have a bad call, no sweat, move on to the next one! With cold calling, the key is to find in buying mode. Every call made will be different from the previous call, some people nice, some angry and some who are potential customers looking for what you are selling.

In business to business sales, most office equipment is not exciting. Let's take copiers for instance. A copier is probably the most boring piece of office equipment you can think of. Cold calling in the copier industry is a numbers game, the more calls you make, the more appointments set. With any product or service, a natural product life cycle exists and there are customers out there.

Intimidation of the phone is a mental barrier which can be solved by picking up the phone and jamming out your first 10 calls. If you hit a speed bump (AKA a JERK) don’t take the time to think about it, there are plenty of other people to call, keep making calls.

Find ways to track your productivity and how well you are at staying on the phone. It can be argued that the time waster you will encounter is your computer. More specifically, your CRM system and e-mail. Reading e-mails or logging calls in your customer tracking system along with call details, next actions and/or appointment scheduling can kill your productivity on the phone. If you are mindful of your time, you should consider switching to paper.

Using paper(old-school) is one of the best tricks of all time. Print off your cold call campaign for the day, turn your computer screen off, take your phone off of the receiver and jam out your first 10 calls. After each call, write your notes on a legal pad and move on to the next call. If you are cold calling fresh leads, you will most likely have a 20-50 percent connect rate, so log your calls and repeat.

As long as you keep dialing, you will eliminate your fear of the phone and make more money.

Cold calling will always be part of any good sales process. That being said, there are ways to supplement cold calling and find more warm leads(AKA BUYERS), find out how to Never Cold Call Again.