Time2Market Business Development Coaching & Consulting

LinkedIn - Beyond Jobs. Business.

Yes, LinkedIn can be used for more than your job search. This topic came up today while meeting with a business associate.  So, here's a quick Top 5 list specifically for those who have leadership roles, or are in consultative, business development and sales roles.  

5 LinkedIn features that can help you build your business:

1. Companies. Research and follow companies, tracking headcount changes, job openings, your connections there, statistics about employees, and more. This feature is getting better all the time. Are there prospective client companies that you should be tracking? Do you know what's happening at the company where your customer works?  Are there competing companies that you want to keep an eye on?
2. Events.  Are there events you or your staff should be attending for networking or professional development?  This feature can help, allowing you to search and find relevant events and/or see which events your contacts (customers and/or colleagues) are attending.  Identify events relevant to your business and connect with people who are important to your business.
3. Groups.  Join them! These provide an opportunity to build your expertise and/or showcase your knowledge/products/services/events.  You connect to existing and new contacts.
4. Updates.   Periodic updates keep you intouch with your network.  Read others' updates and post yours! Let people know what you are doing, or where you are going. You can also use updates to announce new products/services/events/company news, etc.  I’ve found some great information from watching updates, including identifying research of interest for my clients. I've even identified consulting projects to pursue.  You can too.
5. Applications.  Add your business blog to your LinkedIn page, highlight upcoming trips, post presentations and more.  There are many applications that can be used to further connect with your network. 

Brava, Giusi Mastro!

Congratulations to one small business owner I've had the privilege of knowing and working with in NYC.  First book compiled and available for sale here.  Great designs.  You'll be amazed at her collection of works.  Brava, Mastro!

Where is your customer?

With more companies and individuals embracing social media, it's useful for you to understand today's networks and their demographics.  Study: Ages of Social Network Users  provides an interesting snapshot of social network user demographics in the US.

Career Development Program Design and Delivery Successes

Feedback on career development services - program design, workshop sessions, group and one:one coaching - has been extremely positive. Serving over 1000 clients in the past year, this is what some have e-mailed me:

- You were by far the most helpful. I can’t thank you enough for your insight...

- My thanks for your help preparing me for my next career steps - especially regarding your help with preparations for interview, which was extremely useful.

- You have been the most helpful and inspiring to me.

- I really enjoyed the course and found it extremely helpful, thanks again for all your help.

- Great class, everyone loved it! Thank you for help on my resume, very useful!

- Thank you so much for your help on this topic, you have worked wonders with our resume's, and I will be forever grateful.

Resilience - it's ordinary, not extraordinary

Resilience: recovering from or adjusting easily to change or misfortune. You may think it's something you're either lucky to have or unlucky to lack, but that's not so. Resilience is an ordinary ability, and you can take focused action to build it in your life. Don't wait. Start today.

The first step to building resilience is accepting change. With Spring being a time we welcome change, this first step should be easy. Beyond acceptance, focus on your adaptability, strategic planning, results-oriented actions, and persistence-- so you can build resilience and achieve goals. While the economic forecast is looking rough in many parts of the world and here in New York the Department of Labor warns that 2008 was the good year, 2009 can still be fine.

To work toward keeping 2009 just fine, concentrate on building your resilience a little bit at a time and successfully seizing new opportunities. A few tips to do this include:

1. Avoid viewing crises as insurmountable.

2. Establish and grow your professional support network, making contact to ask for and accept help, and to help others.

3. Nurture a positive outlook, discover what restores you mentally, and take care of yourself physically.

4. Do not stop looking for new opportunities.

5. Take decisive action to work toward goals, proactively working a plan.

Resilience is an ordinary ability that everyone has, it is not extraordinary. But you must build and foster this ordinary ability to have it ready in challenging times to drive favorable business and professional results.

Work the list on your own, or foster your resilience working with a Time2Market coach or consultant to move forward faster. We're helping professionals daily. Contact us here if we can help you or your organization be resilient too.

Linkedin - Can it help you build a network to support your business and professional development efforts?

I think the answer to this is, Yes!  But, as with all networking, you'll likely see better results if you make it a two-way street.  And, this site makes it easy to do that.

As you focus on your professional and business development, you may consider Linkedin one good resource to explore, with tools and functionality, for relationship building. Here are 5 main reasons why I think Linkedin can help your development efforts:

1. It’s easy to find and invite others to join your network - get back in touch, and reach out to new contacts.  And, if you are concerned about the privacy of your network, you can keep contacts hidden.
2. Referral functions help you explore new career and business connections faster.
3. Question/answer features can facilitate your knowledge and network build faster.
4. Changes in your network can be viewed daily, so you can stay up-to-date easily (if that feature is enabled by those in your network)
5. You can move your information out to others quickly, with forwarding, pdf, and messaging capabilities. Or, others can find you as a professional match with key word searches, and communicate quickly as well ....

Marketing Innovation for Today's Publishing World

January has been an exciting month, with Gabriella Goddard, a UK-based Executive Coach who is part of the Time2Market team of experts, launching Gulp! in the US and visiting New York. I'm receiving my signed copy this week! I've known Gabriella for about ten years now and loved the UK version, which was fun and inspiring. I also learned some very funny expressions that stick with me today. One of those was "nut it on the head", which I'll write about later. But for now, if you need to nut your book marketing on the head (if I can actually use the expression that way), here are a few tools to help make your mark:

• Blogs
• Book trailer videos
• Podcasts
• Interactive facebook

Gulp! is a great example of marketing innovation in the publishing world, with these on-line tools in action. Check out www.gulptoday.com, and give up living passively. Your marketing campaign can take on a whole new look, integrating these digital tools.

10 Business Building Strategies - Grow

Looking to build your business in the New Year? Here are 10 strategies to grow your business in the next 12 months:

1. Expand the number of locations
2. Franchise
3. License your products
4. Form an alliance or partnership
5. Diversify your offering
6. Target new business markets (i.e., consumer, business, government, etc.)
7. Target new customer segments
8. Buy a new business or merge
9. Expand your business footprint internationally
10. Build your online presence

Time2Market’s business development coaching and consulting services focus on these very things, but this list is from Karen Spaeder, who wrote 10 Ways to Grow Your Biz for Entrepreneur.com. My terminology here is slightly different, but it's a great list and article to share.  Contact us to help.

Start up and Small Business Tips - Lessons Learned

9 small business owners share what they would have done differently starting their businesses today and the following tips result:

• create a marketing plan to promote e-commerce and build your customer base faster
• focus time and money on search engine optimization, especially if you are in a competitive market that is closely tied to on-line shopping and/or information gathering
• emphasize employee commissions as incentives to drive more business
• seize multicultural product offering and/or marketing opportunities
• consult your board of directors to sound out ideas for growth
• have a marketing and PR budget
• create a local, scalable, sales development program/model
• have a partner to work with
• get help/staff to support the business and pick up some of the work

Check out the article from Entrepreneur.com, which highlights e-commerce, real estate, health-care management, restaurant, hair care, catering, video game, and apparel retail businesses.  And, contact us, if you need to move forward fast with tips above for business growth.

International expansion – Are you prepared?

If your business is expanding internationally, look closely before you leap.  Both large and small companies sometimes underestimate the requirements and difficulty of expanding operations abroad.  Recently noted examples in the press include Google’s experiences with Orkut in Brazil, as well as the experiences of smaller firms.

Apart from understanding the business environment from a marketing perspective (e.g., business/consumer demographics, competition, etc.), examine key areas, such as:

• country specific practices and regulations relevant to your business operations and industry
• cross-border, as well as, local taxes and duties
• labor laws and practices
• foreign currency, in the context of local and global economic trends

You can read about how these factors have impacted some large and small businesses by clicking the links above.  Be sure you are prepared to create detailed market analyses and entrance plans for growth.  And, find a dedicated local person, or firm, to help establish your local presence in target markets before launch.