Want to make 2010 way better than 2009? There is one to-do that I recommend: Think back to all of your failed presentations (the ones that DIDN'T turn into sales) and write down the objections the customer gave that killed the sale. In fact, strive to make a list of your top 5 objections that kill sales. 

Then, spend the next week (between now and the first weekday in January) and come up with 2-3 ways to counter each objection. Maybe you need to build more value into your product. Or maybe you need to find a way to accommodate the customer's request to escalate the sales presentation to someone else. Maybe you do need to drop your price. Or, maybe you need to be presenting on a longer timeline so potential customers have a chance to build your purchase into their budget.

If you have 5 top objections and you created 3 ways to counter each one, you'll have 15 top priority to-do's that you need to put into effect right away. And when you do, you'll counter those objections like a pro and make more sales.

Of course, you will face other objections – no one is denying that. But this isn't a situation that you can create a magic bullet for. You just deal with the top ones and move on. In fact, it might be a good idea to schedule an "objection review" at the end of each quarter where you work to solve the top objection you faced in that quarter. Over time, your prospect's objections will become weaker and weaker as your sales skills and ability to handle their objections becomes stronger and stronger.

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With 2010 approaching, business owners are turning their thoughts to what the next year will bring and what they need to do to be more successful. In the midst of these thoughts there is the inevitable consideration: What do I need to be investing in for my business?

Investing in business is essential for a business to grow and become successful. There are all kinds of investments you might consider making in order to have a more successful business:

* Invest in marketing in order to get a greater return on investment of prospects

* Invest in better copy and sales material in order to get a return on investment of more closed deals.

* Invest in your own education in order to get a return on investment of more proficiency or an extension of services.

* Invest in writing ebooks and other products to get a return on investment of more passive income products.

* Invest in time management software in order to get a return on investment of better and more profitable use of your time.

Preparing to invest in the business requires some considerations to help you determine whether the investment you're thinking of is worth it. The considerations you need to think of in advance are:

* What is the required investment? It will be some combination of time, effort, and money and depending on your business, these will all be different. Perhaps you have lots of time and no money; your investment will look very different than someone who has lots of money and no time.

* What is the expected outcome? This is the "return on investment" (Commonly referred to as "ROI"). In other words, after you've put in a specific amount of time, a specific amount of effort, and a specific amount of money, what are you hoping to get out of it? 

* What is your time horizon? Most businesses want a return that is fairly close on the time horizon. It wouldn't make sense to invest heavily in your business with an expectation of a return 2 or 3 decades in the future. While you should invest for the long term, if you don't ALSO invest for the near term then your business might not be around long enough to invest for the long term.

* What are the contingencies? Not everything works as planned and every good investment should be made with contingencies in mind: What happens if the outcome is worse than expected? What happens if the outcome is better than expected? How much more are you willing to spend to get an increase in return (i.e. if the outcome is worse and you try to fix it)?

2010 is just around the corner and this could be the year of opportunity for your business if you invest wisely.

When I got my first fresh-out-of-college job at a big faceless corporation, they handed me an operations manual for my position. The name "operations manual" sounds boring but it wasn't bad. I read it, applied it, and did well at my job.

When I was promoted through the ranks to become branch manager, I opted for a crappy, failing branch that was about to be shut down. When I got there, one of the first things I did was to put together an operations manual. That was a contributing factor in fixing how the business ran and the renewed branch became a model for others, earning me a promotion to higher heights in the company.

Now, as an entrepreneur, I still believe in the power of the operations manual and I recommend that other business owners put one together, even if they are sole proprietors and don't think they'll hire anyone anytime soon.

Yes, operations manuals offer a number of benefits for business owners, even "one-person shows". 

* They help you to articulate what you do, day-to-day. This is huge and its value should not be underestimated. When you first start out you might focus on a few things and do them well but as you grow you will soon find that new challenges and opportunities pop up and you'll need to navigate them. Additionally, your services and products may become more complex (and at the very least, they will probably become more sophisticated). Creating an operations manual will help you to identify your processes at a granular level and allow you to innovate to create better systems.

* An operations manual can help you to be more profitable. As you periodically review what you do and how you do it, you may find ways to do it better while also identifying those activities that are too costly or time consuming for you to do.

* An operations manual can help you in case you do hire someone. Sure, you might not hire a full-time employee to replace you, but you might start with a part time virtual assistant who can take on some of your work for you. Having an operations manual ready to go means that your virtual assistant can get started right away.

How do you start? It's easy. Get a piece of paper and divide it into columns – the same number of columns as you have unique tasks for the day (i.e. if you do 5 sales calls, some work on Twitter, and one coaching webinar, you have 3 unique tasks and therefore should have 3 columns). When it comes time to do one of the tasks, just write down what you do in the order that you do it. Keep it specific and granular (Step 1. Open Tweetdeck. Step 2. Review columns. Step 3. Find someone to retweet, etc.). After a week or two of this, you'll have created and refined a really useful operations manual that you can review and revise from time to time.

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If you’re in business, there’s a good chance that you will need to negotiate at some point. You might negotiate every day with clients during the sales process, or with vendors in trying to reach a price on raw material. Or, you might negotiate with these parties only occasionally. It might be as infrequent as a negotiation on a delinquent bill.

Whether you’re negotiating daily or occasionally, the key to success in negotiation is knowledge. Before you enter any negotiation, make sure you’ve mastered these areas:

1. Knowledge of the industry. By knowing about the industry you’re working in, you’ll be confident with prices that your competitors are charging. No prospect will be able to blindside you with "I’m going to go to your competitor if you don’t cut your price" if you know that you are the best price. Or, if your competitor does offer a lower price, but you offer better value, you can counter their objection.

2. Knowledge of trends. When you know the trends that are taking place, you’ll have the big picture view. Economic trends are a good example: If you know that the economy is about to improve, and your vendor’s prices will probably go up because more people are buying, you should buy and lock in now, negotiating hard for the lowest price. But there are other trends, too: Consumer attitudes; technological advancements; even political trends can impact your business down the road and thus should impact your negotiating today. Read up on trends by trend experts (Google "futurists" or "trend predictions" to get started).

3. Knowledge of customers. Knowing your customer really, really well will help you in both your customer-side negotiations and your vendor-side negotiations. What are your customers using your product or service for? What will they likely use it for in the future? How are consumer attitudes shifting? What opportunities does this present for you? Create a profile of your customer and modify it as you gain additional information.

4. Knowledge of the other side. This is one of the best ways to get your preferred result from a negotiation. The parties that you’re negotiating with have their own agendas, motivations, and ideal outcomes. When you know these, you can work the negotiation in your own favor. There is an excellent blog post about this on the blog The Customer Collective. In the blog post "Hidden Needs Drives Sales Negotiations", Dr. Jim Anderson outlines some of the important facts you MUST know about the person sitting across the negotiating table from you in order to improve the negotiation outcome for yourself. (Read the blog here).

It’s likely that the most successful negotiations you have will not come from great negotiating skill but rather from the knowledge you’ve collected. When you sit down to negotiate, the more power you have the more effective your negotiation will be.

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Social media – from Facebook to Twitter and everything in between – does have value for businesses if used correctly. Companies need to find the right audience and deliver high value messages to them, but they need to do more: Social media is about engagement, not JUST marketing. Therefore, businesses using social media need to interact with their audience at increasingly deeper levels. In yesterday’s business, it was enough to interact with a customer over the phone when they were ready to buy. Today, businesses need to build relationships with customers that are deeper and longer lasting: In Twitter, this means reading and retweeting what your prospects are saying. In Facebook, this means "liking" their statuses, commenting on photos, sharing links, and more.

But businesses need to drive that engagement further. Twitter and Facebook aren’t a panacea. They are entry points for prospects and customers to meet you. But you can engage them in other ways.

One way is with Slinkset. Slinkset’s claim is that they allow you to create a social news site. But this claim falls far short of the opportunities they provide. On their website they describe several other possibilities: Slinkset gives businesses the opportunity to create a link blog. They give businesses the opportunity to create a site where users can share links back and forth. They let users write ideas that readers can vote up or down. So, you can have people voting on feature requests. In fact, FourHourWorkWeek creator Tim Ferris uses Slinkset to invite readers to vote on topics they want him talking about in his conference and in his blog. And, users can use Slinkset as an internal repository of research.

This is a great way to engage your audience. A Slinkset page is extremely easy to set up (it took me less than 15 seconds) and it’s configurable enough for many uses. In fact, here are a few more uses that Slinkset doesn’t mention:

* You can add feeds so it is like a personal RSS reader
* Add custom sidebar and Google Analytics to track viewership
* Create multiple categories – "clients", "portfolio", "feeds" and use this site as your main site.
* Position your business as an expert by collecting industry content
* Add value to clients by creating individual sites for each of them and gathering information for them
* Use Slinkset as a sort-of "link-sharing intranet" for your business
* Create polls and find out what your audience is really thinking

It’s easy to create a customized site with a unique URL, unique sidebar, multiple categories, voting, comments, and more.

Slinkset is a powerful website that gives users some exciting opportunities to engage their audience and grow their business. Drive readers from Twitter and Facebook to Slinkset to involve them in deeper engagement.

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Michael E. Gerber developed the E-Myth strategy for small business. There are a number of useful ideas and tools that he espouses in his E-Myth books but one of the ones that stuck the most with me is the simple phrase: Work on your business not in your business.

This simple phrase is packed with a lot of meaning, which we will talk about in this article. In this simple phrase, Gerber cleverly identifies the role that a business owner should take in his or her business.

When you work in your business, you are letting your business control you. In a way, it’s almost as if you’re an employee, simply doing what you’re told to do. Your schedule and your customers and your industry and your system of practices and procedures dictate what it is that you do each day.

When you work on your business, you are the master. You control your business. You set your schedule, you control your customers (in a good way), you work alongside (not as a result of) what your industry dictates, you create good practices and procedures. You are in command.

When you work in your business, you’re like a whitewater raft, pushed about according to the whims of other forces. When you work on your business, you’re like an engineering firm that redesigns and redevelops the river itself to flow where you want it to flow.

When you work in your business, it feels different. You’re busy and you don’t feel like you’re in control. It feels like chaos. When you work on your business, you know it. You do feel in control and it feels like controlled chaos. How do you really know whether you’re working in your business or on it? Gerber gave the perfect measuring tool: If you can step away from your business for a period of time (say, a day or a week) and your business continues to run, you’ve been working on your business. However, if your business struggles or folds, you’ve been working in your business.

So, what can you do about it?

One way to work on your business instead of in your business is to create systems. We’ve talked about that here recently.

Another way to work on your business instead of in your business is to hire (either employees or virtual staff) to do some of your work for you. Once you have systems in place, this will be extremely easy to do.

And a third way to work on your business instead of in your business is to focus on vision-casting and positioning. Create the big picture and position your company as a leader in the field. Let other people do the delivery work itself. Or, if your knowledge is invaluable to the delivery of your product or service (i.e., if you are a coach or consultant), employ others to do everything else but deliver your product or service. And, if your knowledge is invaluable to the success of the company, consider creating other products and services that you don’t have to be present to deliver (like information products or pre-recorded webinars).

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If you have employees, a big part of your job is motivating them to work. You might use the carrot and the stick approach (in which you dangle the carrot over their heads to tempt them to move forward)… or you just use the stick approach (in which you beat them senselessly until the do the work)!

Okay, so you don’t literally use a carrot and stick to tempt or the "beat-them-with-the-stick approach" for harsher motivation, but you do need to motivate them and plenty of motivation falls into those categories.

Let’s look at two jobs I held during high school as great illustrations of these two types of motivations in action:

The first job was at a gas station. The owner would berate his employees by cursing at them and asking, "are you stupid?". He made us beg for our paycheck. He took money away whenever he felt that we weren’t working the way we should be. I realize now he broke several labor laws (although at the time I didn’t know any better and just accepted it).

The second job I had was at a small franchise fast food restaurant. (Smaller than McDonalds). The owner encouraged us to have fun and didn’t mind if we sat down on the job as long as everything got done. He rewarded us a with performance bonuses. He held a contest (which I won: I got to see Robert Plant and Jimmy Page in concert!). He encouraged employees to connect after hours.

The difference is like night and day. And if I knew then what I know now, I’d have left that first job in a heartbeat. It’s not a surprise that the gas station owner churned through employees while the restaurant owner had loyal employees.

And my two part-time high school experiences illustrate (perhaps hyperbolically) the real world. We have those bosses that tempt us to succeed and we have those bosses that seem to beat us mercilessly if we fail.

You might have employees now or you might be thinking about hiring some soon. Regardless, now is the perfect time for you to think about employee motivation and develop personal policies and best practices to create a great working environment:

* Your employees earned their pay. Don’t make them work extra hard to get that money.
* Your employees don’t always feel bought into the company so they don’t always work as hard as they could. But if you pay them for performance, they could be more likely to feel "bought in" and thus will work harder for you.
* Your employees spend at least one-third of their days at your workplace. So make sure that it is a place that is enjoyable to be at, that feels like a community. Care about your employees. You don’t have to get really personal to still show them that they are important to you.

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Small business owners have a lot to do and the relentless forward march of time can be stressful. It’s hard to get everything done that you’d like to get done. (Heck, it’s hard to get everything done that you need to get done). You schedule, you prioritize, you delegate, but it still is an overwhelming flood of work.

What you need is focus. Stop multitasking. There is a lot of pressure to multitask: To try to cover several projects at once. And, although this might work for some things, it doesn’t work as often as we’d like to think it works. Simply put, we’re not as good as we think we are.

When we multitask, we end up doing an inferior job on all of our projects, and potentially taking longer to do them. When we focus on one thing at a time, we can actually do a better job in a shorter time. To give a simple example: If you have 4 projects and you try to multitask them, you might end up taking 2 to 2 and a half hours to complete the work and each project will feel choppy and inferior. However, if you focus on each one individually, you can do a single project in only 20 to 25 minutes (for a total time of 1 hour and 20 minutes to 1 hour and 40 minutes) and end up with 4 well-done, cohesive projects at the end.

Part of the problem is that we can’t switch as easily from one thing to another. It takes a great amount of mental energy to switch. If you’re a consultant and you’re working on a business plan for a client and at the same time you’re coaching a client on how to get the most out of their staff, you’re demanding too much of yourself at once.

Instead, you can get more done in less time and complete it to a greater level of excellence when you focus on one thing at a time.

Here are some tips to help you do that:

* Batch similar projects together. Even if they are to different clients, if they are similar, you’ll do them faster and more effectively when you do them at the same time.

* Stop watching your email. Sometimes, having an auto-notification of email can feel convenient because it allows you to respond to people right away. But it is a big factor in us switching from one thing to another.

* If you need a period of concentration to finish a project, switch the phone to voicemail.

* If you’re prone to get off onto rabbit trails about stuff, or if you’re the kind of person who will instantly hit the web if a thought suddenly jumps into your mind (even if it isn’t related to the topic at hand), keep a piece of paper on hand to list any thoughts or ideas you have. Rather than pursuing them, write them down. Then later, when you have a moment, you can get back to them but they won’t pull your attention away from your work.

* Make sure you have eaten, drank plenty of water, are in relatively good health, and get plenty of rest. Busy entrepreneurs can be hard on their own bodies and not eating right or not getting adequate rest can make it harder for you to focus.

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Some days, when you look at your schedule, you probably think that an extra pair of hands would be helpful. Unless you’re a mad scientist working in your mountaintop laboratory, it’s not likely that you’ll be able to attach an extra pair of hands and arms from your shoulders any time soon. [Insert mad-scientist-style cackling laughter here]. You need another set of hands to help you get more done, and you’ll need a person to go with them.

• No additional phone line
• No computer or printer
• No desk or office supplies
• No additional light/power/heat charges
• No interviews and resumes
• No sick-day replacements

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Business owners work towards growing their companies. This might include any number of factors:

• Growing marketshare
• Growing revenue
• Growing the customer base
• Growing profitability
• Growing the product line
• Growing reputation
• … and other factors.

But at some point, business owners are likely to hit a wall when they discover that they cannot continue to grow in the way that they were growing. For example: Maybe they’ve acquired as many customers as they can realistically serve on their own. Or maybe they have hit some kind of invisible limit in their revenue and they just don’t know how to make more money without working longer hours. Or maybe they have extended their product line as broadly as possible and don’t want to extend it any more for fear of having too much on their plate. No matter what metric you’re using to chart growth, you seem to be hitting a wall and you can’t break through.

If this happens to you, what should you do?

The short answer is: This is a clear sign you need to think about hiring someone else. If you’re running a business on your own, there can be a big question mark around when to add someone else to your team and this is the time when you need to think about doing that.

But there’s a long answer, too. It might be time to re-think how you want to grow and it might be time to decide what your vision is for your business. If you want to grow in some ways, hiring specific staff will bring you there. If you want to grow in other ways, then it’s time to think about other types of product lines. Here is a fictional case study with different endings to illustrate:

Mary runs a small e-commerce site selling hand-painted decorations. Her website has been pulling in good traffic and she has found some great sources to get customers. Now, she spends some of her day doing administrative work, some of her day marketing, and most of her day is spent creating these hand-painted decorations. Mary has hit the proverbial wall, mentioned above, and is now thinking about what’s next for her business.

OPTION 1. Mary decides that she likes the painting part of her business and wants to continue doing that, but she wants to get rid of the rest. So, she hires a virtual assistant to take care of the administrative work, some of the marketing, and some of the customer management. This frees her up to hand-paint more decorations.

OPTION 2. Mary decides that the painting part is enjoyable but she ultimately wants a bigger business. So, she hires a virtual assistant to take care of the administrative work, and she hires someone who she can train to take care of the hand-painting. Then, in the short term, she does some hand-painting of the decorations but she starts to focus on the marketing side of her work. She gives most of the hand-painting to the painter (and does a bit herself to handle the overflow with an eventual eye toward hiring a second painter).

OPTION 3. Mary likes the money! She enjoys what she does, of course, but would enjoy retiring early even more! So, she focuses on building profitability. She revisits her suppliers to see if she can negotiate lower prices for bulk orders. She examines her systems and processes to make herself more efficient. She improves service to enhance customer loyalty. She raises her prices to increase revenue. She looks to broaden her offering to include some higher-profit items like an ebook on how to decorate with all hangings or a paid subscription to a webinar series on how to start a hand-painted decoration business.

There are other options, of course, but these three nicely illustrate what is next for Mary.

For Mary, and for you, it starts with asking yourself what you truly want with your business. Maybe you want to grow but you don’t want to have someone else doing to revenue-generating work that you love to do. That’s okay. As soon as you know that, you can figure out what the next step is to take.

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