Shahriah Hossain’s start-up advice: get in the zone before your sales calls

Thanks so much to Shahiar Hossain of Catalyst for bringing his business mentoring expertise to our enterprise club this week. It was a lively and participatory session with plenty of good advice tailored to the start-ups that attended.

Some tips from Shahriah:

• You are on your own as a start-up and so you need to do what you can to prepare yourself and give yourself energy before you make your sales calls – eg pumped up and in the zone
• You can’t avoid sales calls (phone or in person)- aim for an absolute minimum of 1 a day.  Leaving out weekends perhaps and holidays that should be over 200 calls and with a 10% success rate, that’s 20 clients.  If you don’t make those calls, someone else will!
• Keep an active diary with reminders to get back to clients and potential clients.  (He uses Outlook and diarises all  his reminders)
• Keep a database of all your contacts – an excel sheet or even a note pad will do but you must keep a note of all your contacts.
• For any partnership or piece of work, you absolutely must have an agreement, and it’s best to get legal and financial advice.
• You need to be on Linked In – it’s an important way to get business
• You must have a website – doesn’t matter how basic.

We are hoping to keep in touch with Shahriar and work out how we can work together. In the meantime for those that want a basic WordPress website, myself and others can help you with this in 2 hours through the Timebank. 🙂