Curriculum Overview
The Business Accelerator Program delivers free coaching to help small business owners build their sales volumes, manage their risk, and improve their business acumen. The curriculum will be delivered via a series of symposiums and webinars with accompanying exercises and contests. There is also an online coaching forum where participants can post questions to the coaches to receive one-on-one feedback. Based on our coaches' years of experience working with small business owners, the program's core curriculum spans three tracks:
Sales
- Learning to be your best salesperson
- Rethinking selling, sales as a service
- Establishing sales activities and tracking your progress
- Generating leads with the maximum return
- Understanding your personality style for more effective selling
- Establishing rapport by understanding yourself and your clients
- Building relationships for the long-term
- Overcoming objections by understanding yourself
- Hiring great sales people
- How to get referrals that lead to business
- Managing your contacts and sales activity effectively
Marketing
- Finding time for marketing
- Analyzing your current situation (SWOT)
- Knowing where your competitors stand
- Understanding your customers' needs and the benefits you offer
- Finding success through narrow targeting
- Building your identity: positioning your business among your competition
- Refining your elevator pitch (communicating your identity in 30 seconds or less)
- Acquiring new customers on a small budget
- Building your marketing plan
- Using Facebook, LinkedIn, & Twitter to generate business
- Discovering the elements of an effective brochure
- Integrating e-newsletters into your marketing plan
- Leveraging mobile marketing in today's cellular world
- Finding a direct mail recipe that works for your business
- Using the media to generate leads
- Making your website visible in Google
Finance and Growth
- Surviving a tough economy—best practices
- Growing your business—best practices
- Knowing your scorecard, understanding your financial statements
- Analyzing profit and loss to better plan for the future
- Looking at profit at the customer level
- Managing cash flow during the rough times
- Obtaining financing
- Certifying your business
- Collecting from your clients
- Making pricing decisions
Plus HR and Risk Management
- Managing risk and controlling loss in your business
- Exploring various business insurance options
- Managing your most important asset, your people
- Deciding between employees versus independent contractors
- Knowing employment laws that affect a small business
- Laying or firing staff without legal or business repercussions
- Handling the difficult employee
