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How Long Is Your Business Plan?

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About.com: One of the many questions about business planning I receive is how long is a typical plan? The length of a typical business plan can greatly vary from 10 pages to a 100-page document. It depends on the intended use of the plan and its audience. An internal business plan for your company will exclude areas such as management team experience and be heavier on the implementation side. A basic plan for the banks will usually run 20or more pages. The executive summary shouldn’t exceed 3 pages.
Business Plan Length? [About.com]

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Sales Training on a Shoestring

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In a sales economy where up to 62% of sales people don’t go for the close, how is a sales person supposed to succeed? First, they need to use a sales process that helps them manage the steps in a sales cycle in the right order. Second, they need to learn, or re-learn, basic selling skills. These skills include how to cold call, qualify prospects, ask the right questions, listen, handle objections, negotiate, close and retain customers.
The problem lies with finding the time to learn these skills, or at least get a refresher course in skills that were learned long ago and since forgotten. PEAK Sales Consulting now offers inexpensive, on-line sales training that helps new and experienced sales professionals learn basic skills such as cold calling, listening skills, qualifying, value-added selling, handling objections, negotiating, closing, and more.
Called “Sales Snippets”, which range from 10 to 20 minutes each, these on-line training modules are Internet-based sessions that allow a sales person to get quick, concise training sessions on various selling skills. All ten Sales Snippets cost only $29.95.

“Our Sales Snippets are derived and summarized from our full sales training courses. They are brief training sessions for both new sales people for getting up to speed on basic selling skills as well as veteran sales reps to review sales techniques that have long been forgotten and to learn new skills required in today’s economy,” said Russ Lombardo, President/Founder of PEAK Sales Consulting, LLC and instructor on the Sales Snippets programs.

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HitTail

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Small Business Trends: The HitTail widget shows the keywords that searchers are using to arrive at this site, updated in real time. It demonstrates part of what the HitTail service does.
Using the HitTail service, you can (1) track the keywords that people are using to come to your site or blog, (2) extract the keywords that matter most into a handy list, and (3) use those keywords in future articles or blog posts that you write.
The idea behind HitTail is to increase the organic (non-paid) search traffic to your site, by revealing the keywords that visitors are using to find your site so that you can build on those to attract even more traffic.
HitTail Helps You Build Web Traffic Without Advertising [Small Business Trends]

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Business Crystal Ball

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Inc.com: If only you had a crystal ball for business.
Gilbert Systems seeks to provide just that — with a new product that helps business owners anticipate their customers’ spending habits in order to maximize sales.
Proclivity is a consumer predictive engine technology that is able to analyze a customer’s online activity and identify their interest in certain types of merchandise. The program aggregates the data collected and then generates probabilities for the number of customers likely to buy a certain product, during what time period, and at what price point.
Online businesses can then use the results from Proclivity to design their marketing campaigns around specific consumer interests. For example, if an online clothing retailer wants to launch a campaign around jeans, Proclivity will quickly generate a list of customers based on the analyzed data that predicts how many customers would buy jeans and how much money the company would make in a given amount of time. The company can then decide how much to invest in certain campaigns.
Ever Wish You Could Read Your Customers’ Minds? [Inc.com]

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YoungEntrepreneur.com

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There are many business blogs dedicated to small business and entrepreneurship on the Internet today. The bloggers put in a lot of effort on their blogs, sharing helpful small business content and resources for the many aspiring entrepreneurs out there. The road to your own start-up is full of uncertainties and unknowns, and as such it’s always great to learn from the entrepreneurs who share their guidance with their useful advice and comments on their business blogs. Likewise, here at GetEntrepreneurial.com we’re always learning from and aspiring to reach the same levels as entrepreneurs like Anita Campbell, Yaro Starak, Adnan, and many others.
Evan Carmichael is no exception. His YoungEntrepreneur.com blog is another fantastic resource for all of us young, aspiring entrepreneurs around the world. Filled with entrepreneurial advice, business growth strategies, startup experience and marketing tips, YoungEntrepreneur.com is an useful resource which we watch very carefully on our blogroll. We particularly like the entrepreneurial advice which he shares based on his own experience, such as delegating tasks in your startup:

If you want to build a company of any substantial size you need to learn how to delegate. It can be a difficult process for many entrepreneurs because it means they are giving up some degree of control but you can only do all the jobs in the business for so long. Here is my advice on how you can successfully delegate some of your work.

There are many other interesting insights and useful articles on the YoungEntrepreneur.com blog, and it’ll continue to be a great resource for us to depend on.