How to Transform Your Fear of Failure

Portrait of a smiling businessman talking on the phone at street

Entrepreneurs often struggle when they start doing cold calls. They hate calling others to drum up business and they’re not good at it, either. Their approach is too timid and they give up too soon when they encounter resistance. They don’t manage objections well, so they don’t bring home the bacon.

Fear Of Failure

One of the guys on our team had problems with cold calling. This seemed strange because he was an audacious, bold and outgoing person. But tell him to sell on the phone and he turned into a frightened little chicken.

The cause was obvious: fear of failure. He was scared of rejection. We both knew it. He also rationally understood that this fear did not serve a positive purpose, but he was still stuck in it.

Turning Fears Into Reality

But how could we get him unstuck? How could we shake him up and change this state? I decided to challenge him with a new task: to fail with every call. For the rest of the day, I told him he should call people and make them hang up on him. His mission was to fail miserably.

To make it more fun, I told him to fail in a different way with each call. “Start by speaking painfully slow and unenthusiastic,” I suggested.

Our little coaching conversation turned into the center of attention in the office. Everyone on our team was looking at him when he made the first call. His discomfort was obvious. But he played along. He spoke each word painfully, slowly, with excruciatingly long silences and pauses. It was painful to hear. Everyone in the office had to tap into the core of our self control not to burst out laughing. But there was no holding back once the other person hung up on him. The whole office was going crazy, including him.

The team came up with a new challenge for the second call: stuttering. And so he did; he stuttered his way through half a conversation. After 10 of these calls the atmosphere in the whole room had totally changed.

Changing Your State

I looked him in the eyes and said: ”Now go get’em. Close deals. Take everything you’ve got and make it happen. Have fun!” And suddenly he was a different person. A total transformation of energy: he became fearless and unstoppable, a relentless machine.

But what exactly caused this transformation? It wasn’t a new insight; he already knew that it was just fear holding him back. But he had now transferred that insight from a logical, rational level into an instinctive insight. He had emotionally internalized what he already knew mentally by making failure real. And that led to the breakthrough in his behavior.

Use These Techniques If You Feel Anxious About Cold Calling

  1. Address the issue and verbalize it.
  2. Instead of trying to avoid failure, aim for failure.
  3. Be creative about different ways to successfully achieve failure.
  4. Have fun and be silly. It will unlock the secret vault of sales power deep inside of you.
  5. Now that you have experienced what failure feels like, realize there is nothing to be afraid of.
  6. Now crush it and see how you can perform once you aim for success.

How have you lost your fear of failure in the past? Please share your stories and experiences so we can all let go of our fears and live more adventurous and successful lives.

A version of this article was originally published on LinkedIn.

Steli Efti is the Co-Founder / CEO of Close.io and an advisor to several startups and entrepreneurs.

The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) is an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, YEC recently launched StartupCollective, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses.

Why Conversions Matter More Than Traffic

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At the end of the day, website traffic is primarily a vanity metric. While I suppose you could say that higher traffic numbers are indicative of successful awareness-building initiatives and external marketing campaigns, it seems that the biggest benefit of measuring traffic metrics comes from establishing bragging rights amongst your peers.

“I just hit 50,000 uniques per month,” you might say. Or, “Last month, my site’s traffic increased by 25 percent!” That’s all well and good, but what I really want to know about are your conversion numbers.

To put things in perspective, I’d much rather have a website that gets 100 visitors per month and converts 15 percent of them into paying customers than a site that gets 100,000 uniques and only averages a 0.01 percent conversion rate. If I’m selling a product that retails for $200, that first scenario nets me $3,000 a month in sales. The second example gives me just $2,000 per month for my efforts.

If you have to pick one thing to focus on when it comes to your website’s performance, make it your conversion rate — not your visitor counts.  Here’s how to put a proper conversion rate optimization plan into place:

Identify Your Conversion Paths

Tracking conversions doesn’t necessarily mean tracking sales. Depending on your business’s structure and customer acquisition processes, “conversions” could include any of the following completed actions and more:

  • Purchasing a product
  • Signing up for a free trial
  • Requesting more information
  • Viewing a video
  • Downloading an ebook
  • Completing a lead generation form
  • Sharing your content on a social media website
  • Printing a coupon
  • Opting in to your email newsletter

It’s also likely that your website will have to measure more than one potential conversion action. If you can’t turn a visitor into a paying customer right away, for example, it’s probably still worth your time to pursue a secondary conversion option. Something like getting a future buyer to download a coupon.

It’s even possible that your website will offer all of the conversion options above. But for the purposes of launching a conversion rate optimization (CRO) program, focus on no more than 2-3 actions that have the biggest impact on your business’s bottom line.

Once you have these conversion actions identified, map out every step that a site visitor must take in order to complete the conversion process. You can break this down in terms of “entry,” “action” and “exit.”

For example, suppose your action is downloading a free ebook from a specific landing page on your site. To convert, visitors will need to enter your landing page from another page on your site that contains a link or call to action referring to the page, take theaction of downloading the book and then exit the action by landing on a “Thank You” page (preferably one that encourages them to share links to the book on their favorite social sites). Knowing each step in your conversion path will be important for installing analytics and tracking tools.

Implement Conversion Rate Tracking Tools

Now that you know what you want your visitors to do, you need to install a tracking tool that will tell you whether or not they’re doing it. One great tool for tracking many different types of conversions is Google Analytics, which offers Analytics Goals and Funnels to measure things like ebook downloads.

Once the visitor has finished their transaction, set up a “URL Destination” goal type to trigger whenever a visitor lands on the “thank-you.html” page, indicating that the download is complete. Google Analytics will assign a value of $25 to each completed conversion and track visitor movements throughout the site as they lead up to the conversion.

Note that, for the purposes of funnel visualization, page views can occur nonsequentially and still trigger a funnel match: If, for example, a visitor went to the “Services” page before the “About” page. Each individual step isn’t required to make it count as a conversion. In this case, if a visitor goes directly from “About” to the ebook landing page.

As this Goal gathers data, you can use the funnel visualization report to determine whether visitors are moving smoothly through the conversion path or if they’re falling out and the process needs to be improved.

This specific process can be used for most of the conversion actions listed above, though a full description of the setup process for each is beyond the scope of this article. Rest assured that if Google Analytics doesn’t meet your conversion path tracking needs, there are plenty of other tools out there that will. FoxMetrics and KISSMetrics, for example, are two programs that will work well if your goal monitoring needs are more complex.

Set Conversion Goals

Finally, keep in mind that your ultimate goal isn’t conversion rate tracking — it’s conversion rate optimization! You don’t just want to monitor whether or not your visitors are converting. You want to actually increase the total number of conversions.

Let’s say that the Google Analytics data captured indicates that roughly 5 percent of your overall site visitors are completing your desired ebook download action. Knowing that, you might make it your goal to increase this percentage two-fold. To get to that 10 percent conversion rate, you could try A/B split testing different variables on your ebook landing page, investing in new, more targeted traffic streams or making your calls-to-action more apparent throughout your site.

As time goes on, you’ll want to revisit both the goals you’ve set for yourself and how you’ve adjusted your course as needed. With regular improvements and a careful tracking, you’ll be able to do much more for your website’s performance than increase the number of visitors alone.

Sujan Patel has championed internet marketing and entrepreneurship for over a decade. His experience, ideas and strategies have helped 100s companies build and strengthen their businesses online. Sujan is the VP of Marketing at thisCLICKS, the makers ofWhen I Work — an employee scheduling software solution for small businesses. 

The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) is an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, YEC recently launched StartupCollective, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses.

10 Best Lead Generating Tools

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Question: What’s the most successful giveaway — eBooks, webinars, coupons or vouchers, etc. — you’ve used to drive lead generation, ever?

Full-Sized eBooks

“eBooks deliver a ton of value. The fact that a consumer is getting an entire book for free is perceived to have a LOT of value. For most people, it’s always worth taking the time to fill out a few lines on an opt-in form.”

Richard Lorenzen, Fifth Avenue Brands

A Customized Training Quiz

“I rolled out a fully customized training based on a quiz for my email opt-in early in 2012, and it has been really well-received. The idea is that you can get a little extra information about your prospects, even as you are delivering a ton of value to them. You can see my example at http://Websitecheckuptool.com.”

Nathalie Lussier, Nathalie Lussier Media Inc.

Gift Cards

“Webinars and eBooks are attractive, but most potential customers are more motivated by cold, hard cash. But that’s not to say that your giveaways need to be expensive. Keep it at $5 and you’ll still get solid responses.”

Andrew Schrage, Money Crashers Personal Finance

Presentations on SlideShare

“Post a valuable presentation to SlideShare (http://www.slideshare.net). Doing so will help your SEO, establish you in the industry, tease your business, tap into the existing SlideShare network and optimize your presentation for social media. You’ll be surprised by the number of views you get soon after posting. Secret tip: Load your presentation up with an SEO-rich script and use images over the top as the slides.”

Benjamin Leis, Sweat EquiTees

An Ultimate Industry Guide

“A while back, we created an “Ultimate Guide” eBook for our industry. Coupons and vouchers are good, but if you really want people to purchase your product or service, give them your expertise. eBooks offer great value to the clients and, in turn, make them more likely to view you as the authority in your industry.”

Nick Friedman, College Hunks Hauling Junk

One Product Each Day

“In March 2013, we created the “Mod-a-Day Giveaway.” The idea was to give away a different product each day for a month. By committing to doing this daily, we created a reason for people to continue to engage. Of course, we’re having other conversations on social media, too, which allows these prospects to learn more about what we stand for. Stand by your own product and offer that for leads!”

Aaron Schwartz, Modify Watches

The Right eBook

“I have four eBooks that I wrote as a set several years ago that are still driving traffic to my website on a regular basis, as well as converting traffic to leads — despite having no gateway (such as a requirement to subscribe to a newsletter for access). These aren’t any old eBooks, though: They were written to specifically address the four questions I get most often from prospects.”

Thursday Bram, Hyper Modern Consulting

Discount Coupons

“Discount coupons are the clear winner for our e-commerce business to drive leads/sales. Once we added a coupon sign-up icon on our website, sales revenue increased by 30 percent. When the online shopper perceives he is getting a good deal in the form of a discount, he is far more likely to convert to a sale. Make sure you set an expiration date to create a sense of urgency to purchase. “

Anthony Saladino, Kitchen Cabinet Kings

A Hardbound Book

“I wrote a book, and we offer delivery to your door for free! It really helps us stand out and has done a great job with lead gen. “60 Seconds: How to Tell Your Company’s Story and the Brain Science to Make It Stick” has useful info for people to make their own videos, hire and work with our competitors or work with us to produce a great video. “

Andrew Angus, Switch Video

The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) is an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, YEC recently launched StartupCollective, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses.

12 Must Have Tools for Managing Leads & Contacts

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6165Question: What do you use to share leads and contacts seamlessly among virtual team members?

WORKetc

“I use an SaaS software product entitled WORKetc. This software is customizable so all team members, or only a select portion of your staff, can have access to leads.”

Andrew Schrage, Money Crashers Personal Finance

rsz_incontentad2Act!

“I love Act!; it stands the test of time. It is a very easy interface; the search functions are great, and the ability to convert the customer data to Excel to do direct mail or constant contact campaigns is very attractive. Most of our customer data is from organizations looking to book our CEO clients for events, and Act! allows us to keep organizations updated on our clients and activities.”

Raoul Davis, Ascendant Group

Streak

“We live in our email inboxes at work, so it makes sense to have a CRM system that seamlessly integrates with our email. Since we use Google Apps for Business on the Poshly team and Gmail is our preferred email provider, Streak is a phenomenal resource for us to share leads and contacts with ease among all of our virtual team members. Our correspondence and contacts are in one place. “

Doreen Bloch, Poshly Inc.

Salesforce.com

Salesforce.com seems like one of the “big guys” now, but it’s still a nimble tool that allows companies large and small to organize leads. The product forces your team to be disciplined in tracking, and following up with, sales opportunities. We now have a much clearer idea of the sales funnel, and we don’t let opportunities fall through the cracks, which is pretty critical to any startup!”

Aaron Schwartz, Modify Watches

Highrise

“We use the 37signals software program called Highrise. It’s great because everyone on our team can collaborate from wherever we are. We share a database of contacts and can constantly see an up-to-date snapshot of each team member’s outreach, share notes, and assign tasks. The mobile app is especially helpful for on-the-go access. It has helped streamline our CRM efforts in a big way.”

Brittany Hodak, ZinePak

Zoho

Zoho is a fully customizable CRM solution that allows our team to organize and track leads to convert them into clients. The full functionality of Zoho allows our team to effectively optimize sales through customized reports on the success of leads by source, industry and other indicators. Best of all, it’s free for up to three users, and you can integrate/sync it with Outlook. “

Fehzan Ali, Adscend Media LLC

Close.io

Close is a new tool that makes it very easy for our sales and accounts teams to seamlessly share info. The beauty of Close.io is they’ve integrated literally every key feature you can think of to make sure other team members know exactly what’s happened with any given contact. Close.io has been a complete game changer for us, and it has increased our efficiency substantially. “

Sunil Rajaraman, Scripted.com

Google Docs

“It’s old school but it works. We don’t claim to have a fancy CRM, and I expect a salesperson to call me after this article gets published, but we’re perfectly happy sharing an Excel spreadsheet and taking copious notes. We can also download segmented email lists from Mailchimp and import customer data from PayPal, Google Checkout, and Eventbrite. All the information is there for us. “

Matt Wilson, Under30Experiences

ConnectWise

ConnectWise is a customizable system that allows us to manage all of our resources in one location, facilitate collaboration, and ensure streamlined operations. It serves as a database for sales leads, opportunities, and contacts and is an efficient tool to track status and time on tickets and projects. Most recently we are integrating ConnectWise into a new quoting system for seamless end-to-end workflow. “

Dave Smith, TekScape

Salesforce and MailChimp

“We use MailChimp for all our email campaigns directed at new community members, and we use Salesforce as a CRM for potential ad sponsors. Both solutions work well with our virtual team members.”

Patrick Curtis, WallStreetOasis.com

Dropbox

“I’m a big fan of Dropbox. Being able to access documents, spreadsheets, contacts and more without having to email back and forth has made our business more efficient. We share certain folders in Dropbox. The documents and files within the shared folder are updated whenever a user makes changes to the original. Also, access to the folders is easy to obtain and can even be done off Dropbox’s mobile app.”

George Mavromaras, Mavro Inc. | Praetor Global LLC.

Ruby on Rails

“We’ve created a built-from-scratch CRM in Ruby on Rails over the last five years that allows us to seamlessly allocate leads among virtual employees. We have 35 full-time and 35 part-time employees and 1,800 tutors — all operating from home. Building a system for our own very specific needs was far more expensive, but has been far more powerful than any CRM we’ve ever tested, such as Salesforce.com. “

Chuck Cohn, Varsity Tutor

5 Long-Term Sales Killers to Avoid in Your Startup

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We’ve all been there. Rather than spend the extra two hours on a Friday night to log your sales data for the week, you head home for some much-needed relaxation. It’s not going to affect your startup that much…right?

Maybe it will. Maybe it won’t. But make no mistake: This line of thinking can catch up with you — quickly.

Starting and building a business demands all your time and energy. Sometimes, there just aren’t enough hours in the day to accomplish everything on your agenda, which is why everyone involved in launching your startup needs to wear several hats.

Sure, it can be exhausting, and you might be tempted to cut corners on sales to ease the burden on you and your team. But relying on shortcuts or postponing sales goals can have crippling effects on the long-term growth of your business.

Instead of taking an easier route, work to avoid these common startup pitfalls:

 1. Outdated Sales Practices

Social media and marketing automation tools are no longer luxuries — even for the most local of local businesses. It’s essential to keep up with current sales methods and understand how technology can affect these practices.

Many CEOs don’t adopt an inbound-focused “sales 2.0” methodology quickly enough, and they almost immediately fall behind as competitors benefit from these rapidly expanding new channels.

As social networking and marketing automation continue to develop, non-interruptive marketing and sales practices will become the norm. Leaders who don’t take a “sales 2.0” approach will find themselves with inefficient processes that likely won’t deliver a strong ROI, and competitors that take advantage of these sales channels and marketing tools will leave these lagging companies in the dust.

 2. Inefficient Databases

Successful sales practices are based on accurate information. Many CEOs simply don’t understand how valuable a fresh and enhanced database is to the process.

For example, they might continue to dump money into an outbound dialing resource without realizing that the logged information is bad or outdated. If 50 percent of your database information is obsolete, then 50 percent of your calls aren’t connecting.

How can any company achieve a positive ROI by using a half-populated database with dead-end leads? Without budgeting for an updated database at regular intervals, you’re likely losing sales and opportunities to engage your current customers.

 3. Limited Training

In most startups, managers must oversee daily operations and contact efforts, and sales teams are often left with no supervision. Soon, the quality and quantity of opportunities diminish, and growth grinds to a halt.

Even if initial employee training is spectacular, every salesperson can benefit from regular, continuous training. Learning new sales techniques (and developing existing ones) is an ongoing process, and your sales team must stay relevant with new strategies and technology to sell effectively.

 4. Lackluster Follow-Ups

Unfortunately, many leaders also don’t understand the value of following up with clients on a regular basis. Nurturing a customer relationship requires steady contact.

Set follow-up appointments after each meeting to build trust and maintain contact. This can also help expand your service. What new strategies, products, or technology can you offer? Is all your contact information current and applicable? Include a summary of your previous communication and an agenda for the upcoming meeting. These seemingly small details can make every follow-up more effective.

 5. Poor Data Management

Another common shortcut that can kill a business is disorganized data management. CEOs who don’t make their team update opportunities and make notes in the CRM are left with a slew of context-free metrics, none of which will benefit your bottom line.

Making reliable predictions becomes impossible when accurate record-keeping starts to slide.

Managers should not just assume databases are being updated; they should spot-check that sales reps are making notes on a regular basis. This is another pertinent detail that can get overlooked when managers are overloaded.

 Startup Sales Strategies for Long-Term Success

The common problems noted above reflect the time, budgetary, and personnel constraints most startups face. The following strategies can help alleviate these issues from the outset:

Create a consistent written plan of action, and develop timely checklists based on that plan.

  • Envision and record how your short-term goals (daily, weekly, quarterly) support your long-term growth. Defined goals posted in your workspace help your employees see how the day’s tasks fit into the big picture.
  •  Review your business practices monthly or quarterly to analyze areas that need improvement. Communicate these areas to your entire team, and ask for suggestions on appropriate strategies.
  •  Maintain your focus. This sounds easy, but if you had a rough quarter and start scrambling to “diversify” to seek immediate revenue, you are sacrificing your vision and continuity.

Startups, by nature, are often stretched thin on personnel and resources, but cutting corners on the sales side weakens your daily operations, client relationships, and future opportunities.

While you might find yourself able to get by with little organization or strategy, these short-term savings can be detrimental to your future success.

John McLellan John McLellan is the Chief Revenue Officer of EBQuickstart, the ultimate source for outsourced sales solutions. EBQ is a sales and marketing firm that helps companies outsource lead generation, sales, marketing, data, and customer service. John can be reached on Twitter or directly at john.mclellan@ebquickstart.com.

 

 

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Build a Successful Sales Process in 7 Steps

At ElasticSales, we’ve had the privilege of working with dozens of early-stage startups, helping them establish their sales processes. Some ask us to build their process from the ground up. Many come to us solely looking for guidance as they develop their own sales processes and teams. In both cases, the best campaigns are those in which the founders are actively involved with developing the process, or have conducted their startup’s early sales themselves.

For tech entrepreneurs without sales experience, here’s how you build a sales process for your startup from the ground up.

how to boost sales

Begin Customer Outreach as Early as Possible

The best thing you can do to develop your sales process is to get out there as early as possible. That Lean Startup mentality works just as well in sales as it is for development. Spend a week, even a few days, picking up the phone and cold-calling your customers. During these early calls you’ll get a sense of their challenges, objections you might face, and direct customer feedback about your product. You might even realize a key aspect of your product that needs to be tweaked before you push hard into the market.

As a founder, YOU absolutely need to do this before handing it off to someone else. Conducting preliminary outreach to your customers will help you better understand them, their needs and your market place. You can then refine your product as you develop your sales process.

Do a Full Walk-Through

Walk through simulated conversations. Begin by finding the lead and travel through the complete sales process. End by handing the customer off to your support team. Do this with colleagues who understand your space, then try your pitch out on someone who doesn’t. (Outsiders quickly notice problems and inefficiencies.) These scenarios not only give you great practice before implementing your process, they’ll help you identify gaps in it. Say on your first call you get a customer’s credit card — then what? How do you process the payment? Who do they speak to next? Mock calls are a great way to practice your pitch and refine the logistics of a sale.

Establish Qualifying Criteria

Qualifying criteria are a list of traits that make someone a good fit (qualified) to buy your product. It sounds easy enough, but lots of young companies have no idea what they need to know about a customer to make a sale.

So how do you develop qualifying criteria and track them?

Common criteria for leads are:

  • Does your product solve their pain point?
  • Does your product save them money/cost?
  • Does your product save them time?
  • Is your product in their budget?
  • Are they using a competitor’s product and paying for it?
  • How fast can they make a buying decision?

It’s best to develop just five criteria based on what you THINK you need to know about a buyer, and then reach out to a subset of customers. Identify those five criteria in the customers, and then see if the criteria need to be expanded, or even cut down, to identify whether they would be a good fit.

DO NOT get into the habit of marking every lead qualified because “you had a nice conversation.” Remember, a qualified deal is very different than an active opportunity. An active opportunity is a qualified lead with a value attached to it. This means that you have communicated the cost of the product/service to the prospect, they understand it, and have expressed that it is in within their budget.

Establish a Sales Script

A good call script is a method for you to guide a customer through your sales process from start to finish, while showing them the value of your product/service.

A call script typically has the following sections:

• Introduction
• Qualifying Questions
• Q&A About Features, Pricing and Next Steps
• Asking for the Close
• Managing Customer Objections
• Establishing Next Steps

Developing a script is an iterative process, but it begins with research. Know your product and how it fits into the market, and convey that as simply as possible to the customer. Your script needs to incorporate your qualifying questions (so you know they’re a good fit), common pain points, and benefits around which to position your solution.

Establish a Conversion Funnel

A conversion funnel should be built with a “reverse” approach. Establish a range of deals you’d like closed over the course of a week or even a month. Then ask yourself how many active opportunities/deals you need to qualify in order to achieve that goal. This is called a conversion rate.

But how many scheduled calls or demos do you need to perform each week to in order achieve the desired amount of qualified opportunities? Using the conversion rates you’ve estimated (be conservative), determine how many calls/emails, or leads generated, you need each week in order to schedule that target amount of calls.

The amount of calls or emails you need to send each week is pretty large – this is the top of the funnel. In turn, this might mean that your “closed deals” goal might be too large. Start with a number you believe to be attainable but aggressive. Work through the entire process and reach the goals you set out at the beginning of the week.

Once you’ve done that, start increasing your goal by 10 percent each month. You need to have 10 percent month-over-month growth to really have a healthy funnel as a startup.

Optimize Implementation

Sales doesn’t end with the close. As a sales person, you need to make sure that the customer is successfully integrated. This means a clean handoff to your support team. As a founder, you’ll quickly find out ways to improve your process and ensure that your customers stick around. This is also crucial in order to secure customer references — integral in bringing in new business down the road!

Iterate, Iterate, Iterate

Just because something works, doesn’t mean it’s the best way to do it.  Make sure you are constantly stress testing your process to figure out what’s broken. Maybe your script is still a bit clunky, emails don’t generate the response rates you’d like, or your conversion rates too low. Don’t get stuck doing something because it works well enough. Lack of iteration is what prevents companies from making a good sales process great!

It’s crucial that you, as the founder, conduct some of this early outreach and help develop your company’s sales process. Early customer engagement can provide some of the best insights as you look to improve your product or service. Only once you’ve developed this repeatable process, and know it works, can you confidently hand off sales to a director that can refine the process even more.

Steli Efti is the Co-Founder / CEO of Close.io and ElasticSales and an advisor to several startups and entrepreneurs.

The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) is an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, YEC recently launched StartupCollective, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses.

Apple’s iPhone Outsells All Microsoft Products Combined

(photo: SAI)

While Apple and Microsoft are duking it out over which company has the record as the wealthiest company of all time, SAI (by way of CultofMac) is reporting one startling fact this morning.

According to CultofMac, the iPhone, even with people holding off for the next version, has generated $22.7 billion dollars in the last quarter. This compares with Microsoft’s total revenues of $17.4 billion in revenue for the last quarter. This takes into consideration all of the Redmond company’s products across all disciplines.

While Microsoft insists they are going to have a huge push for Windows 8, a Windows 8 phone and the Windows 8 powered Surface tablets, the anticipation for the next version of the iPhone is at a buzz louder than it’s ever been.

Rumors are floating around rampantly as to what features Apple will throw into the next release of the iPhone. Some are saying the next iPhone will have a bigger screen. Others are saying it will have a 19 pin connector vs a 30 pin connector. One rumor that most everyone agrees on is that the next iPhone will have 4G/LTE a standard being adopted by all four major carriers.

This means that demand will be at an all time high. AllThingsDigital reported yesterday that FBR Capital Analyst Craig Berger said:

“We expect the iPhone 5 … has the potential to generate the most promising device upgrade cycle in Apple’s history,” in a statement to investors.

Source: SAI