Succesful Sales people recognise that they work through a logical process one step at a time.

Any business needs a certain number of sales worth a certain amount of money to make it's monthly target. To be sure of closing that number of sales you need a larger number of people and companies who are ready to buy - because not all selling activity ends with a sale.

You are likely to need 2 -4 times as many sales pending to make sure you will close the ones you need.

So you need a still larger number of enquiries to keep your prospect bank topped up - perhaps 5 or 6 per prospect. And you will need to generate enough marketing effort to get these.

This will be a lot.

On average customers need to be contacted 7- 8 times in one way or another before they will buy.

The problem we have as small companies is getting the balance right between selling and producing. You can't work for a client when you're out selling and you can't sell when you're busy fulfilling orders.

So what can we do? Since you probably don't have time to do more than do your work and close your live prospects, you need to automate the prospecting process by relying on the power of the internet to deliver the stream of enquiries you need.

Companies who do this do well. One lawyer we talked to put it like this. "At the beginning of the year I work out how much money I want to make and I have a discussion with my (outsourced) marketing manager. We take into account what the conversion rates of all the lawyers who work for me actually are. They range from 16% to 74%. So the best is converting most enquiries into work while the "worst" (who is actually a better lawyer) is closing 1 in 6. Then we work out how many enquiries she has to generate to feed the machine and that's what she's targeted against."

The problem for most small business owners is that they've never worked in a real sales environment. So they find it difficult to estimate how much promotional work to do, and they don't systematically measure what they do. If you know what your own ratios are it's much easier to hold sales people that you may need to employ as the business expands to account.

So the telling it face to face part of 1Man Brand focuses on this and helps you put some system in.

The other parts help you focus on telling your story on-line by developing it, writing it and promoting it.

That will provide the backdrop against which you can sell your services more effectively than at present.