In today’s slower economy, there are three ways to improve profits:

1. Find new things to sell. You can try to expand your markets by acquiring new products and services. If you have deep pockets and gambler’s instincts, this is the high-risk, high reward model. Exciting and challenging.
2. If resources are tight, you can cut expenses to the bone, shrink down until better times. Sometimes this works, as you preserve cash. Other times, unfortunately, this may merely prolongs the inevitable in a slow and painful way.
3. You can stop whining about the state of the economy and recognize that, even in the worst downturns, most companies and individuals are still buying and growing. In order to grow you business when the overall market is shrinking, start stealing from the competition.

How? Well, for starters, figure out how to get them to stop buying from everyone else, so there are more dollars available to buy from you, instead of standing by and watching as your more aggressive competitors do it first.

Face it. The main reason for your shrinking sales in a slowing economy is that your competitors are building their sales by cutting into your turf.

The law of survival is that, when there is less to eat, the more aggressive jungle animals take more from the weaker ones. The choice is either to get mean, or get lean.

So, want to succeed, no matter what the economy is doing? Get your mean act together. Here’s our outline to mean success and stealing from the competition. Follow this outline and you will be the one saying that this is your best year ever:

So, how you can increase sales at higher margins in a shrinking economy?

• Many companies will thrive and will enjoy record sales and earnings.
• Many more will see their stock reach new highs.
• Many sales people will punch through last year's "personal best" and will continue to live the good life.

• Knowledge.
• Strategic marketing planning.
• Program and execution.
• Training.

This isn’t rocket science, but don’t be afraid to get help if you need it. Then use your industry knowledge to partner with clients to establish and meet attainable goals. Create entire sales and marketing programs and train your sales and marketing people to thrive in hard times.

What you learn is not always new, but we find that it is often reinterpreted in new ways, which is always profitable. Focus on the key points for you to thrive while everyone around you is struggling just to stay afloat.

1. Redefine complex technology. Make it simple so sales people can explain it to mom.
2. Create structure for every sales call.
3. Focus away from tech-speak and onto key fact-finding to better communicate and close more.
4. Guide the sales process toward problem solving and away from classic feature wars, ending with greater customer benefits and, thus, higher dealer margins.

1. Make very sure you have a better trained sales army than they have at the competition. We use our own exclusive "Stealth Sales Training (c) program." It doesn’t require us to take everyone out of the field to attend class.
• If you don’t have a better trained army, competition will destroy you.
• But, if you do, you will destroy them, which is always the more preferred choice.
2. Make sure you only sell the most terrific products in your market segment.
• If you don’t have the best product in your space, strategize to find a better product.
• Or, if that isn’t an option, strategize to move you to a more appropriate market space. Either way, you win.
• You do not always have the means to switch products mid-cycle, but it’s a rush to find out that changing the market focus often works better, faster and cheaper.
3. Listen to your customers. You’ve heard it before, but it is still the best way to meet needs.
• Sell what they need, not what you have.
• Even when you have what they need, many sales people sell from the wrong prospective (It does this. It does that. It does this. It does that).
• Teach your staff how to return to "empathy" and tell what the customer needs to hear.
• Teach how to really find customer problems and then solve them.
4. Find better, more aggressive sales people, or train existing ones to be more aggressive.
5. Spend more time identifying prospects most likely to need what you have, before you make the sales call. This saves time that would usually be wasted and concentrates sales talent on more likely sales. We employ a unique copyrighted process called "Prospect Profiling,(c)" which identifies those prospects most likely to make our sales people successful.
6. Shorten your sales cycle by simplifying the sales proposal process – even for complicated technical sales.
7. Customize and then standardize your proposal into a generic template that is very customer-centric, yet quick and easy to prepare. This frees sales people for more time prospecting for opportunities.
8. Teach your sales people how to work as a team and share successes (yes, and failures) effectively, to improve the "learning from mistakes" yield and shorten time-to-market of new training.
9. Improve sales management’s ability to fill the prospect sales funnel by combining the best of traditional and non-traditional thinking.
10. Practice "top down" aggressive management. Specialize in growing sales in shrinking markets by keeping the energy level very high at the highest levels of management. We never stop teaching how to aggressively improve share of the market by the process we call "steal from the competition."

Here’s what works for our clients and what doesn’t. We follow this simple guide so that your web site will increase your business.

Click here to World’s shortest guide to great web success page

1. Always have a written strategy, even if you often have to change it.
2. Always have a marketing mission statement that every department can live with (otherwise you are just kidding yourself).
3. For every product you sell, identify target markets where your product:
• Provides exceptional value.
• Is clearly superior.
• Captures the imagination.
• Establishes an emotional connection with the customer.
4. Remember, branding is never about the technology. It’s always about the relationship.

Click here to great press relations page

Here is our partner letter that is a great sample for you to follow in your own letter writing efforts

Click here for your best sample sales letter