Saving Money is Earning Money

When you’re a kid the thing you want most in the world is to be a grown up, so birthdays are a big deal.  Presents are fun, but the thing that I looked forward to the most was the birthday card from my grandmother.  She always tucked a crisp, clean, brand new one dollar bill in it.  Over the years it never changed.  It was always a one dollar bill.  Her rule, a dollar every birthday until year eighteen, and then that’s it, and it was.  Long after my beloved grandmother passed, one day, just out of curiosity I asked my mother – why always just a dollar?  My mother replied, “Your grandmother probably still has the first nickel she ever made.”

My grandmother wasn’t the first penny pincher, nor was she the last.  People who watch every dime aren’t just those who struggle to make ends meet; even billionaires do it.  For instance, Warren Buffet; net worth nearly 60 Billion; IKEA founder, Ingvar Kamprad; News Corp. Chairman, Rupert Murdoch, and Australia’s retail king Gerry Harvey are all worth billions, but they are known to take thrifty to the extreme.

We may laugh at some of the penny pincher’s antics; we may see them as eccentric and odd, but it’s a little hard not to covet their ability to manage their money better than the rest of us.  Most people comparison shop for the big ticket items and feel a rush of happy when a good deal is had.  The same people probably use coupons at the grocery store.  The same people run businesses in less than cost effective ways because they tend to count their profit as just the dollars in the door, and ignore the dollars saved by doing things in time-saving/money-saving ways. 

• Piggyback Advertising: Advertise on everything. Put your company logo on items you can give away – pencils, Post-it notes, calendars, business cards, newsletters, and every email you send – even personal.
• Collaborative Marketing: It’s the electronic age, use the technology. Trade advertising links with other companies. Include “partner coupons codes” in email marketing or on your company website for like offers to give your partner’s customers. Share media space in print. Pick a partner and share the cost in newspaper ads.
• Testimonials: Let your happy customers tell others what you’ve done for them. Refresh the testimonials on your website every couple of months.
• Electronic Invoices: Convenient for the customer, cost effective for you.
• Online Meetings: Cut travel costs and save time with online business meetings. There are several sites on the Internet like GoToMeeting and WebEx that offer this service. Meetings can be held on desktops, laptops, tablets, cell phones – anything that can connect to the Internet. That means you can squeeze meetings in no matter where you are.
• Form Partnerships: Find other companies that you can trade goods or services with at no cost. It is a financial boon for both.

Stay abreast of the different types of software being offered that automate your selling process.  Over 100,000 of the world’s most innovative companies of all sizes use Salesforce to close bigger deals faster.  It only stands to reason that if you can speed up what Salesforce does, that you will make more money by virtue of the time you save.  ClearKen Incite2 does just that.  It is a Salesforce add-on that gathers the information that is spread across the Salesforce site and puts it all on one page.  Your sales team can save a mountain of time by having everything they need to know about a prospect, scripted call prompts, emails and voicemail, as well as an active time line that easily documents every step taken, on one convenient screen.  Time is saved that allows more calls to be made.  Imagine the dollars you can add to your bank account.

The only bad mistake is the one you don’t learn anything from; the one you repeat.  When something doesn’t work, make time to figure out why.  Life is supposed to be a learning experience.  Turn “no thank-you” into revenue by using it to make you better at what you do.