There a lot of buzz these days about entrepreneurs and aspiring business owners being stuck, unable to make their businesses work.

Procrastination and fear of the unknown are nothing new for budding entrepreneurs. What is different is that lately this mind virus of panic-stricken paralysis seems to have become a full scale epidemic. Even seasoned business owners are uncertain how to deal with this slow economy. What I see is that people have had a lot of internal blocks and excuses to not succeed  that were dormant for a  long time before this financial bubble burst. It’s going to take a strong commitment to change for things to show up differently.

Two years ago, it was much easier and safer to make money, you didn’t have to be so free of internal blocks to success . Now you do. If you’re feeling overwhelmed by  the current doom and gloom, you have to develop a winning ‘can do’ confidence that success is just a matter of following through.

There’s help on the way. Two excellent new books dealing  directly with the current situation are Pamela Slim’s “Escape from Cubicle Nation” and David Lakhani’s “How to Sell When Nobody is Buying” both in  bookstores and online at Amazon.com.

I won’t go into an in depth book review right now. But briefly Pam’s book is a clear step by step process to take people from the first thought of creating their own business through the process of leaving the corporate world behind to planning and creating a business. It’s excellent, I highly recommend it.

Dave Lakhani’s “How to Sell When Nobody is Buying” is quite simply excellent and chock full of great techniques to prospect and then make the sale. For anyone who owns a business or is in the sales profession, it’s essential information unless you’re already making more money  than you know what to do with.

To make money consistently in this uncertain economy you need strong personal clarity about who you are and what you want to accomplish with your life along with effective  nuts and bolts business techniques. That’s fostered by the right information and inspiration along with mentors that take a personal interest in your success. It takes a strong jolt of positive energy to get you going when you’re caught by the throat by fear and uncertainty. If that’s your situation, find out what will work for you.

Continuing from my last post, there are four strategic ways to clarify your business  strategy that are crucial to increase your sales and profits.

1. Your vision of what you would like your business to look like in the future.
2. The targets you set to accomplish your vision.
3. Who your best customers are.
4. The primary action steps you need to take to reach those targets and achieve your business vision.

Your Vision for Your Business.

You clarify your business vision by getting in touch and becoming intimately familiar with all the aspects of what you would like your business to look like. What’s important to you personally and professionally? Get to the heart of what you’re offering and what makes you different. How do you solve or prevent problems for people? What does that actually  look like in practice? Write it all down and ruthlessly edit out  all the vague generalized statements. Take time to really look at this core vision for your business. Your customers’ testimonials will often give you your greatest  insights. Such things as “I love your software, it’s simple and easy to use, yet it handles our billing system thoroughly and effectively”. If you follow your insight, you should be able to come up with a clear effective mission statement and well targeted Unique Selling Proposition to differentiate yourself and promote your brand. Sometimes it helps to get personal coaching to clear the blocks and uncertainties that are keeping  you from seeing clearly.

Setting Targets

What targets would you have to reach to achieve your business vision? Set a realistic bigger target and break it down to smaller ones. If you wish to reach $200,ooo in sales this year with a gross profit margin of 65%, what targets would you have to reach on  a monthly, weekly, daily basis? Pay attention to how well you’re reaching your goals. Don’t get stuck with your plan.  If something starts to not make sense re-evaluate. Stay on track by constantly referring to how your offering is solving people’s needs as efficiently as possible.

Who Are Your Best Customers?

You know or should know your customers well enough to decide who to put you greatest attention on for repeat sales and what kind of  prospects to look for.  As I pointed out in my last blog, don’t jump to conclusions and make erroneous assumptions. Someone you may not like may actually be your best customer. And someone you like may be wasting a lot of your time. Let go of the judgments that don’t allow you to receive everyone as a customer and choose to keep and look for customers who need what you sell, are willing to pay you for it and don’t cause more headaches than they’re worth.

Your Primary Action Steps

Each target has specific action steps that will streamline your achieving them. How do you know which actions that will give you the best results in the fastest time with the least amount of effort? Brainstorming with partners, employees and business specialists;  looking at what competitors and companies in other industries are doing;  reading business books and magazines. All good, but ultimately it’s not information and input that’s so important as your ability to recognize the best strategy when it comes along. Otherwise you can waste a lot of time jumping  from one idea to another. Yes,  find someone you trust to give you sound advice and counseling, but also develop your own sense of what works for your company. Use, but don’t depend solely on outside advice. You have to have a direct conscious and interactive relationship with your targeted results on a daily basis.

Running a business even for a solo-preneur can get very complicated. One essential key to maximizing your profits is to run all aspects of your business keeping the big picture in mind as you’re looking at the smallest details.

This global economic crisis  is  putting a lot of pressure on business people  from  solopreneurs all the way to  Fortune 500 companies. This is a very non-traditional recession and a lot of companies are not responding in innovative ways ASTD blog. There’s a lot of pain out there with diminishing sales, lagging profits and anemic cash flow. The good news is that it’s  forcing business owners to run their businesses at optimum levels. The bad news is that a lot of companies are not changing and innovating to adapt for the long haul. There’s no room anymore for wasted money, time or effort. You have to get a clear vision of how to run your business in order to stop the losses and  maximize your profits in new and more effective ways.

There are four strategic ways to clarify your business  that are crucial to increase your sales and profits.

1. Your vision of what you would like your business to look like in the future.
2. The targets you set to accomplish your vision.
3. Who your best customers are.
4. The primary action steps you need to take to reach those targets and achieve your business vision.

I’ll cover these 4 key targets in more depth  in my next blog post. For now I’d like to talk about how you can have clearer vision even before you start looking at these four areas. The key to clear and effective business vision  is not just the questions you ask, but the clarity with which you look at them and how open you are to new and unexpected solutions.

How to Avoid False Assumptions

So often we look at things and only see what we want to see. How many judgments and assumptions do you use to shut off your ability to see outside the box? If you ask the question: “Who are our best customers?” You can get very good data back from  your sales records (assuming you kept good records).  But if you start with false assumptions and hold onto them, you’ll make poor decisions no matter how good your data is. How do you change that?

Let go of your judgments that are clouding your vision.  It’s a choice and an ongoing discipline. Get another perspective. Get feedback from different points of view and be willing to change. If that doesn’t work, hire a coach to walk you through the personal changes that will get you clearer. The bottom line is that these times require your personal best whatever it takes.

How to Receive More from the Questions you Ask

So often we ask a question and then come up with an immediate answer even before we’ve really looked at the evidence. What if instead of coming to conclusions right away and limiting the insights and creative solutions you could have, you left your mind open and really saw what was in front of you?

Sherlock Holmes was a master of observation. He could come up with amazing insights from the smallest bits of information about a person or situation.  Some slight detail about how someone was dressed, the way they walked or moved their body could tell him where they came from and what they did for a living. That came from his clear vision and willingness to receive the smallest bits of pertinent information. He could receive all those insights not just because of his sharp intellect, but because he was willing to see past the surface of apparent sameness. Most people aren’t willing to receive that amount of information from things that they see all the time.

So if you started seeing these four areas and all the other important aspects of your business clearly and fully received the information, do you think you could come up with innovative solutions that would stop your losses and maximize your profits?

Wine Library TV’s Gary Vaynerchuk talks about emotions in business in his video Emotion is a dangerous pill when doing business.

Gary argues that we need to have emotions completely sucked out of business decisions.  Ironically he’s quite intense talking about it .  But you get the point. Unfortunately emotional decisions have a sneaky way of inserting themselves when you’re least suspecting it.  It’s the hidden beliefs and judgments that can sabotage your business the worst, because you’re not aware of them as they’re wreaking havoc. That’s when it’s so important to  have a trustworthy mentor or coach to run decisions by. They can help you to be the conscious leader in your own business.

What would it take for you to see your business opportunities and problems more clearly?

Peter Kim’s  blog post “It’s Time to Transform” talks about the need for businesses to transform the way they look at Social Media and their relationship to customers.  From my perspective, authentic marketing has to be based on  personal transformation. Fixed points of view don’t change overnight unless we’re willing to destroy the old ways of thinking – the judgments and assumptions with which you create  business as usual.

The marketplace has changed, people have  gained far greater access to information and self expression. Business leaders  have to follow the lead of change makers  like Richard Branson, who has long treated customers more like partners than dupes to exploit. He created an amazing brand loyalty from Virgin customers who have followed him into many different industries. That kind of partnership is based on deep seated trust and likeability. It’s time for marketers to fundamentally change the way they interact with the world.  If they don’t this social revolution will leave them in the dust.

What do you think has to change?

In his blog post “How Powerful is Your Social Media?” , Christopher S. Penn sounds the alarm for marketers to wake up and smell the poisoned Kool Aid. It’s not that social media is bad per se. But if you’re spending a lot of time on Twitter and Facebook etc. and don’t have a clear business action plan and systems in place, you’re wasting a lot of valuable time and even spreading a weak message of your company on social media. Time to put attention on business basics and cut back your tweets and “What’s on  Your Mind”. As a Chinese proverb says  “Action without vision is a nightmare!”

Do you have a clear and effective strategy and message for your business?

In his latest blog Seth Godin talks about Your World vs. The World . Your world is often not your customers world. It’s easy to get into projections, expectations and assumptions about where our customers live, what they like and how they buy based on our own orientation to the world.  Although we consciously know that we have to study our customers and talk to their needs and ways of seeing the world, unconsciously we often make false assumptions that blind us and show up as poor results. Like bad science, a faulty  premise skews the feedback we get.

The way to effectively see the truth is to let go of judgments about what we think should be and clearly see what actually is. So would you be willing to destroy your favorite assumptions about your business and open yourself to a much larger world?