When I do business plan consulting, one of the most painful areas for some women business owners to review is their financial reports, including Profit and Loss, Balance Sheet and Cash Flow reports. These are vital reports for every business owner to review, and the entrepreneurial woman is no exception.
This week I ran across a great article from “Jane Out of the Box” on how to handle cash flow problems. Jane says,
“There are two primary reasons businesses have cash flow problems – either the amount charged is insufficient to create enough profit OR the business does not have enough customers to keep it afloat.”
Women entrepreneurs are constantly plagued by two underlying causes for these problems: they don’t feel that they are “worth it,” or they “hate sales” so they don’t do it.
Selling for Small Business to Improve Cash Flow
We need to get over both of these problems.
If you feel that you aren’t “worth it,” then you can fix what’s wrong with your offering. If you think it’s a good offering, then you need to fix what’s in your head. Therapy can help and coaching can help. There’s also an excellent resource, Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life
Marketing and sales work a lot better if you give the used care salesman who lives in your head a boot in the rear. Have you ever been looking for an item and seen the perfect ad on television? Or had a friend mention to you where she got her hair done? That’s marketing. We do it all the time. It’s just letting people know about your product or service so when they have a need for it, they know it’s around. Your product or service does fulfill a need, doesn’t it? Well, then tell us about it!
Sales doesn’t mean calling a list of people you’ve never met at dinner time. Good sales involves a lot of listening. You are trying to solve a problem that someone else has. You think your product or service will do it! You can solve someone else’s problem. How good is that?
Like most things in life, if you change your attitude, you can change your circumstances. So straighten out those voices in your head and improve your cash flow!
