Andy Bounds

Make Downtown top of your ‘resolution’ list

Downtown

Well here we go! Another New Year has arrived and we are all busy trying to maintain our ‘resolutions’ of cutting back on chocolate, ‘dry’ January, starting a new fitness regime, or whatever it might be. Good luck to all of you who have made a commitment and commiserations to those of you who have given up already.

The New Year is also an opportunity to review ambitions and plans for your business, and I hope part of your plan includes engagement with Downtown in Business which is planning a fantastic twelve months of activity, in terms of the events programme that we will offer; and the involvement in an increasingly interesting political landscape that will include a General Election and continued discussion over devolution and the Northern Powerhouse.

Helping business influence government thinking, and offering a genuine business voice for the North of England is a key Downtown objective, but equally important is supporting our members to maximise the potential of their business, and we are determined to build on the £800m plus worth of deals that we have facilitated for our network during the past decade.

That is partly about the quality introductions we can provide through our business support managers who are on the ground in each city, but it is also about enabling you access to intelligence and advice from some of the most successful entrepreneurs from across the UK.

To kick off what will be a series of Downtown events that will bring together members with a high growth mind-set and business leaders who have completed the high growth journey, we have a half day conference in Liverpool entitled ‘Limitless – Developing a hyper growth Mind Set’

Among the speakers will be two of the regions’ best known business mentors and coaches Andy Bounds and Michael Finnigan. There will also be a range of business owners who have ‘been there, done that and got the T-shirt’.

This is the type of networking that allows you to meet quality people and learn a thing or two as well. It is what Downtown does best, and if one of your resolutions is to grow your business in 2015, then it would be daft not to take advantage of what we will be offering this year. I look forward to seeing you at a number of our events this year, and wish you all the very best with your hopes and aspirations.

Happy New Year!

To learn more about Downtown CLICK HERE 

Sell, Sell, Sell…

Sell Sell Sell

Selling more stuff is something that all businesses need to do, want to do, but seldom explore how to do.

We take on Business Development Managers, Marketers and occasionally direct Sales staff, and hope that somehow, some way these poor souls will be able to go out into the big wide world and generate income by selling our product.

We are unlikely to have any training in place for them, sales collateral will most likely be limited and within the company itself it will be seen very much as their responsibility to ‘make the sale’.

At our packed out ‘sell more stuff’ breakfast seminar in Liverpool yesterday, we set out to start to tackle some of these huge challenges. How do we embed selling into the culture of your whole business? How can we make the life of sales staff easier? How can we provide existing and potential future sales staff with the type of training and development programmes that most professions take for granted?

Salesman extraordinaire Andy Bounds, as always, had the 120 delegates buzzing with his tips and anecdotes on how he advises some of the biggest and best known brands on the planet to accept that sales starts at the top and filters down through to the rest of the business. Your company’s culture needs to embrace selling as an essential and positive part of your work rather than an unfortunate aspect of it.

The head honcho from Winning Pitch John Leach has help at hand for those desperate to improve the skills of their existing sales team, or indeed recruit better sales staff in the future. Winning Pitch is establishing a Sales Academy in Liverpool. Quality advice, support and training will be available to sales professionals, whether they are called BDM’s, Marketers or Relationship Managers.

This type of initiative is long overdue, and Downtown is delighted to be involved in promoting it. The good news is we can help you get help in paying for this staff training too. So, get in touch with Downtown now, and sort out places for your sales team so that they can sell more of your stuff in the New Year.