We're back for more!

Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes

I know you’ve missed The Steel Road for the past 6 months, but to tell the truth we’ve been a little busy. Lucky for you, WE’RE BACK!

You may wonder where the posts have been for the past 6 months, and what we’ve been working on since then. We’ll get to that, I promise.

Let me tell you why I came back though. Even though I wasn’t actively writing The Steel Road, almost every single day I would get notifications of new subscribers, comments, and people sharing my posts. Eventually it just built up so much and I had to come back.

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And that brings me to what I’ve been working on in the meantime. I’ve been helping grow a business that provides texting services for small to medium sized businesses. We provide two way texting through the business number, reputation management(Google and Facebook reviews), better lead generation through the website, and taking payments faster and more efficiently.

I wanted to share a few lessons I have learned in the last 6 months:

1. Cold Calling still works.

   

   Far and away the biggest and most important lesson I learned. I’m still kind of shocked that it works this well, but every day I pick up the phone and make 60-100 calls to random strangers who own and work at dealerships. It’s still crazy to me that they actually pick up the phone and listen to me, let alone make an appointment and purchase our product.

   I have it down to a science, in 60 calls I’ll set 2-3 appointments. Out of every 4 appointments, 1-2 people will sign up, at a price point of about $4,000 per year.

2. Keep it simple.

   Our product isn’t necessarily new or particularly inventive, in fact there are multiple other competitors who are very similar, but an aggressive sales cycle and quick implementation works wonders.

3. It’s hard to work well, but it’s easy to work hard.

   I’m not the smoothest or cleanest salesman, but I have seen many talented people come and go because they aren’t willing to put in the work. Working hard covers a lot of gaps in performance.

You’ll notice I haven’t mentioned the name of the product we are building. That’s because I don’t want this to feel like an ad. If you are interested in learning more, feel free to use this form and I’ll contact you to talk to you about signing up with our friends and family discount.

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We’ll be back with some more business ideas this week. If you want a refresher on some of our top businesses we’ve discussed in the past, check out this post!

If you have any requests for specific types of content, I’m all ears! Feel free to drop a comment or send me a message and I’ll be sure to take that into account.

Bye for now. Keep your eyes peeled for a post later this week!

-Matt Bidstrup