Other Added - Business

URL Everywhere? Offline Marketing For Online Success
Your URL (www) should be everywhere and more.I know many of you are going to think this is common sense, but how many of these are you using? Your web address should be on every piece of anything your business does, period.Your customers can come from anywhere, at anytime. Yep, the airport at 3:32 a.m., or how about the car behind you?Below is a list of some of the obvious and the not so obvious places you should be advertising your website. Some of them cost you nothing, most of them cost you very little. Do you want more customers than your competitors? Then put yourself 'out there' - more than your competition! You'll be surprised at how much traffic you can directly generate.Hopefully you are using all of this first set...* Invoices - Make sure, or get it on your next re-order.* Statements - Another one, get it printed!* Business Cards - Every card should have the website address and appropriate e-mail address. Letterhead - Right after your address should be your web address.* Envelopes - This all goes to Branding effectively and getting people to your site.* Company Vehicles - Often overlooked, but I thought I would add it here... don't forget these!* Corrugate Products - Each and every package or product you ship should have your web address either stamped on it (cheap) or printed on the next run.* Everything you publish with your company name should also carry your URL. Your Holiday cards for example...* Advertising - It amazes me not only how much business spends on print advertising, but how many of them do not include their web address in the Ads. It's 'way' better than your phone number at 5:00 a.m. Saturday morning? You already pay to print everything, just be sure you're adding the line: www.we are real.comDo you have all of those? Good job! Now try these...You never know where your visitors (customers) could come from.* Your Answering Machine message..."be sure to visit our website at www." Your "On Hold" message..."for additional savings, visit our website at www."* Include your website business card with every bill you pay! You'll be surprised.* On a Bus waiting bench. Just your URL, t

f cold calls and the success of a sales person, or team.

Cold calling is just a form of networking. Everyone in the company can support cold calling campaigns, whether you are in sales or not. Cold calling is as simple as calling someone you know, a friend/associate, in a company that is not a current customer, or in a different division in a current customer, and having a conversation about their business – everyone loves to talk about themselves. Keep in mind that you do not need to close the order. You need to initiate the contact and then get a sales person involved. You can continue to follow up with the sales person as the opportunity materializes to an order. Just make sure that, once you have initiated contact, you communicate through the sales person or you just might become the problem.

# 10 Perform and Leverage Win/Loss Reviews: Win/loss reviews are probably the most valuable sales tool to use AT ALL TIMES, and not just in tough times. Unfortunately, since most of the results of the review are view as more of a marketing function, most sales organizations do not do them, or worse, do them incorrectly. Also, many sales people, and their managers, are afraid of what the review will tell them – what they need to do to be successful. (areas of weakness)

What a win/loss review is? A win/loss review is an in depth analysis of all aspects the sales process for a particular deal. You need to look at each and every win, and loss, and ask, sometimes tough, questions. Questions that are very similar to what you learned in college about journalism, the five W’s and one H, sometimes called the ‘Journalist’s Six W’s’ (Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How). Why you won the deal (Win Review

How to Defend Your Marketing Budget
Management's first response to a tight budget is often to reduce expenditures across the organization. After all, that's the best way to balance the budget. Every department suffers equally. Right?Wrong! Although it may seem right (politically) to accept this decision, it's the wrong move to make. In the long run, accepting a significant budget cut will harm your organization. When a nonprofit cuts marketing, it cuts off one of the hands that feed it.Even worse, marketing and communications are often cut more than other areas. Our work is sometimes perceived as being expendable, rather than recognized as a critical means of generating revenue, raising awareness, etc.That's what you have to point out – as diplomatically as possible. Rather than taking a defensive position when faced with budget cuts, proactively respond to your leadership's challenges with either or both of these proposals:• Leave our budget untouched, and we will increase X by X in the next fiscal year. Even better, if you will increase our budget by X percent, we'll increase X by an additional X percent. • Let the marketing and communications team work with the current budget for the next two years, and we'll deliver an X percent increase in revenues (donor and/or earned income) in that time.Of course, these strategies require your marketing and communications team to report on concrete results, proving the value your efforts bring to the organization. Examples include:Direct Marketing (email and mail) • Response rate. • Dollars earned per dollar spent (return on investment, or ROI).Media relations: • Development of media relationships. • Coverage by media type (newspaper, magazine, Web, broadcast).Public Speaking: • Number of speaking engagements and presentations (and audience count).Whatever you do, don't just give in to a proposed budget cut for your department. Consider the options with as much creativity as you bring to your marketing work. Then shape your strategy and come back with a creative solution that will let you and your colleagues continue to build the bottom line.Good luck!

At the forefront of driving revenue is the sales team; however everyone, from the receptionist to the CEO, is vital for accelerated revenue success. No matter what position you hold in your company you can use the many low-to-no cost strategies in this article to accelerate revenue.

# 1 Set Your Goals and Objectives: Members of the sales team usually have a quota assigned to them by management. If you are not part of the sales team you probably do not have a direct quota, however the more value you add to the revenue driving activities of your company, the more valuable you are to the company. If you are not part of sales, make a commitment, even if you don’t tell anyone about it, to do what ever you can to drive revenue up and to costs down.

Make sure that you hold yourself accountable. I have found that one key de-motivator, including self de-motivation, is an imbalance of accountability – even if it is perceived and not real. This imbalance is caused when your actions are not inline with your goals and objectives. Manage yourself and your activity consistently and you will see the results in your top line.

# 2 Know Where You Are Now: Before you start any journey you need a map, a plan in the case of your accelerated revenue driving activities. Before this journey begins it is important to know where you are going (discussed in the previous section) and where you are now. Here are some questions to ask yourself:

- Where are you against your goals?

- Where is your company against its goals?

- Are your goals inline with your company’s?

# 3 Know Your Value: Take an inventory of yourself. Understand what you do well, what you do OK, and what you don’t do well at all. Then leverage what you do well and improve on what you do OK and not well at all. Constantly, review your progress and keep adding new skills to your training regimen.

# 4 Know Your Company’s Value: Look at your company. What does your company do very well? What is the value of that product/service? Value from your customer’s perspective – not yours. How does this product/service increase revenue or decrease cost for your customer? (Not how can you offer the product/service cheaper than your competition.) Or does it increase efficiency or reduce risk (subset of reduced cost). Again, for your customer, not you.

Focus most of your energy on leveraging those things your company does extremely well. Especially, those products/services that add the most value to your customer. This is probably where you can increase revenue the most.

# 5 Increase Key Lead Generation Activities:

- Write newsletters for existing and potential customers;

- Provide Free, or Low Initial Buy-in, offers to drive paid product/service business;

- Write white papers;

- Develop positioning papers;

- Conduct short, value focused, seminars on how you help your clients increase revenue and decrease cost

# 6 Automate all Sales Reporting: Use my simple and short three step process to develop your sales reporting system. Here it is:

1) Define Sales Reporting Needs: be focused on the deal and on the client’s timeline;

2) Establish Sales Reporting Needs: make reporting quick and easy for everyone; and

3) Execute and refine as you gain a better understanding of what information is really useful.

I don’t recommend that your company spends $5M, or even $5/month, on a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution. They take too long to add value anyway - the point of this article is results in 30 days. Look at what you need to report and report it in the most efficient and effective way possible. Leverage information technology, if that makes sense, or just have a process flow for hard copy reports. Define reporting parameters beforehand and make sure that you report in regularly.

# 7 Get Help / Offer Help: Show your management that, by having a sales admin you can increase revenue by X. Or reduce cost of sales by Y. Or …whatever metric you can use that shows increased efficiency, value, to the company that you couldn’t do on your own. This sales admin person/team could also support more than one sales person. Show value in real terms and you might get a favorable response.

For example, if I was going to pitch this I might say “ Mr., or Mrs. Boss, it has been my experience that, in most cases, Sales admin staff keep more expensive, and productive, sales people (like me) in front of, or on the phone with, a customer, prospect, or suspect. In a layered sales force I feel that can contribute even more time to the sales cycle and won’t spend valuable time on areas of the sales process that I am not as efficient, or cost effective, in. The key here is not to hire more sales staff, it is to get more revenue dollars for every hour of my effort.”

If you are not a sales person, then offer to help. Talk to the sales team and determine where you might offer assistance. Working together with sales will give sales a renewed appreciation of you and your department. It will also give you a renewed appreciation of sales. Together you and your partner(s) in sales can revitalize accelerated revenue efforts while being an example for the rest of the company to follow

# 8 Leverage Your Hunter and Farmer Skills: There are two types of sales styles to focus on to accelerate revenue, Hunters and Farmers. These two types apply to inside and outside sales people.

Hunters are those sales people that love the thrill of the kill. As soon as they ‘close’ the deal they are on to the next. And they are very good at it. The main weakness of the hunter is that they typically do not nurture accounts – they lose interest in the account as soon as the ‘deal is closed.

Farmers nurture accounts. They typically don’t penetrate new accounts. They take those accounts first closed by the hunters and expand them. Closing opportunity by opportunity, until they have sold all that they could sell into that account. The weakness of the farmer is that the company that they work for must continue to evolve, adding new products and services, or the value of the farmer drops quickly, for that account, to the company they work for.

The key is for you to understand the two sales styles, understand which role you do best in. Exploit your strengths and find a partner that has complimentary strengths so you can leverage each other.

# 9 Increase Your Number of Cold Calls: If you implement only one idea out of this article THIS IS THE ONE! Don’t waste your time with anything else unless you cold call – a lot. Look at any report that measures correlation of the success of an individual sales person, or sales team, with the number of cold calls. The number just don’t lie. There is an absolute, and direct, correlation to the number of cold calls and the success of a sales person, or team.

Contractor Safety Programs for Construction Project -- Part I
Contractors have a moral and legal obligation to protect their employees from harm during the performance of their duties. Providing a work site that is free from recognized hazards is an achievable goal that will benefit both the contractor and the contractor’s employees.The federal Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) has developed standards that address most job site situations. Whether a contractor is merely putting up a ladder or actively involved in a steel erection project, there is a standard, or standards, that addresses these activities.A safety program that incorporates work procedures extracted from the applicable standards for the type of work the contractor does will, to the greatest extent possible, reduce the possibility of injury to employees.However, just having written policies and procedures is a far cry from having a viable safety program.To be effective, a safety program must contain four key elements. They are:1. establishing company safety policies and procedures.2. effectively communicating the policies and procedures to employees.3. performing regular and frequent jobsite safety inspections.4. employing consistent enforcement procedures.Failure to incorporate any of the above steps in a contractor’s safety program will invalidate the whole effort.Clearly, having safety policies and procedures that are not communicated to employees are of no value as far as employee safety is concerned. Of course, as an aside, written safety policies and procedures may be of value for bid submission regardless if they are conveyed or not conveyed to employees.The only method a contractor has to ensure that employees are following established safety policies and procedures is to actually inspect the job site activities.Lastly, if employees are not following safety procedures and are placing themselves, or others, in harm’s way, there must be some sort of clearly defined enforcement procedures to nip this behavior in the bud.A contractor who has complied with the above four steps will have done all that can be reasonably expected of an employer and will have provided employees a safety environment in which to work.

do well at all. Then leverage what you do well and improve on what you do OK and not well at all. Constantly, review your progress and keep adding new skills to your training regimen.

# 5 Increase Key Lead Generation Activities:

- Write newsletters for existing and potential customers;

- Provide Free, or Low Initial Buy-in, offers to drive paid product/service business;

- Write white papers;

- Develop positioning papers;

- Conduct short, value focused, seminars on how you help your clients increase revenue and decrease cost

# 6 Automate all Sales Reporting: Use my simple and short three step process to develop your sales reporting system. Here it is:

1) Define Sales Reporting Needs: be focused on the deal and on the client’s timeline;

2) Establish Sales Reporting Needs: make reporting quick and easy for everyone; and

3) Execute and refine as you gain a better understanding of what information is really useful.

# 8 Leverage Your Hunter and Farmer Skills: There are two types of sales styles to focus on to accelerate revenue, Hunters and Farmers. These two types apply to inside and outside sales people.

The key is for you to understand the two sales styles, understand which role you do best in. Exploit your strengths and find a partner that has complimentary strengths so you can leverage each other.

Selling to a Door in the Face
We are affected when we are introduced to two vastly different alternatives in succession. We know that contrasting two alternatives can distort or amplify our perceptions of things. Generally, if the second item is quite different from the first, we will tend to see them even more differently than they actually are. As a Master Persuader, you can use this contrast to steer your audience toward the object of your persuasion. The use of contrast is based on our perception of items or events that happen one right after the other. If you've had a rotten day because you found out you're losing your job and you come home to a new scratch on your car, you will have a vastly different reaction than if you were having a great day because you're getting a promotion and then came home to the scratch on your car. It's the same scratch, but there are very different perceptions and reactions to it, depending on your personal circumstances."Door in the Face" is one of the most common techniques for implementing the Law of Contrast. Basically, an initially large and almost unreasonable request is made, likely to be declined--hence the "door in the face" as the prospect rejects the proposal. Then a second smaller and more reasonable request is made. People accept the second request more readily than if they'd just been asked outright because the relativity between the two requests makes the second one seems so much better. The technique is effective because social standards state each concession must be exchanged with another concession. When you allow a rejection, it is considered a concession. The person you are persuading will then feel obligated to agree with your smaller request.Demonstrating this point, researchers first asked college students to donate blood every two months for three consecutive years. Requiring a long-term commitment of not only time, but also of physical and emotional responsibility, the request was overwhelmingly turned down. The very next day, the same students were asked to donate blood just one time, the following day. Forty-nine percent agreed. The control group, wherein students were only approached with the second request, only demonstrated a 31 percent compliance rate.The study continued the next day. As students

r company spends $5M, or even $5/month, on a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution. They take too long to add value anyway - the point of this article is results in 30 days. Look at what you need to report and report it in the most efficient and effective way possible. Leverage information technology, if that makes sense, or just have a process flow for hard copy reports. Define reporting parameters beforehand and make sure that you report in regularly.

# 8 Leverage Your Hunter and Farmer Skills: There are two types of sales styles to focus on to accelerate revenue, Hunters and Farmers. These two types apply to inside and outside sales people.

The key is for you to understand the two sales styles, understand which role you do best in. Exploit your strengths and find a partner that has complimentary strengths so you can leverage each other.

Trade Show Victory!
So you're going to have a booth at a trade show. How exciting - or how terrifying - depending on your state of mind!First of all - remain calm - you're not the first person to do this. There's some easy to follow tips that will ensure success at the show, and give you follow up business too.Preparation ahead of time is important. Gather all the supplies you'll need. Brochures, business cards, product samples, entry forms for a draw, professional signs and any audio visual equipment you'll need. Be sure to ask for electricity from show organizers well in advance if you will need it. Also, do not let any piece of marketing literature leave your booth without contact information on it - people MUST know how to get in touch with you after the show.Make your booth look GREAT! It doesn't have to cost a lot of money - ask a friend whose got a sense of style to help you create something that is eye catching but doesn't cost too much. Don't over crowd your display area because people get overwhelmed and pass by; but on the other hand, don't have so little that people think there's nothing to see. Make sure your sign is professionally printed and hung straight!Once you’ve set up your booth, stand back about 20 feet and objectively take a look at it. Is it welcoming? Is your sign easy to read? Can people tell what you do BEFORE they get to your booth? These are critical issues that you need to answer before the show.At the show be friendly - wear a name tag and smile. When people come by your booth, you’ve a VERY short period of time to catch their attention. This is the time you need to have something to say. Create a 15 – 20 second “speech” you can recite. For example, if you sell children’s wall murals, why not try this, “Hi there, I’m Julie Lewis and I use paint to create a magical room for your child or an experience that will take you anywhere in the world with my wall murals.” Sounds more exciting that “I paint wall murals”, doesn’t it?Let’s try another one, “Hello, I’m Alex Brown and I create marketing programs for my clients that really make them be unforgettable!”By having something prepared in advance, you’re always ready to gain a new client! If you’re unprepared you will look very unprofessional.Encourage everyone wh

. Together you and your partner(s) in sales can revitalize accelerated revenue efforts while being an example for the rest of the company to follow

# 8 Leverage Your Hunter and Farmer Skills: There are two types of sales styles to focus on to accelerate revenue, Hunters and Farmers. These two types apply to inside and outside sales people.

The key is for you to understand the two sales styles, understand which role you do best in. Exploit your strengths and find a partner that has complimentary strengths so you can leverage each other.

Customer Service for Professors
Believe it or not most universities could use a few pointers from private enterprise. One place I feel they fall down is in customer service. Professors at universities could do more in the way of customer service by assisting their clientele, the students with better care.Rather than sitting the 100 kids in a classroom looking at a video monitor it would be best if the professors would give better customer service to the students and give them more one-on-one time and not treat them like cattle. Many professors as they get up in tenure and stature in the “publish or perish world” of academia assume that they are too good for the students and withdraw from what I believe to be their duty and responsibility as professors.Too often they will use student aids to help the students who are trying to learn rather then giving the extra customer service directly. It is amazing that in the liberal world of academia that the professors do not realize they are in business and competition with other universities. Apparently they think that the non-meaning stream of students means that they no longer have to give good customer service due to supply and demand, as if they knew what that meant?Professors should all have to have had a job at one time in their life in a field, which required customer service before they are allowed to teach. Sometimes I feel that the professors are faking it, in that they are not as smart as they pretend to be and purport their brilliance to the students and the reason they do not give good customer service is because they can't. What you think of that academia?

f cold calls and the success of a sales person, or team.

As you review your wins, and your losses, make sure you continuously scrutinize your pricing policy. If you are losing based on price, make sure that you understand, in detail your sales process. If you sell based on value (realized value to the customer, not what you perceive your value to be) then you don’t need to reduce price, you might just need to work on your approach in establishing, and communicating, value for the customer.

# 11 Visit Your Past Customers: Start with your top ten former customers. Call them, or have them called by an executive. See how they are doing. Ask them why they have not done business with you recently (this is a very valuable method to understand the customer’s perception of your company). If there are any issues, work through them. If not, engage the customer. Get back in there. Work a deal. Get the relationship back on track.

# 12 Commit to Become the Sole Source for Your Key Customers: Just the commitment to your key customers would provide you huge returns. As you make this commitment to yourself, your boss, and your customer, impress upon everyone that you will do this by adding value to everything you do.

Making this commitment will force you to look at all aspects of your customer’s business and understand where you, through your products/services and other capabilities, can enable your customer to increase revenue and/or decrease cost. Focusing on your customer’s business and how you can increase revenue and decrease cost will not only help you grow revenue, but also increase your gross margin on every deal. If you stay committed and honest, this process will be the springboard for a very long and very profitable relationship for you and your customer.

# 13 Determine What Your Customers WILL Want: Don’t just look for what you customers want right now. Figure out what their needs will be in the future. Key note: Your customer probably does not know what she needs now. She knows what she wants, but not what she needs. As well, she probably won’t know what she will need in the future. It should be your mission in your professional life to know the future needs of your customers. – Be ahead of your customers and you will be ahead of the pack.

# 14 Take Your Executive Team Out on Sales Calls: The CEO of any size company is usually the best sales person. If you think that he is not a sales person, you are wrong – dead wrong. How did he get funding? How did he hire his first staff member? How does your CEO get the management team to get what he needs done, done? He sold them, he sold them all.

Your CEO owns the vision, in most cases it is HIS vision! Who else can best sell his own vision?

I do not recommend you take the CEO out on the first, second, or third call. Look at your sales pipeline, take the proposal that is the largest in revenue, or is the most profitable, or you know the most about the customer/buyer. Set up a face-to-face meeting. This meeting should be with someone on your customer’s senior executive team only, preferably with the CEO.

Go and get the order. This process affords you the opportunity to: 1) get to know your executive team, 2) get to know the customer in a new light, 3) understand the issues in closing business today, and 4) gain confidence in what you, and your company is doing, or needs to do. Worst case, you are educating the executive on the sales team and sales process.

# 15 Advertise your success (internally to your organization at first, externally if you feel it is appropriate).

# 16 Reduce Time Spent on Non-Customer Meetings: Unless absolutely necessary and even then, when you can, stop all, or reduce the amount of, time spent on internal meetings. If the meetings MUST happen then make them outside customer’s business hours. Every minute that you are in an internal meeting, you are not in front of, or on the phone with, or supporting the needs of, a customer, prospect, or suspect.

Your company is in the business of making money. Every minute that you are not in front of, or on the phone with, or supporting the needs of, a customer, prospect, or suspect, you are not adding value to the customer. If you are not adding value you are not going to get paid (Revenue). Even if you work for a non-profit you need revenue (donations).

# 17 Go to Training: I bet that there is at least one person in your company that is always in training for one thing or another. I am also confident that if you go to training, unless you are at a very large company, you only go through product/service training and seldom to real sales training.

I was in the information technology business for fourteen years. I have been in back office support roles, I have been a techie, I have been in inside and outside sales, and I have been in sales and marketing management. I have taken so much training it is crazy. However, I have never been in sales training. The companies I have worked for were either distributors or resellers and I went to vendor ‘sales’ training countless times. Turns out, they were not sales training. They taught us how to position their products/services. That was product/service training, not sales training.

I was trained OJT (on the job), trial by fire, mentored. Whatever you want to call it – it took too long to translate the training to a closed deal. I was very successful. In retrospect, I believe I could have been much more successful, much more quickly, though, if I would have gone through structured sales training.

# 18 Train Others in Your Company: Leverage your sales skills to help strengthen the relationship between you and the rest of the company. Do a series of ‘lunch and learn’ sessions. Require at least one person from each department, if that make sense. The point is to give everyone the opportunity (requirement) to participate. The focus of the training should be to educate the company on your sales process and to get feedback from all employees on new ideas/approaches.

You will be pleasantly surprised where the best ideas come from. Remember to include ALL employees in the training sessions. The rewards will appear as accelerated revenue very quickly.

# 19 Get Everyone Networking: From the CEO to the sales team, including all marketing, fulfillment, administration, and back office staff. Everyone knows someone. Know who they know and leverage everyone to accelerate revenue. I suggest that you start with a plan and some training that you provide during ‘lunch and learn’ sessions. Set the objectives of the Networking Plan and communicate to the team.

# 20 Energize Alternate Sales/Marketing Channels: Sure you have partners. In today’s networked world EVERYONE partners. Unlike others, make partnerships work for you. I understand that you might not have the authority to execute co

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The Limited Liability Company is the newest kid on the block among the legal entities available in the United States for operating your business. For many entrepreneurs, it is the ideal marriage between the tax advantages of the limited partnership and the limited liability feature of the corporation. Now available in all 50 states---even to non-U.S. citizens--most likely the LLC should have a key place in your business structure.

In 2006, two out of three chiropractors increased billings (67%), while almost ninety percent (88.3%) of chiropractors sold retail products to patients. At an average $28.5 collections per patient visit (PVA), retail product sales to patients remains a major revenue source. But for junior practitioners with a humble patient growth record, point of service sales is the fastest way to increase practice revenue.

Has your small business been the target of corporate fraud? You may have been and never even known it. And, it happens more frequently than you might think.

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