Month: April 2013

3 Positive Reasons to Do the Right Thing in Business

Post author By Ethan Theo
Post date April 25, 2013

ABC’s “Good Morning America” ran a story recently about 7-year-old Ransom Duel who noticed his classmate choking after eating a bite of a Nutella sandwich. Ransom picked up the jar, read “hazelnuts,” and knowing that his friend has an allergy to nuts, ran to get his teacher who brought an epi-pen and saved the friend’s life.

When asked about it afterwards, Ransom said, “I just did the right thing. I didn’t think, ‘Oh I’m gonna be a hero.’”

What can we learn from Ransom about business ethics?

First, do the right thing regardless.

At first, you might think, “What else would Ransom do?”

Nothing.

He could have done nothing as his friend grew sicker by the second.

The opposite of doing the right thing isn’t necessarily doing the wrong thing. Doing nothing is just as damaging to your business operations. Apathy drains profits. Lack of engagement lessens productivity. The more employees there are, the easier it is for you to say, “Somebody else will do it.”

Take personal responsibility for acting. Make it your business to do the right thing regardless.

Second, depend on someone always watching you.

Ransom didn’t realize his right-thing action would be so public.

At work, when you face an ethical decision, assume someone is watching you. Odds are good they are regardless of whether you see them or not.

If you catch yourself saying, “No one will ever know,” you’re headed down a slippery ethical slope that leads away from doing the right thing. Be assured—someone will know. At the least, you will know. Knowledge of deliberate, unethical behavior erodes your core values, maliciously rearranges your priorities, and removes power from your unique contribution to a profitable business.

Depend on someone always watching you.

Third, deal with consequences either way.

When you do the right thing regardless while fully aware that someone is watching you, you create consequences that are far easier to deal with later. Ransom’s greatest challenge is dealing with all of the attention that comes with being dubbed a “hero.”

When you do nothing or the wrong thing and hope no one sees you, your consequences are extremely difficult to explain away when they come to light. The business you work for eventually displays your unethical choices either through loss of customers, key employees, or critical supplier relationships—all of which lead to lower profits.

You deal with consequences from every decision. Choose easier outcomes to live with.

Work Positive with Ransom Duel today. Do the right thing regardless. Depend on someone always watching you. Deal with consequences either way.

About the Author

Dr. Joey Faucette is the #1 Amazon best-selling author of Work Positive in a Negative World (Entrepreneur Press), Work Positive coach, & speaker who helps business professionals increase sales with greater productivity so they leave the office earlier to do what they love with those they love. Discover more at www.ListentoLife.org.

Customer Service

3 Positive Ways to Engage Clients for More Business

Post author By Pamela Swift
Post date April 19, 2013

Article Contributed by Dr. Joey Faucette

“What have you done for me lately?” is the client attitude du jour. And by “lately,” they mean very recently. The number of client experiences with and impressions from your competition expands daily with a multitude of tech-driven access points.

Client engagement—from relationship to results—is a key to your increasing sales with greater productivity to get out of the office earlier to do what you love with those you love.

How do you strategically engage your clients?

Here are 3 Positive Ways to Engage Clients for More Business:

Be Initiating

Your clients are inundated daily by distractions. Some of it is part and parcel of the 24/7, always-on culture today. There are welcome distractions from friends and for entertainment. There are more interruptions they didn’t ask for or anticipate.

Initiating contact with your clients helps you rise above the distracting crowd. Your company name is quickly recognized and welcomed. You maintain your top of mind position as a part of their home team. You are someone whom they trust to help.

By initiating, you give them a reason to strengthen their grip on you. They remember what you’ve done for them.

Be Interesting

Since you’re initiating, your clients remember what you’ve done, but the “lately” factor is important to consider.

Of course you benefit from their doing business with you as often as appropriate as do they. As you initiate, remind them of the continuing benefits of doing business with you. Reward them for sending their friends. Or, ask specific questions that build on your current relationship, e.g., “You find value in xyz service/product. Other clients like you have also found benefit from abc service/product. When is best for us to talk about it?”

Be interesting by building on the current value equation with something that answers the “lately” question.

Be Engaging

To more strategically grow results from your client relationships and drive more revenue, insure you engage in two primary ways:

First, ask questions. These can range from more personally-oriented, e.g., “How’s that new grandbaby?” to “What’s working well for your business these days?” Our favorite subject is always “me.” Only positive responses arise from such questions.

Second, listen and offer solutions/answers. How will that new grandparent help meet the challenge of rising tuition costs? If you’re the financial advisor, you have a solution. How will the IT needs change as business grows? If you’re the IT consultant, you have an answer to make it easier to rake in more business, right?

Be engaging with your clients by initiating contact with them in interesting ways and prompt your business to grow!

About the Author

Communication Skills

Handling Bad Customer Reviews

Post author By Pamela Swift
Post date April 18, 2013

Article Contributed by Mark Chandley

Reputation is one of the most important assets your business owns. A disgruntled customer being vocal is the last thing you need to deal with. Negative reviews can show up in the search engines and affect your ratings. Developing a system to handle these situations, and they will occur, will help reduce the affect negative reviews can have on your clients and potential clients.

Tips For Handling A Bad Review

Build your online presence. Build your brand with your web site. Having a professional web site built and maintained, will help to brand you and your business, and convey to customers and prospects your competitive value in the marketplace. Visibility on the web is vital today in reaching new customers, as well as maintaining existing customers by branding yourself to set your business apart from the others.

Utilize Your Loyal Customers

Focus on your loyal customer base. When you receive a negative review, burry it. Contacting your good clients, those who will be willing to help you, and having them go online and submit good positive reviews, can do that. This is where you need a good system and working with the person who maintains your web site can be helpful in establishing one for your business. Before long, the good reviews will bury the bad ones and when someone does a search, they will usually only look at the first page or two and then move on.

You Can’t Please All The People All The Time

Bad reviews will probably happen. Know that sooner or later, if you are in business long enough, you are bound to have that one customer, that no matter what you do, will never be pleased. Creating a system is the key to success. When you plan ahead of time, how to handle situations as they come up, you will achieve better results in dismantling problems. Have a strategy in place to handle bad reviews, and handle them. Respond to your customers directly, not online. You may email, phone, or send a letter to them and immediately. Let them know you would like to rectify their bad experience and ask what you can do to make it better. This should apply whether they have submitted a negative review on line, or just discussed verbally their dissatisfaction. Never confront them publically, always keep their problems private. If the issue cannot be solved, and sometimes it can’t, monitor the online review to make sure it doesn’t show up there. If it does, go back to your plan you set up for dealing with getting new positive reviews to flood and bury the negative ones.

Keep A Watchful Eye.

Be on the lookout for negative reviews. When they happen, have your plan ready to get new reviews from your loyal customers, and bury the bad reviews. Maintain a good web presence to promote your good image and you can over come when a disgruntled customer shows up.

About the Author

Guest blog written by Mark Chandley, President of Adeptiv Soultions, an order fulfillment and ecommerce fulfillment company based in New York.

Operations

Why You Need Performance Management Software

Post author By Pamela Swift
Post date April 17, 2013

Performance Management software manages the productivity of companies in an organized manner. Performance management describes how small business owners use their assets to meet their set goals.

This type software is effective in charting performance through methods such as expenses control, controlling the cost of your business is important because meeting financial goals is the only way to chart progress as well as promote growth. Also, assessing your organization’s potential break-through’s as well as threats and surrounding competition. Software can assist in developing an appropriate strategy and game plan which is based off of the organization’s particular niche in the market. Proper execution methods of this strategy can maximize the performance of the entire organization. It is thus an indispensable career tool.

A good performance management system might bank on three components. The software plans to reduce costs by automating and optimizing the global review process as well as short and long-term goal setting. High level performers will be rewarded and charted so there is a competitive incentive for contributors to perform better than one another. Systems such as these pride themselves on a strong organization of not only personal employee goals but team goals as well. Aligning the two concepts can push performance to a new level as well as create a clear understanding of each person’s objectives and the overall strategy they will approach to obtain these goals.

ReviewSnap is a software product that implements a system which helps to breed collaboration and keep everyone in tune with the performance of the organization while optimizing the performance individually. Similar to SAS, this software performs compensation management and allows users to learn strategies from the analyzed content. The system provides a collection of practices to keep track of KPI’s and world class support that is beyond dependable. Many companies trust ReviewSnap performance management to manage the performance of their employees.

Other types of performance management software focus on the budgeting and planning businesses need to be successful. Many organizations use this product for a number of reasons, beginning with how user friendly it is – providing clean and simple data which is charted for easy interpretation and provides relevance for action. These systems can also chart the resources which companies are able to manage and rearrange within the software. This includes allocating money, technological innovations, and people relationships; a combination of these can lead to a well-built strategy.

Performance management helps small businesses learn from the program by assessing the probability of success. Users will be able to share this information among others within the network as well as strategize as a group effort among several co-workers. Experimentation is also promoted, strategies are planned based on research but there are many options available in case the situation changes which should be anticipated. As the options are input into the software, the possibility of benefits from each are evaluated.

Article contributed by Jenna Smith

Sales & Marketing

The Anatomy of the Perfect Subject Line

Post author By Pamela Swift
Post date April 17, 2013

Article Contributed by Kay Ackerman

Your carefully crafted marketing email won’t even have a chance to impact your mailing list unless it includes a well-crafted subject line. People are inundated with emails, and, even if they subscribed to your mailing list, they may not be interested in hearing much of what you have to say. The subject line is your one chance to convince people that it’s worth their time to open your email. Consider the following guidelines for the perfect subject line as you craft yours.

1) Make it clear and relevant: Generic and confusing subject lines don’t attract readers. Take a hard look at your email and craft a subject that clearly encompasses what’s in the email. Don’t leave your readers guessing what the email is about, because they’ll see it as junk. Don’t make readers guess who it’s from, either. The from portion of the subject line should contain a consistent brand identifier. Develop a consistent set of tags and choose one to enclose in brackets at the beginning of the subject line to indicate what type of email it is.

2) Include a call to action: People are responsive when you give them something to do. Come up with an actionable step and frame it in the subject line. This gives the person something tangible to respond to, in addition to a better awareness of what content they’ll find inside. Include a relevant deadline to put some urgency behind the action and increase the chance of having your email opened now rather than a week later.

3) Make it local: If location matters to your business, use relevant information about the user’s location in the subject line. For example, you may be opening a new store in Chicago, so send an email marketing campaign to subscribers, noting that it pertains specifically to the Windy City. This helps people see at a glance that the email is relevant to them.

4) Keep it short and sweet: Your subject line should never contain more than 50 characters. If it does, the last portion will be cut off, both on computers and mobile devices. In fact, data compiled by MailChimp suggests that the most successful subject lines contain between 28 and 39 characters. Make every word count, and cut anything that’s not adding to the message.

5) Be descriptive, not sales-focused: Although it sounds counterintuitive, you don’t want a sales-oriented subject, even when people know you’re trying to sell something. Rather than selling what’s in the email, just tell what’s in the email and leave it up to the reader to make the decision to buy what you’re offering. This makes your subject line clear without being pushy.

Within these general principles, keep in mind that every audience is different. People on your mailing list may respond better to some subject lines than others, so manage your email marketing campaigns to identify the most successful subject lines in terms of open rates and click-through rates. As you gather data about your mailing list, you’ll be able to fine-tune your approach to reach your audience with relevant, interesting subject lines.