Category: Operations

I recently received a request from one of my blog readers to do an article on pricing your product. He sent me some great articles he found on the net. After reading them I realized he may have been over thinking the pricing issues. To me it is fairly simple. There are only three outcomes to consider:

1. Your product is priced too high and no action is taken (the competition is complacency.)
2. Your product is priced too high and it invites the buyer to buy from someone else (I need to make sure I am getting the best VALUE.)
3. You price your product to low and you introduce concern from the buyer because he wonders what is being missed (lack of trust.)

Pricing your product can be simple if you let it but you must price it from the buyer’s perspective. As a business owner you need to know both your fixed and variable cost and ensure you cover those cost while remembering the buyer is not concerned with your cost. They simply don’t care.

From my perspective, here is what you need to be concerned about. What does your competition charge? This is important if the consumer has a preconceived notion of the value of the product. For example, if I go to a paint store and see a gallon on paint is priced at $50, I might go to another store to see if I can get the same quality (different brand) for a better price. I may have a belief that I am not going to pay more than $30 for a gallon of paint (or $20K for a car, or $3 for loaf of bread, or $1 for a pen, etc.)

The bigger issue for me is the value proposition. I believe people will pay to solve a problem and in many respects they will pay a premium if they believe you are the right and safe choice. Making the buyer understand that you are the right and safe choice is both hard and critical. Understand this is not a universal construct. For example, if I have $1 to spend for pen it may not matter if it is a BIC or another brand as long as it fits my budget. If I have a Rolls Royce for sale and my buying audience cannot afford a Rolls (or do not want it) then price it does not matter.

The hard work is the unique value proposition, helping other to understand your value, where and how to market your product and knowing how the problem you solve will allow you to charge more.

Pricing the product is in fact telling a story about the product. For example, why would I pay $50 for a gallon of paint when I can a similar product for 40% less? If price is not an issue, you can focus on the parts of the products story that are important to a client. The higher price for the paint can be told in a story: it is safer (less smell), easier to clean (important to a busy mother because it save time), last longer (don’t have to do it as often), provide a better finish (looks better), or is easier to apply (saves time.)  If those concepts are not important to your audience, you have a different kind of problem.

Sometimes price is not a consideration. If you are selling to high net worth individuals, they are buying prestige and convenience. The price is secondary. If I am buying a gallon of paint, price is primary.

Finally, pricing is impacted by the demographics of the audience. It is harder to sell your product using “pain” as the value proposition when selling to an older audience because their life experience tells them that “been there done that. This too shall pass.” Pain works better on younger people who have a need for more immediate gratification.

Bottom line is that pricing is an effective marriage between cost to produce, what people will pay, and the story that motivates them to buy.

Article Presented by Ace-Envelopes

Direct mail can be used for everything from selling, raising funds, to generating more foot and web traffic to your store, restaurant, trade show or office. Besides just routing through the post, direct mail envelopes can be used for a variety of purposes. Below are some reasons to consider using printed envelopes for direct mail.

1. Establish company identity: Just as any other entity announces itself on printed material, so should businesses when it comes to their direct mail. Custom envelopes serve to let a potential customer know who you are, while also helping to cement your identity.

2. Professional impression: Before a piece of direct mail is opened, the envelope is the most important aspect of your communication. It is more professional at all times to use an envelope that represents your business.

3. Build Familiarity: A custom envelope, over time, allows customers to get to know who you are. On that basis alone, many will open your mail. This can only be accomplished with a custom direct mail envelope.

4. Special deal announcements: Everyone loves a sale or a special deal. Use the outside of the envelope to entice potential customers. Direct mail writers have always understood that the writing on the outside of an envelope can increase response.

5. Use colour to entice customers: A custom designed printed envelope can make a statement worth looking into. That’s the goal: to get the recipient to look inside of the envelope.

Vibrant colours go a long way toward achieving that goal. Use vibrant colours if you can, to make your mail stand out. You may find that various colours evoke certain responses, so don’t be afraid to change the colours frequently. One idea is to colour code according to holidays and societal events.

6. Change up the sizes: By changing the average size of the envelope somewhat, to set your direct mail apart from others. Try using both smaller and larger envelopes and note the responses you receive.

7. Graphics, illustration and design: Only a custom envelope can include the kinds of illustration, graphics and photography that include action and movement. Today’s audience expects to see graphics. The visual aspects of advertising are very powerful. Use them to convey your message and to effectively promote your products and services.

8. Personalize the message: Only a custom envelope may be used to personalize the company message. Use your company message on the outside of the envelope to draw attention. The more that people see your message, the sooner they will remember your company. The more familiar people become with your mailings, the better the chance that they will respond.

9. Try different ways of printing on the envelope: Use a flap side envelope. Use plastic or try a continuous form. Anything that is different will set your direct mail out from the pack, which means it could entice more interest. Try more bold colours; change the size, typeface and other adjustments.

10. Use the front and back of printed envelopes: Make every piece of “real estate” count. Figure out creative ways to say some of the same things or expound upon what was said on the back. This can be a very attention getting tactic and an opportunity to get the most out of your direct mail efforts, with custom envelopes.

Article Presented by Ace-Envelopes

Ace-Envelopes is one of UK’s leading suppliers of over 700 types of plain envelopes, bespoke custom made envelopes, business envelopes and printed envelopes fornext day delivery service to meet your business needs. For more information about envelopes from Ace-Envelopes please visit – http://www.ace-envelopes.co.uk/

Contributed by Suzen Pettit

If you’re looking to grow you can’t do it all on your own. You just can’t. Your foundation must be laid so that you can be freed up to do your thing. You know, your thing? The thing that makes you money.

As much as we may look like Wonder Woman, or so as not to be sexist, Superman, and feel like them too, we cannot be a one person band and expect that the everything will just fall into place. It’ll fall alright, down, into bed, if you make it that far, from exhaustion.

A smart and successful small biz owner has back up, and I’d love to share my back up tricks honed from trial and error throughout the years that have saved me countless hours of unproductive work.

One of the best tips I’ve gotten to be constantly reminding ourselves of what is a time waster and what is a productive money making action for our day is from the wonderful business coach Jane Pollak, that goes like this: when creating your day to day tasks, use a green marker and mark which daily tasks are your business growth, money making tasks, and which are not. I usually make my list and then mark the moneymaking tasks with a green dot. If nothing else this will be a wake up call. Are you wasting way too much time on your proposals? There’s a system for that! Are you crunching all your numbers yourself for an hour a day? No need for that! Invoicing taking too long? There are a number of great programs for that.

Here’s my top 5 time saving and either free or really inexpensive systems, as I am a tightwad when it comes to these things… all designed to free you up so you can spend your day tackling the big stuff:

1) A really intuitive invoicing system: I use Freshbooks. Not only does it invoice really easily, but it sends them either by snail mail or email, does all kinds of cool numbers crunching, runs reports, allows you to send estimates that can convert to an invoice, and so much more. Bookkeeping — which I personally can’t stand to do so this forces me to do it in a fun and quick way — made easy, and quick.  A nominal cost well worth the expense. Allows for customization as well

2) A proposal/Contract system — which used to take me half a day to do — try Quotegine. It allows you to create, save, customize and re-use templates in a library, sends it out with a click of a button and allows for an e-signature on your clients end so that they don’t even have to print out, excepting for themselves or mail, attach, or fax back. Just pressing a button lands it back in your hands within a fraction of the time it would take otherwise, allowing you to get going on your next project. Free up until a certain amount of clients, and again, allows you to white label it.

3) A CRM system, otherwise known as a Contact Relationship Management System. Other wise known as a database. If you’re not already on Outlook, look no further than cloud based Highrise, run by the same cool, uber smart folks who created Freshbooks. If you are using your email contacts list as your database I might have to come over there and smack you. Highrise has all the bells and whistles you could ask for to allow you to keep on top of all of your prospects, clients and important business affiliates and contacts in an organized manner, create and schedule tasks and have them appear in your inbox when they come due, as a reminder to ‘get on that!’ It can also be synced with Freshbooks so that your whole client profile, jobs as well as the payments and invoicing are under one heading.

4) Housecleaning! I know that this involves money, but again, if you are trying to be all things to all people including a family of 4 back home, something is going to cave if you’re working hard all day and then expected to come home and clean the house as well. Even if you bring someone in just once per month to do the heavy cleaning, or pay your kids to do it. A scary thought I know. The money you spend here will make itself up to you in ROI if you’re taking the time where you would have been under the bed cleaning dust bunnies to instead contact 3 more warm leads to invite them to lunch. Time much better spent. I’d give you the name of mine as a referral but am afraid she’d be spread too thin and not have time for me. Selfish, I know, but some things are more precious than others. I do know that the team at The Maids are great though. Ask for Melissa.

5) Social Media tools. I have a confession. Social media is not my biggest strength. Other than LinkedIn, I do it because I have to, not because I want to, and I make no bones about it to my clients, as they need to do it as well. What has made it tolerable for me has been a little tool called Onlywire, which allows me to share what you’re reading right here with a load of social media and bookmarking sites instead of spending oodles of time uploading things separately when I could be interacting with folks online and off. Great for the SEO.

Hope these help you be more efficient and use your time more effectively. Now run to that networking meeting!

About the Author:

Suzen Pettit blogs at http://omaginarium.com/blog/, a site that guides small businesses through the maze of technology to help them grow their online presence with successful SEO.

Whenever you receive an email from me you will ALWAYS see my contact information at the bottom and know exactly how you can get in touch with me.  You will see:

• My name
• My company’s name
• My telephone and fax number
• My email address (with an active hyperlink)
• My website address (with an active hyperlink)
• And an active hyperlink to the signup page of my newsletter

But do you have all of your contact information on the bottom of all of your emails?  If not, why?  And why is it so important that you have an email signature?  Well, because:

• Your clients and potential clients know exactly how to get in touch with you
• It’s a good marketing tool
• You can use it to promote special offers
• It can drive traffic to your website
• It tells people who you are and what you do

Setting up an email signature is simple to do, and I will tell you how!  As a general rule of thumb your email signature shouldn’t be more than about six or seven lines long otherwise it just becomes too big and may detract from your email.  After all you don’t want your email signature to be longer than your email!

Your basic email signature should contain:

• Your name
• Your company’s name
• Your telephone, fax number, and email address
• Your Website URL with an active hyperlink
• And maybe a line promoting one of your services, a special offer, a link to your newsletter, or anything else that you would want to let your target audience know about.

Set up your email signature so that it AUTOMATICALLY goes out on every single email that you send, whether it’s a new email or you’re replying or forwarding on an email.

Here’s how to set up your email signature …

Outlook

1. Go to Tools > Options > Mail Format > Signature Picker.

2. Click on New and then enter a name for your signature i.e. Business

3. Client on Next and then design your signature in the blank box. You can change the font, font size, and text color

4. Once done click on Finish and preview your signature in the preview window. If necessary, go back and edit it.

5. Once you’re happy with your new signature click on OK.

6. Ensue that the Use this signature by default box has the name of your new signature in it, and click on OK.

7. Congratulations – You’re done!

Outlook Express

1. Go To Tools > Options > Signatures Tab.

2. Tick Add signatures to all outgoing messages.

3. Deselect Don’t add signatures to all ‘Replies and Forwards’.

4. Add your signature in the Edit Signature text box

5. Once you’re happy with your new signature click on OK.

6. Congratulations – You’re done!

Gmail

1. Go To Mail Settings (looks like a cog wheel in the top right corner of your Gmail account).

2. Click on Labs.

3. Search for Signature Tweaks (this places your signature before the quoted text in a reply, and removes the “–” line that appears before signatures).

4. Click on Enable, and then scroll down to the bottom of the page and click Save Changes.

5. Now go to your General Tab and scroll down until you find Signatures.

6. Select the email address that you want to create a signature for.

7. Create your email signature.

8. Scroll down to the bottom and click on Save Changes.

9. Congratulations – You’re done!

Traditional web conferencing solutions are centered on sharing your screen; they don’t help you produce good outcomes from your meetings. With Lucid Meetings you can share your screen, but you can also do so much more. For working teams this means getting more done with less by combining collaboration, web conferencing, and teleconferencing into one seamless solution. Now everything you need to meet with your teams and plan, decide, assign and track is all in one place. For one low fee.

For organizational leaders, boost productivity across your teams by transforming and improving what employees dislike the most, their meetings.

Benefits of Lucid Meetings:

Lucid Meetings provides:

– online historical record repository
– provide a scalable organization-wide all-in-one facility for a company’s teams and projects
– actionable records
– documented discussions
– collaboration tools
– cloud-based solution
– easy real-time communication tools
– affordable alternative
– expert meeting infrastructure & guidance

Which helps:

– oversight into teams
– it’s the results, stupid! (not the talking)
– provide a unified organizational experience
– create alignment between project goals and meeting outcomes
– to look professional; impress clients and stakeholders with your meeting organization & management skills
– provide continuity between meetings to avoid repeating discussions and revisiting decisions
– Improve visibility / transparency into what teams are discussing and accomplishing in their meetings
– increase value for time spent; if 30%+ of your day is spent in meetings, make it count!

Unlike the competition:

– disjointed solutions that rubber band together wikis, base camp, dropbox
– difficult and expensive enterprise collaboration: sharepoint, Jive, and others
– status quo with old technology, such as Webex, GoTo, Conference calls, online meeting presentation tools

How do people get started using Lucid Meetings?

Lucid Meetings offers a free 30 day trial with all new accounts. Many customers first learned about Lucid Meetings by attending a meeting hosted by someone else. Others find us online and spend time reviewing the how-to videos or contact us for an introduction when they have questions.

To learn more about Lucid Meetings, check out: http://www.lucidmeetings.com