BusinessKnowHow: What’s the hardest thing about starting a business? For many new business owners, the answer is “Finding customers.” Having a great product or service that you are sure many people will need isn’t good enough. Customers won’t find you or your web site just because you have started selling a product or service. Indeed, most business owners have to go on regular and frequent fishing trips to find customers and keep new business coming in their doors. But how do you do that? Here are several suggestions to get you started.
Develop a plan. Consider who would make the ideal customer.
Realize there is no one path to success. Sales often happen because prospective customers hear about your products and services in several different ways and from several different sources.
Work your local newspapers. Daily and weekly newspapers are an incredible source of contact information and leads to potential customers.
Watch for events that may bring your potential market together. Contact the organizers of the event and offer to give away your product or service as a prize during the event in exchange for having the group promote you in their promotions.
Attend meetings and seminars that your prospects might attend. If you’ve been doing that and haven’t made contacts that could lead to sales, look in the newspapers to see what other organizations hold events that might attract your target market and attend some of those meetings.
Follow up after meetings. Contact the people you’ve met to see if they may be prospects.
Ways To Find Customers [BusinessKnowHow]
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Do Mens’ Business
Biz Report: Over 800 consumers in the U.K. were queried about their shopping experiences directly after the transaction had occurred. With the experience fresh in their minds the consumers were asked to give feedback, via email and text, on aspects such as availability of staff assistance, levels of satisfaction and customer service.
“Men are much more likely to go into a shop, get what they need and come away feeling as though they’ve done a good job,” said Rob Keve, CEO of Fizzback. “Women expect more from the retail experience, and will notice things like poor customer service, unhelpful staff or below-standard products, and give a more negative rating accordingly.”
Other key findings of the survey are:
– Men are 22 percent more likely to give positive feedback than women
– Men are 3 percent more satisfied overall after shopping.
– Women on the whole enjoy the shopping experience less than men
– Customer service drew the highest levels of response from both men and women
Men enjoy shopping experience more than women [Biz Report]
Categories
Beer Pong Opportunity
WSJ.com: Sick of cleaning sticky floors after bouts of beer pong, a popular campus drinking game, recent Northwestern University graduates Andy Wright and Mike Johnson put their engineering degrees to use. They devised a triangular rubber mat that helps keep plastic cups of beer from toppling over.
Then they started marketing the mats through their online company, Bottle Cap Technologies, for $9.99. They say they have sold more than 100 since April and are negotiating to sell 1,000 in one swoop to an online store called drinkingstuff.com. “Now, you don’t have to clean up the mess and you don’t waste beer,” says Mr. Johnson.
These guys aren’t exactly Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. But Messrs. Wright and Johnson, both 22 years old, are part of a new wave of young people trying to make money tapping into their peers’ devotion to beer pong, a cross between ping-pong and beer chugging. As beer-pong season hits a peak with the start of the school year, these beer-pong entrepreneurs are running tournaments and peddling customized beer-pong tables, balls and apparel.
Thwock, Gulp, Kaching! Beer Pong Inspires Inventors [WSJ.com]
This is an article submitted by Eric Feng. Submit your article! Find out more.
Blooper #1: Not telling us why we should listen to you
Never assume that just because you have an audience, we are obliged to listen to you. We may love you (that’s why we came in the first place) but never take advantage of the trust we have for you. It is an extreme turn-off when the audience has to do the work i.e. figure out how your presentation is relevant to us. We are a bunch of selfish egomaniacs. We love ourselves so much! And we don’t care about your experiences unless it teaches us something that we can use for ourselves. So here’s a word of advice: If you want to share your experiences, please do. But always include a message, something that will benefit us, your beloved audience!
Blooper #2: Ignoring us throughout your speech
We get bored easily. Period. If you keep talking about you, you, you, you, you… we will switch off. We want to be part of your speech. We really do. Get us involved. It could be as simple as asking us a question. It gives us a chance to hear ourselves talk. It could be as simple as playing a mini game with us. It gets us up on our seat. Please entertain us! Make us love you. We really want to because if you keep ignoring our needs, we will do the same. Lucky for the speaker, he allowed us to ask questions at any point in his presentation and guess what, we did! In my opinion, that was his saving grace!
Blooper #3: Going overtime
No matter how good you are, never ever go over time!!! Unless we paid you thousands of dollars to teach us something and you are about to share with us the ultimate secret to earning another ten million. If you want your audience to love you, end earlier than expected! It tells us that you respect our time. It makes you special because most speakers don’t observe that. And guess what, the next time you give your presentation; we will be there to support you!
Blooper #4: Spelling errors on your slides
If you have glaring spelling mistakes in your slides, here’s the image you are portraying to your audience: sloppy and cannot be bothered. Unless that’s what you want the audience to think of you, I suggest you get someone to do a spell check.
Blooper #5: Bad pronunciation of words
It cracks me up when some presenters stumble upon the same word every single time, without any sign of remorse. There was one time I sat through a presentation where the team had to review a company’s product named Morange. And throughout the ten minutes presentation, they came up with oh so many ways to pronounce this word.
And I swear one time I heard Moron. They might as well labelled the product Moronic Morange. That would be… memorable. Some “credit” has to be given to the company who named their product mo-range.
Blooper #6: Reading off the script
Although my preference is to go without a script, sometimes there is a need for it. However more often than not, speakers are too reliant on their script. You see them referring to their script even if it is just reading their name and designation??!! Yes, this is very puzzling. I once came across a book that taught me how to read from a script. Here’s the golden rule. Never ever speak when your eyes are on your script. Instead, you should follow this three-step process: see, stop, say.
First, look down and take a snapshot of your script. Memorize a chunk of words. Bring your head up and then pause for a second. When you are ready, say what you have memorized in your own words. It’s a three-step process: see, stop and say. It is very important that you pause. Yes, it may be weird for you but in reality, the pause helps make your speech conversational. It also creates anticipation, which further deepen the impact.
Blooper #7: Starting your presentation weak
Maybe it is just me but I get really pissed off when a speaker starts off his presentation with “Urm.. I guess I should probably start… ah ok, here goes…”. Or even worse “I am not really prepared for this presentation because (give some lame excuse). But anyway, I will start…” Trust me, giving excuses of why you may not do a good job will hardly win the sympathy of your audience. Instead, you will make us feel that we are unworthy of your time. You will be better off not giving the presentation since no one will be listening anyway.
As the saying goes, you will not get a second chance to make a good first impression. So make full use of your first 30 seconds to impress your audience. Here are a couple of ways you can start a presentation powerfully. You can tell a personal story and relate it back to the message of your presentation. Starting your presentation with a visual stimulating or humorous video clip will also create impact. Or begin with a thought provoking quote or a shocking statistic, which will create the listening for your presentation. All these are far more superior to your usual good morning/afternoon/evening niceties or worse, apologies.
Eric Feng is an acclaimed public speaking coach and he blogs at http://blog.ericfeng.com. Get a free chapter of his soon-to-be published book at http://www.thefaqbook.com before it’s taken down.
Categories
The New Work Revolution – Communication
Communication of the sort I was talking about does not depend on comprehensiveness of what is being said but on focus – almost exactly the opposite of a lawyer’s brief. Good communication is not the small print of one-sided contracts. It is about someone owning a problem or opportunity and making it his or her job to solve or exploit it.
If communication can be focused there is a chance that this will happen. Not always, of course. Responsibility for communication lies squarely with the sender but if the receiver cannot receive, the sender doesn’t stand a chance.
If all this seems a little remote from the urgent need to provide jobs – any jobs – I do understand. But ask yourself whether understanding the big scene, planning ahead a little, knowing what you want to do and systematically setting about doing it might not have avoided many of the present situations, be they unemployment or unhappiness at work.
Just as we cannot communicate everything we would like to, so we cannot be prepared for every eventuality in life. But we can attend to the fundamentals and know what route we are intending to follow, other things being equal.
Earlier on in my discussion of The New Work Revolution I outlined the clash between Global Village and Balanced Life Style. That clash is here, now. Many of you already feel its effects; more will do so in the future.
There are two problems.
The first is that the potentially enormous economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China (popularly known as BRIC – hopefully one that will not be dropped) have awakened to the possibilities of taking over as the low-cost producers and suppliers of goods and services from the high-cost countries. Bernie Ecclestone predicted that the centre of motor racing will move from Europe to the East. It has already partly done so.
He is correct when he says that Europe has been the centre of so many events, not just motor racing, for a long time. It is now losing that position. In his words ‘Europe needs to wake up’. Why has this happened?
Europe became rich and, as rich people are inclined to do, began to think more about spending it than making it. The result? Europe is now going round and round in circles distributing everybody else’s wealth but paying almost no attention to generating it or to the people who are trying to do so. Soon there will be more money being spent on the distribution of money than money to distribute. In some spheres that has already happened. There are few more contentious matters than the distribution of wealth.
The second problem is that, even if there were not the competition of low-cost centres to contend with, automation and the development of robotic production is reducing the work available for the labour force. This applies equally in the office and the factory.
A young member of my family who runs a small specialised engineering business got rid of all his workers some time ago and installed the latest computer-controlled lathes. I asked him why?
He explained that his automated plant suffered from no fatigue, no illness, was not subject to controls by the Health and Safety Executive, did not have to conform to all sorts of impossible standards. He had no wages to account for, no pensions to provide, no tax to pay for others, no unions demanding longer tea-breaks. He was in control. He looked very relaxed.
How can you be prepared to deal with these threats? I’ll try to provide some pointers.
John Bittleston blogs at TerrificMentors.com, a site that provides mentoring for those who wish a change in career or job, wanting to start a business or looking to improve their handling of people (including themselves).