Jumpstart Your Business

If you want to build a sound relationship with your best customer, you need to focus on communicating well with him or her. There are 7 caveats to good communications and here they are:
1. Context
Who is the audience and what do you want them to do?

2. Content
What single question is your communication designed to answer? Do you have the answer already or do you need to research it and if so, what information do you need?

Getting an early start in the CRM software industry may have helped Salesforce.com to become a leader in the Hosted CRM space, but another CRM solution provider is making a statement of their own, paving the way for some intense competition in the small to mid-size business sector.

Better known for its on premise desktop CRM software, Commence Corporation has been providing contact management, sales force automation and marketing campaign management solutions to small and mid-size companies for more than two decades. The company introduced a web-based hosted version of their popular CRM software and is gaining notoriety. With an outstanding track record for performance, reliability and world-class customer service Commence is a strong competitor and becoming a favorite among smaller businesses looking for a flexible hosted CRM solution with productivity tools that are easy to use.

“Commence web CRM has an impressive and unique user interface that makes the product very easy to use and navigate” says Gary Sanders of OK! Magazine. “The product’s Home Page or Dashboard is completely customizable by individual or job function. This allows each user to create a dashboard to the way they work. The value here is that you can place the functions you use most right on the home page, such as today’s calendar and activities, e-mail, sales opportunities, leads, reminders and even an interactive sales funnel. We hadn’t seen this in any other CRM solution. This flexibility enables people to conduct 90% of their daily activities without ever leaving the Home Page and has really improved productivity.”

See the whole story at Customers Find Good Value In Commence CRM

Want to make your small business look big? You can learn a lot from Monte Enbysk, a senior editor at Microsoft Office Live, who in his article in Entrepreneur, today, points out these ten things as the answer to what customers are looking for when they visit:

1. How your business is unique
Answer the question “Who are you?” as interestingly and compellingly (and honestly) as possible. This includes writing management bios that mention your expertise, years of experience and any unique attributes or details that may set you apart from others.

2. A clear sense of what your company offers
It’s incredible how many sites you visit and you’re not sure what the company offers. Make it a priority on your home page to provide at least general information about your products and/or services, with links to specifics on a Products page.

Small businesses can learn a lot from Allen Adamson, managing director of the New York office of Landor Associates, who in his article in Forbes, today, points out that strong brands are clear about what they represent. Strong brands are strong because people know what they stand for and how they fit into their lives. If you haven’t got a clue what a brand does, or what it can do for you, no amount of sales pitching will help. What will help, as companies like Cisco, BASF and Aflac now know, is not touting routers or polymers, or even quackers, but giving consumers a clear connection between promise and purpose. And, no, while brand builders can’t control Mother Nature, they can control what people think about their brands.

For the complete article please see CMOs: Make A Connection Between Brand Promise And Purpose

Steve Strauss posted this in his column in USA Today. I think that any small business that is not maximizing its Web presence is missing a golden opportunity.

First, let’s make sure we are on the same page. When discussing Web 2.0, what we are talking about is an era where websites are more interactive, engaging, and interesting than before. They are not static, as they were, say, 10 years ago, where all you could do was read. Instead, a Web 2.0 site is one where visitors can engage with you, your business, and your site by:

• Posting comments on your blog, or articles, or chatting in a forum.

• Re-tweeting your content, sharing it on Facebook, or Digging it.

• Watching a video, listening to a podcast, or participating in a webinar.

• Taking a quiz or responding to a poll.

The essence of Web 2.0 is that it is collaborative and interactive. By creating a site that engages and interacts with people, that makes them want to stick around (hence the term “sticky site”) you give people more of a chance to create a connection with your business.
For the complete article please see Maximizing your web presence is key to building your small business

You need to understand who your target market consists of and what they think of your business and your product/service. Your target market may be one or more market segments or sub-sets of your market, made up of people or organizations sharing one or more characteristics that cause them to demand similar products and/or services based on qualities of those products such as price or function. Here are 5 critical characteristics which help you understand your favorite customers:

1. Demographics
These are basic identifiable characteristics of individual final consumers and organizational consumers, groups of final consumers and organizational consumers. Demographics are often used as segmentation bases because groups of people, or organizations, with similar demographics often have similar needs & desires that are distinct from those with different backgrounds. They include: age, race, religion, gender, family size, occupation, income level, education level, marital status and others.

Concrete Ears

photo credit: peter pearson

To really understand your market and get to know what pain your favorite customers are suffering and what their concerns are, you need to be actively engaged in conversations with them. Conversation has two sides to it – talking and listening and the latter is what allows us to gain information. The difference between hearing and listening should not be confused.

Steve Strauss posted this in his column in USA Today. One of the points he makes is to never stop prospecting:
There are three types of customers
1. New customers
2. Existing customers
3. Exiting customers
To remain in business, you must keep these three balls rotating: New customers become existing customers, existing customers change habits, and exiting customers leave, so new customers must be always located.
Never stop prospecting. Never stop hustling and proposing. Don’t stop marketing.
And don’t rest on your laurels.
For the complete article please see 4 sure-fire ways to lose business

Do you ever stop to consider the language that we use to describe our relationships with our customers. The target customer. Our hunter sales people. Shotgun marketing. Farming the installed base. Rifle shot marketing. In every one of these instances, either the customer is a target or we reduce him/her to a cow or a hen to consistently produce milk or eggs.

photo credit: Losttrekker

No wonder the customer has rebelled. And it is about time that we realize that the bullets are headed our way but no longer as arrows to a target but bullets of information either blasted out by customers as shotgun pellets or as rifle shots of information targeted directly at us, the enterprise.

The customer is no longer the target, we the enterprise are. We need to stop thinking of the customer as the target.

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The sale is not the only way for you to interact with your customers, says Mike Moran of Search Engine Guide. You need to remember about the rest of the buying cycle and not the last click that comes about from the search. Too many people have gotten the idea that search marketing is great for sales, but have forgotten everything else about search marketing, and maybe marketing in general.

To really benefit from your customer searches, your site must be search engine optimized with the right search terms in your content. This only happens if you truly understand the language your customer uses to describe your product and you can only discover this if you listen closely to your customer.

For the full story check out: Stop Selling Your Products!