Jumpstart Your Business

Keeping your business in the eye of the public can be achieved either by spending large sums of money on advertising or by getting free publicity by making your small business newsworthy. The Exposure features a list of 20 ways to make your small business newsworthy. Here is a sample of them:

1. Run a “silliest thing” or “dumb mistakes” contest with your customers. For instance, if you’re a shoe repair shop, ask your customers for the silliest things they’ve ever done with their shoes. If you’re a sport goods retailer ask your customers for the dumbest mistakes they’ve made while camping. These are great human interest stories that the press will love.

2. Do you have a customer that uses your products in an unusual way or uses your product to become a high achiever? If you run a gym, is one of your customers a bodybuilding champion? If you own a bike shop is one of your customers a champion trial racer? If you manage an electronics store do you have a customer who has invented a whiz-bang contraption?

3. Tie your business into something that took place in the past. Go to your local library and find articles from 50 or 100 years ago that may somehow tie into the product or service you provide.

Get the complete list of “20 Ways to Make Your Small Business Newsworthy!”

The need to collect relevant marketing information and the inherent fragmented state of current customer data is driving the urgency for a retooled Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution for mid-market companies, Such a solution must possess the following key advantages:

1. It must provide a correct balance of performance and investment.

In Part 1 we discussed some of the reasons why CRM applications are failing. In Part 2 we address some of the fixes that you can make to prevent failing CRM applications.

How does a company ensure a successful CRM application implementation?

Three basic steps:
• A complete understanding of the target customer and the way he/she thinks.
• A productive data capture environment. That includes the customer needs, pain points, business language, key words and phrases used when looking for your products or services
• The right marketing message that resonates with the target customer.

How to pick a good CRM application software suite?

Firstly, you need to think of CRM as a marketing process and not as a way to manage sales cycles. Most of the applications in use today do not fit today’s marketing needs because they were built for sales cycle management.

Also, applications which automate the sales cycle process have totally different characteristics from their sibling tools used for designing and constructing marketing strategy and marketing messages. These tools must be able to satisfy both the company and the customer needs.

Lately, there’s been much talk about the failure of installed Customer Relationship Management applications to deliver the increase in sales volumes that companies are looking for. The reason often given is that most of the installed applications are old and don’t relate to the complexity of today’s environment. Customers are being urged to invest in the new breed of applications with the promise of better results because of the currency of these apps.

Interestingly enough, a close look at the application landscape reveals that the newer applications are just as irrelevant as the old ones because they both concentrate on increasing sales volumes without assisting companies to better understand their markets and better segment them to get at the targeted markets they need to pursue.

The newest game in town is CRM application modernization. Many an IS director and many a Business Executive is being hotly courted to re-engineer or modernize their CRM application portfolio. This article looks at the basic reasons why you may not be entirely ready for CRM modernization. It also discusses some of the pitfalls to avoid.

CRM applications in particular need to be constantly modernized because the majority of today’s business organizations have become “subject to change without notice”. A CRM application which was developed or acquired to solve yesterday’s business problem based on yesterday’s business requirement, may not fulfill the needs of today’s business process. The application must be aligned to the business needs and this is not a one-time alignment but rather an on-going need.

All of your life you have been told to learn to think outside the box. All through school you have been taught to think outside the box and now comes this idiot who says the time has come to think inside the box. When did he arrive from Pluto or was it Uranus?

The Wikipedia definition of the term “Thinking outside the box is to think differently, unconventionally or from a new perspective. This phrase often refers to novel, creative and smart thinking.” Thinking outside the box inspires our creative juices and gets us looking at all the different possibilities that lay around us. It makes us look at all the options and then some, before we choose the strategic path upon which to tread.

This is told in the first person as seen from the eyes of someone who would like to be your favorite customer.

1. You ignored me when I arrived and now I’m leaving, your nose is still in the guest book. How about noticing and acknowledging your customers.

Small business executives have to wear multiple hats and generally have little time and very limited budgets to devote to marketing activities. Nevertheless, they need to understand their target markets and favorite customers even moreso than their larger counterparts because of the very little room they have for mistakes. So how does Social Media come into play in this environment?

Interestingly enough, social media gives the small business the unique opportunity of gathering marketing data and encouraging customer loyalty with very minimal outlay. Creating a Facebook page for your business or a Twitter account and getting your customers to join a select group can get you valuable information if you encourage them to tweet or post, and collect and analyze their tweets or their Facebook comments.

Using the Internet to do business is here to stay and more and more small businesses are having an online presence. You need to think of your business in terms of what it takes to build a more relevant and targeted customer base to meet your market head on rather than how to push your product or service out to unsuspecting prospects. Here are five things to do to set up a web strategy to compete effectively in today’s online world.

1. Build a web site with content that is written around the key phrases that your customers use to find a business or products/services like yours.

I’ve arrived at the conclusion that I always want to tip better if my wait person smiles and makes me feel comfortable. So I’ve stolen a little from a Nat King Cole classic and written a song for all wait staff:

Smile though your feet are aching
Smile though your back is breaking
Although a tear may be ever so near
That’s the time you must keep on trying
Smile, what’s the use of crying?
You’ll get your tips in a higher pile
If you just smile