Doing The Right Things Right

For a business to be effective there are several right things that need to be done, such as the promotion of your products or services, having a good pay structure that attracts talented people, providing a customer after sales service and delivering everything on time.

But it is not just by doing the right things that your business will thrive and grow, if you want your business to be successful you must ensure that you are doing the right things right.

Using marketing to promote your products or services is the right thing to do, but if you are not asking your customers for feedback about exactly what influenced them to purchase your products or services you are not doing the right thing right.

If you are providing an after sales customer service you are doing the right thing, but if it is only a customer complaint gathering exercise then you are not doing the right thing right.

Making the delivery of your products or services on time is the right thing to do, but without finding out if the customer is delighted in doing business with you, it is not doing the right thing right.

Thousands of businesses are doing what they know are the right things, but only a few hundred are finding success, that is because those are the businesses which are doing the right things right.

Is Your Business Too Fat?

When a human is overweight it makes many of the things that you would normally do in your life more difficult, because it is not as easy to function properly when your body is carrying too much fat.

Well this principle is also true for your business, if it is carrying too much fat it will perform sluggishly and this will greatly affect the productivity and efficiency of your business.

For a business to be successful it needs to be agile and lean with no unnecessary extra weight to drag it down and slow its progress. Anything that does not contribute to the growth and success of your business will count as fat and needs to be eliminated.

In an economy that is putting so much pressure on the ability of businesses to perform, only those businesses that are carrying the least amount of fat will emerge as successful sustainable businesses.

All business leaders should now be carefully reviewing their business activities and determining if there are any that are not needed because they only constitute adding a burden and are essentially only business fat.

Are You Bringing on the Best Worker or the Best Personality?

In an ideal world, employers would get the employee who is both a great worker and exhibits a fantastic personality. Remember, I said the ideal world.

Truth be told, many employers end up getting outstanding workers who have the personalities of a door mat or workers whose personality lights the room on fire, yet they can’t think their way out of a paper bag. In a day and age where employers use internal human resources, outside staffing agencies and even social media sites to get a better idea of who they may be interviewing and ultimately hiring, just what exactly should companies be looking for when adding to their payroll ranks?

Know the Cost of Hiring Someone?

Keep in mind, the average expense of hiring and orientation for a non-exempt employee was reported a decade ago to be approximately $1,100 (Saratoga Institute - 1999 Human Resource Financial Report). The average cost of hiring and orientation for an exempt employee came in at around $9,000 (Saratoga Institute). While the cost of replacement figures will differ from company to company, take note that today’s tight economy makes hiring the right people all the more critical.

I have always been of the belief that while finding a strong worker with a good personality is the ideal catch, there are many more cases where you will end up with one or the other.

When you hire someone who is more than qualified for the job yet they tend to keep to themselves, you typically end up with:

* A worker, who will give you 100 percent on the job, yet may shy away from after-hours activities involving the company. They also may keep to themselves during the day and not engage in a lot of one-on-one conversation with others;

* A worker, who is not going to be one who needs much attention and/or micromanaging. This person knows what is expected of them and will come to work regularly with the attitude of accomplishing the goals and tasks set for them.

When you hire someone who is mildly or extremely personable yet they may not entirely focus on their jobs, you typically end up with:

* A worker, who will in most instances, be very outgoing and take part in different office functions. They may end up being the life of the party in the office, so one may wonder if they’re not spending too much time talking and not enough time concentrating on their jobs;

* A worker, who oftentimes takes it upon themselves to bring others into the fold as far as office happenings both during and after the work day. This person can sometimes have too much placed on their shoulders as far as helping to bring the team together outside of work or for in-house functions. Remember, you did not hire them to be a party coordinator in most cases.

One of the oftentimes overlooked factors when hiring people is where and how they will fit into your corporate structure.

If you’re hiring someone for your sales team, you want an individual who is outgoing and can make a connection with both current and potential clients. Someone who is more to themselves is not in most cases going to be a good fit. Conversely, the people you hire for in-house work that will not have direct contact with customers and/or upper management do not necessarily need to be bubbly and outgoing.

Another factor to keep in mind when hiring is where the individual will be placed.

Some new-hires are great fits for your company individually, but then they find themselves lost and unhappy when you match them with a manager who is of the complete opposite personality. Conversely, you may hire someone who is more than qualified, yet lacks the ‘people skills’ to be entirely productive. Yet, when you match them up with a stellar manager, you can see them emerge from their shells.

As you can see, there are a myriad of things to consider during the hiring process.

Both talent and personality are just two of the things to consider when the interview process begins.

Dave Thomas writes for Business.com, an online resource destination for businesses of all sizes to research, find, and compare the products and services they need to run their businesses.

Motivating Your Employees

A good business leader is a multi-faceted individual who possesses many strengths and capabilities. He can manage budgets, spearhead marketing campaigns, design products, network with industry experts, and appraise contract management software. He is dedicated, hard-working, smart, and creative. But even with all these exemplary qualities, a business leader is truly only a leader if he also possesses one crucial trait: motivation skills. In fact, no matter your walk of life, if you seek to be a successful leader you need to be able to motivate those people who follow your guidance.

Motivated employees are more productive and cohesive. They also are more likely to be happy with their job and less likely to seek work elsewhere. But how can you motivate your employees and achieve these results? How can you make them as passionate about your business as you are?

Here are a few tips:

Keep Clear Reinforcements

There are two general ways of explicitly motivating people: positive incentives and negative tactics. Using positive motivation creates goals and incentives to which your employees can strive. Negative motivation, on the other hand, involves using threats or fear of reprisal in order to achieve productivity goals. Far too many employers use a combination of the two in their attempt to motivate workers; this approach, however, causes threats and incentives to cancel each other out and yield counterproductive ends. For this reason it is important to have a clear approach. Of course, when choosing between the two, most experts would say that positive motivation almost always works better than the negative variety in the long term.

Breed Culture

Many office managers and business leaders believe that it is important to promote workplaces that are “fun” and “relaxed.” These two aims certainly reflect admirable goals, but there is really only one overarching word that should come into consideration here: culture. If having fun office outings, free food, and themed work days translate into a more cohesive office culture – one where employees see themselves as members of a family rather than a team of workers – then fostering a fun office is a good approach to take. If not, you need to consider other ways of promoting employee cohesiveness.

Create Team Incentives

Along similar lines, employee motivation often rises when a collaborate work environment is promoted – when it comes to business projects as well as office functions. While creating individualized incentives may breed stress and competition among employees, group projects and targets can translate into productivity, cohesion, and more motivated employers, even on an individual level. Keep in mind that a desire to build a team culture should carry over into hiring practices. Applicants who are good fits for the culture should be sought out. Employees who detract from it, conversely, should probably be let go.

Hopefully these tips can help you plan an appropriate motivational approach. While a good business leader may be highly motivated, a great one needs to be just as capable of instilling that same spirit in his employees.

Are You Using Social Media in Your Small Business Aspirations?

With 2012 here, many small business leaders are looking to get the New Year off to a positive start, removing any negative memories of the past 12 months.

For those small business heads who have not implemented productive social media campaigns into their plans over the last 12 months, now is the perfect time to plow forward with such efforts.

One of the great things with deploying a social media strategy for your small business is that it essentially doesn’t cost much money, along with opening you up to a new realm of customers.

Some Small Business Leaders Missing the Boat on Social Media

That being said, many small business leaders have been slow to embrace all social media has to offer, meaning the competition is oftentimes getting a leg up. The bottom line is that one’s return on investment (ROI) can be greatly impacted, leaving them playing catch up to competing small businesses.

If you are a small business head and are still lagging behind when it comes to social media, recognize that a consumer or other business may be a potential lead.

When using social media in your small business plans, this allows you to instantly introduce yourself to potential customers. Not only that, you can guide them to your company’s Web site, providing pertinent information that may lead them to start up a business relationship with you.

Most social media campaigns involve more time than money, so this can be especially attractive for those businesses working on a tighter budget, yet still need to spread their message and attain more leads.

What Are Our Social Media Options?

For a small business who has yet to fully embrace social media, what are some of the better SM outlets to assist one’s business in generating more customers?

Among the more notable options (these are not all of them):

* Facebook – As the leader of social media, Facebook and its approximate 750 million users provide a great resource for small businesses seeking to create more leads. Begin with forming a fan page for your small business. Be sure the page offers visitors’ pertinent information related to your business, is set up for back-and-forth conversations with other small businesses/consumers that follow it, provides linking/subscription information to a company newsletter, and is monitored regularly. One aspect where some small businesses come up short when putting together such a page is that they forget about it and only update it off and on. Doing so will turn off consumers and other small businesses coming to you for possible business;

* Twitter – While a budding rival of Facebook, Twitter differs in the sense that small business leaders can use this SM tool to provide both businesses and consumers interested in their product and/or services with valuable links to industry information. As an example, if your small business falls in the salon area, use a company-based Twitter page to share hair-related information with interested parties. By using Twitter hashtags, you can use keywords like hair, haircuts, hair coloring, hairstyles etc. to link up with others who would find your business useful, therefore bettering your opportunity to generate leads;

* LinkedIn – By interlinking both the professional and company profile, you offer individuals who locate your profile information regarding both you and your business. In generating leads through this social media option, make sure you effectively optimize your profile, become linked up with groups that are interested in your audience so that you can be involved in discussions, and lastly search for individuals at companies you want as potential clients.

Should you still be questioning the importance of social media and its ability to help in generating leads, think about the numbers from a study via Constant Contact and Chadwick Martin Bailey. The report notes that 51 percent of Facebook fans and 67 percent of Twitter followers claimed they were more likely to buy from the companies they “liked” on Facebook or “followed” on Twitter.

As all small business owners should know by now, it all comes down to being social.

Dave Thomas, who covers among other items starting a business, writes extensively for Business.com, an online resource destination for businesses of all sizes to research, find, and compare the products and services they need to run their businesses.

Small Business Strategy Guide

This small business strategy guide features insight from experts in several industries showcasing what tweaks they see small businesses making to stay afloat. Some highlights include:

• What sets the small business owner and his or her company apart from a larger company when it comes to Internet marketing
• Tips for going beyond a basic online storefront with e-commerce small businesses
• The real root of the problem small business owners face in strategy development and execution

Read More.....Small Business Strategy Guide

Providing Excellent Customer Care

There are many different aspects of providing quality customer care. It begins with the call center manager, who is responsible for the call center and all the many outside contacts.

The call center manager will decide the amount of time that is dedicated to the training of customer service agents and team leaders. Training is an important aspect of running a quality call center, as customer service agents need it to appropriately represent a company and deliver great service to the customer.

The shift supervisor communicates between the call center manager and the team leaders. They produce reports from the information they receive from team leaders with regards to any issues with attendance, call times, and customer satisfaction rates.

Team leaders spend most of their time on the call floor providing coaching to their customer care agents to ensure their comfort and positive frame of mind.

These agents have the daily responsibility of staying within their policy and procedure guidelines while occasionally dealing with irate customers and still keeping a smile on their face.

Quality assurance is monitored within a call center to ensure a high level of quality is maintained so that customers are receiving the correct information and that they are treated with respect.

A dedicated IT team will keep the call center, including the telephones, computers and call center software, running smoothly so calls can be answered in a timely fashion.

The Secret of a Business Leader’s Success

Experience plays its part and there is always a good measure of luck involved when it comes to understanding what makes a business leader successful.

But there is in fact a deep embedded secret that greatly influences whether a business leader will find success.

That secret is not in the way that they work or indeed not even in what they do, it is a secret that dwells within them.

It is the capacity to believe that they can and will make a success of their business and that nothing will in any way stop them from doing it.

This self confidence and self determination is the secret that drives all of the successful business leaders to be even more successful.

Now you know the secret use it, believe in yourself and make it happen.

Big Business Opportunities

The traditional world powers of the United States and Japan are starting to diminish either through economic or natural disaster circumstances and in terms of Europe the bottom really has fallen out of the market.

The new world powers of Brazil, India and China are now emerging and that is where the big business opportunities are to be found.

Any business that recognizes this trend towards these countries will gain the most benefits by investing as much of their business activities with them.

Whether you are a small innovative business, a medium sized traditional business or an internet based business the decision should be the same, get on the bottom rung of the ladder and climb up to those big business opportunities.

By acting now your business will grow as the influence of these new world powers grows.

Filling Your Forward Order Book

The purpose of a forward order book in any business is to log everything that has been ordered but not yet bought by prospective customers. It will include any deals where contracts have been signed but have not yet reached completion, as well as reservations for specific items.

The forward order book will act as a good barometer of how a business is faring.

Now is the time to fill your forward order book for 2012 while your prospective customers are beginning to feel the spirit of the season of goodwill.

Share with your customers the future innovations which you intend to develop for your business in the coming year.

Inform them of next year's seasonal promotions and special deals in advance.

Show your customers how much you value them by offering them discounts now on future purchases.

By making an environment of customer inclusion in your ongoing business planning you will discover that your customers will greatly assist you in filling your forward order book and making the prospects for your business much more successful.