People Spend Money In Every Economy: They Should Be Spending It With You |  |
- People Spend Money In Every Economy: They Should Be Spending It With You
- 6 Signs It’s Time To Change Habits
- Daily Deals That Won’t Break The Bank: Check Out Signpost
- ACTA Vote Coming but Anti-Piracy Could Have Consequences for Business
| People Spend Money In Every Economy: They Should Be Spending It With You Posted: 28 Jun 2012 11:00 AM PDT Strong economy, bad economy, we spend money in every economy. We have to eat, run our offices, manage our teams and that takes money. The question is, are we spending it with you or some other company that's more attentive?
It's clear to me that how you talk makes the difference and how you listen can make or break the sale. How do you talk to your guests?While browsing in a local computer store, I noticed the difference between two salesmen. One was attentive without overcrowding. He took my questions seriously and you could tell that he was excited about and deeply familiar with the product. This made him a pleasure to talk to. When I shop local, I shop with him and I refer others to him. But when he's not there I encounter another man who likes to tell you what canNOT be done—and it's not often true. He doesn't seem to know the product intimately. On top of that, there's a quiet but clear pressure to buy right now or leave. However, large purchases don't happen that quickly for me and when it is time to buy, my team — family, clients, friends in business — tend to follow suite. Here's the problem: that kind of atmosphere makes me look for a new place to shop. It causes me to reevaluate my own sales processes. Can people browse as long as they want and ask the questions they need without feeling like a nuisance? Am I a barrier to the purchase? Is your sales team a help or a hiccup? At the end of a day, your guest (potential customer) wants the chance to see if your product has the answer to their problem. That tends to include browsing and questions. Are you and your sales team prepared for both? Quick Tip: Use your website to create a great space for browsing. With a smart site that tells:
Your visitors can take their time as they move through your information and images. A smart website is good for business. Do you listen to your shoppers?I'm upgrading my accounting system (because it needs to be more fun and still accurate and effective). In the process I'm testing and contacting a lot of companies and interacting with multiple sales teams. I ran across an attentive agent at Shoeboxed.com who answered a series of questions through their instant messaging system. She made me feel as if she came to work just to help me find my answers. Don't get me wrong, she wasn't my best friend or anything like that, she just took the questions seriously and provided the kind of answers that assured me that she knew her stuff. Which was a far cry from the sales team that tried to close me while I still had questions on the table. In this friendship economy where we probably share too much about ourselves with strangers, the truth is most of these connections are temporary and a means to an end. What lasts is real answers to real problems delivered as graciously and simply as possible. Quick Tip: Your shoppers want you to be attentive to them and not your list and agenda. And in order to do that, you have to listen to those questions and provide real answers. Shopping Photo via Shutterstock From Small Business Trends |
| 6 Signs It’s Time To Change Habits Posted: 28 Jun 2012 08:00 AM PDT "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit." - Aristotle
Habits can be our greatest asset and can become our worst curse. We know in order to grow and maintain our personal and professional lives, we need to develop and establish effective, solid and sensible habits. We also need to keep them fun, fresh and motivating. From Psychology Today, the topic of habit formation is hot in the news these days, especially with the success of Charles Duhigg’s best-selling new book The Power of Habit (which looks fascinating). Even New York Times columnist David Brooks is singing the praises of habit formation as the answer to everything from weight loss to addiction. The premise is this: Why struggle to do something when you can simply make it automatic? So, when we look back on different cycle in our lives, we can see that the signs to change were there all along, but we choose to ignore them. Why do we wait until it’s too late and then are forced to make a move? We don’t have to. Change is the most natural thing that we actually do. There is an organic change process we all live through in our life cycles, career cycles, personal cycles. Birth, death, divorce, moving, accidents, health, nature and choice all impact our need to change. It’s not always about dramatic change, in fact more often it’s about small things that can make a big difference. Here are 6 signs it’s time to change habits: 1.) Complacency 2.) Boredom 3.) Lack of energy 4.) Procrastination 5.) Distraction 6.) Negativity I’m a fan of Leo Babauta’s Zenhabits.net. He makes it easier to embrace changing habits, consciousness and taking action. Check out The Essential Zen Habits of 2011. Are you seeing the signs that it’s time to change up your habits? Be proactive and make a list of 5 habits that are working against you right now that you can and will change up and change them. One at a time! Our personal brand and professional advancement depends on creating great working habits, embracing change and developing high EQ!
From Small Business Trends |
| Daily Deals That Won’t Break The Bank: Check Out Signpost Posted: 28 Jun 2012 05:00 AM PDT Groupon and LivingSocial have motivated many small businesses into offering daily deals, but the 50 percent commission is often a daily deal breaker. Signpost is a new venture-backed daily deal service that that lets small and medium sized businesses set up their own daily deal campaigns and online marketing offers on a DIY (do it yourself) basis. It operates on a lower commission structure with a flat monthly fee, to boot.
How it works: 1. Signpost gathers info about your business and creates a campaign. You share details about how your business operates and works, of course. 2. They match your campaign with the right online channels. This is one of the cool things about Signpost — they have loads of content partners that show your “campaign ad” on their blog or website. From their website:
3. Customers buy a voucher online to redeem at your store by clicking on that daily deal ad and pre-paying for the offer. You pay a commission to the content partner that is displaying your ad (via the Signpost system, of course) and they promise it is never more than 15 percent. Within your account, like any web service, you have a real-time dashboard that shows your offers, redemptions, and other campaigns you are running. For example, you can set up a Facebook campaign or run an email newsletter through the service. What I liked about the service
What I would like to see improve As most of my readers know, I don’t like it when you can’t get access to a site without leaving all your contact details. Signpost requires your email and phone and after you click “sign up” it says they will contact you shortly. So, I tried to sign up and now I’m waiting for a sales rep to call me. Not a big deal, but that wasn’t my expectation. As noted above, they are transparent with their pricing and how it works. Ideally, they would allow you to start filling in some details or checking out the dashboards or more than “hey, we’ll call you.” Pricing is a flat $99 per month and a 15 percent (maximum) commission to sites that generate the click-through. If you've wanted to provide a daily or weekly coupon to your local customers and prospects, Signpost might be worth a closer look. Learn more about Signpost. From Small Business Trends |
| ACTA Vote Coming but Anti-Piracy Could Have Consequences for Business Posted: 28 Jun 2012 02:30 AM PDT If your business relies on intellectual property, you may sympathize with efforts to pass a multinational Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement as a way to protect your valuable business information, especially on the Internet. As a vote draws near on the controversial agreement in Europe, however, critics also fear ACTA could restrict the free exchange of information and make Website and other online service operators responsible for policing and even violating the privacy of their users and customers. Here is where things stand with the controversial treaty today. Where We StandHe won’t take no for an answer. Resistance to the ACTA treaty in the EU in particular is strong, but that’s not going to deter the commissioner in charge of pushing ACTA through the European Parliament, Karel De Gucht. Despite De Gucht’s certainty that support of ACTA is the right decision, opponents worry the treaty’s vagueness could open the door for curtailing the free flow of information on the Internet, which is so important to economic growth. TechDirt Right or wrong. Although De Gucht may insist the passage of ACTA is the right choice, the apparent disregard supporters have for widespread opposition to the agreement may say something about how the eventual rules would be applied. European Commission The Anti-Trade Trade AgreementACTA: Bad for trade. You would think that if the proposed ACTA treaty is really good for global business, it could at least gain support from an organization like the International Trade Committee. Not so, as it turns out. The committee has already rejected the treaty 19 to 12. The Verge Let freedom ring. Freedom on the Internet is critical for many businesses, which is why so many Web workers and entrepreneurs get so burned up over ACTA and the US Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act. Vigilance is needed if business on the Internet is to remain free, says blogger Zac Walton. More proposals are doubtless coming, whether ACTA is approved or not. WebProNews Protection vs. FreedomA better mousetrap. Ofcom, a UK regulatory agency for TV, radio, fixed line telecoms, mobile devices, and postal services, may have a better idea for combating intellectual property theft and protecting users’ privacy: Establish an appeal process for alleged violators. TechCrunch Copyright and business. The new proposition from the UK regulatory agency incorporates many of the concerns registered over an earlier proposal. The question with all intellectual property rules is how they achieve a balance without destroying the ability to exchange information freely. One concern from a business perspective is whether misuse of infringement claims restrict this exchange. Ofcom Achieving BalanceProtecting your creativity. No matter what the reaction to ACTA, this post makes an excellent point about the need to do something to help protect businesses whose product or service is their intellectual property. These businesses loose big time when Internet pirates steal their property and profit from their innovation. This Is Cornwall Unintentional consequences. Dutch economic affairs minister Maxime Verhagen and junior justice minister Fred Teeven best explained the concerns many have over ACTA. The Dutch cabinet, they said, would not sign or ratify the controversial anti-piracy agreement because it is too open to “unintentioned interpretations with negative consequences.” Dutch News A Brand New ThreatRegulating the Internet. Some critics say another potential threat is brewing. A UN attempt to severely reduce the Internet’s role in economic growth and restrict the free flow of information is in the works. This all sounds sufficiently menacing to concern those whose businesses are dependent upon the Web. Fox News Raising a red flag. A recently leaked document from the UN’s International Telecommunications Union indicates some member states hope to “use international agreements to regulate the Internet by crowding out bottom-up institutions, imposing charges for international communication, and controlling the content that consumers can access online.” Worried? You should be! The Wall Street Journal From Small Business Trends |
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