Do.com Adds New Tools to Help Your Business Stay Productive |  |
- Do.com Adds New Tools to Help Your Business Stay Productive
- You Shouldn’t Be Your Own Registered Agent
- 7 Ways To Educate Your Way Into Making The Sale
- Where Small Business Owners Get The Money They Need
- Google Announces Service Shutdowns
| Do.com Adds New Tools to Help Your Business Stay Productive Posted: 06 Aug 2012 01:00 PM PDT Enterprise cloud computing company Salesforce has recently updated its social productivity app Do.com with a new social contacts feature and tracker for ongoing deals, among other changes. The company hopes the new changes will help companies and individuals complete necessary tasks more seamlessly than ever before. Do's new deal management capability gives users the opportunity to set up a sales process and track the progress of their company's current deals. They can assign tasks and reminders to the deals to better manage what tasks need to be accomplished to make each deal successful.
Do is also adding social integrations with Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Salesforce. Its new contacts feature lets users import their contacts from sites like Google or Facebook, and then send messages to them and collaborate with them within the app. And when contacts from these sites update their information, it is automatically updated within the Do app as well. Launched last year, Do is an HTML5-based app that offers various productivity tools for small and medium sized businesses. Users can create tasks and prioritize them, make assignments for other team members, take notes, and track progress. All of the tasks a company adds to Do are updated in real time, so business owners can stay on top of their company's to-do list and know what projects are showing progress. Currently, the app is free for all users, but once the new features move out of the beta stage, users will be able to use parts of the app for free, but pay for premium features like deal management. Do, especially with the addition of these new features, aims to improve productivity and organization all while helping to create a sense of community within a team or company. Do is currently available as a web or iPhone app, and has a beta version of an Android app in the works. From Small Business Trends |
| You Shouldn’t Be Your Own Registered Agent Posted: 06 Aug 2012 11:00 AM PDT Deciding to take your small business to the next level by incorporating or forming an LLC is an important step in the lifecycle of any company. If you've recently incorporated or formed an LLC, you'll realize that one of the prerequisites to becoming a corporation or LLC is designating a registered agent in the state of incorporation.
If you're not familiar with the term, a registered agent receives important legal and tax documents on behalf of a business in a given state. This includes important mail sent by the state (annual reports or statements), state tax documents, as well as any Notices of Litigation. Individuals can act as a registered agent for a business. If you have a physical address in the state where you incorporate or foreign qualify, you could name yourself as the agent. While it may be tempting to take on this role for yourself, here are five reasons why you should think twice: 1. The registered agent must have a physical address in the state of incorporation or qualification: A registered agent is required to have a physical address in the state; post office boxes and private rented mailboxes won't suffice. If you incorporated or formed an LLC in Delaware, but you live in California and your company is physically located in California, this means you cannot serve as a registered agent in Delaware. In this case, you'll need to use a professional third party as your registered agent in Delaware. 2. Your company does business in multiple states: When you register your company to conduct business in other states besides where you incorporated, you'll need a registered agent in each of those states (unless you have physical offices in each state). 3. You don't maintain normal business hours: The registered agent needs to be available during normal business hours to accept important documents from the state. If you set your own hours or aren't tied to an office (i.e. you're a real estate agent or landscaper), you should consider a third party service so you never miss an important communication from the state. 4. Your address is likely to change: A registered agent's address must always stay current in the state records. Any changes to the address require a formal state filing, which is often accompanied by a fee. By using a professional third party service as your registered agent, you never have to worry about updating the state records – no matter how many times you move over the years. 5. The registered agent's address is of public record: Since the registered agent's address is publicly available, anyone has access to it… including marketers, mailing lists, and spammers. Registered agents often receive unsolicited junk mail for their business. If you wish to keep your company or personal address information confidential, opt for a third party registered agent. You'll get an extra layer of privacy and won't have to deal with as much unsolicited mail. While a registered agent may seem like a trivial formality, it actually plays an important role in receiving communications and keeping your corporation or LLC in good standing. The last thing you want is to miss an important filing date or fail to respond to a litigation notice because you didn't receive the notice on time. Reading Mail Photo via Shutterstock From Small Business Trends |
| 7 Ways To Educate Your Way Into Making The Sale Posted: 06 Aug 2012 08:00 AM PDT Why does selling continue to get such a bad rap?
Not only do I totally agree, but can’t stress enough that the “key driver of sales is educating your way into making the sale.” The pressure, hype, arm-twisting and flat out manipulation approach is out. Today’s selling environment and sales experience is about education, illumination, stimulation and inspiration. People want the story, the results, the value and the benefits – not the empty hype. Education is selling, and selling is educating, so the more you teach people about the value, benefits and results the more sales you will inspire and close. Here are 7 ways to educate prospects into making the sale: Inform People About Your What What do you do, or what can and does your product do that can help someone? Share as much information as you can consistently about this. Generate Interest When you know the psycho-graphics of your customer you can craft the language and messaging targeted directly to them making the case for why what you have is a great fit or opportunity for them. You Are The Value Add Create more than just the “selling” of the product or service. Add in YOU, your experience, expertise and your connections as value add. Share Your Point of View Talk about your unique point of view about what you do, why you love your business and how it has impacted others. Inspire Action Ultimately, you want to inspire people to take more action, be it request more information, ask more questions, generate interest with others or the ultimate goal-making the sale. Leverage Results and Testimonials Always educate prospects using results and testimonials. Satisfied customers that become your advocates and cheerleaders are gold! Develop Referrals Spend more time asking for and developing referrals from your community. Ask for referrals but be generous in referring and connecting others. John C Maxwell, a leadership expert and author of 20 million books, who has trained governments, the NFL and United Nations reminds us:
Get personal with people off line. The heaviest thing for most salespeople is the phone. Build in phone time as well as face to face meetings to advance relationships. Educate people more personally. Without sales there is no business. Sales is an opportunity, not a punishment or obligation. It’s time to stop giving selling a bad rap, shift your attitude and educate your way into making the sale. Educate Sales Photo via Shutterstock From Small Business Trends |
| Where Small Business Owners Get The Money They Need Posted: 06 Aug 2012 05:00 AM PDT Many entrepreneurs, policy makers, and academics wonder where small business owners get the money to expand their businesses. Thanks to the efforts of researchers at the Census Bureau, we know the answer.  Source: Created from data from the Survey of Business Owners, U.S. Census Above, I have created a chart that shows the fraction of small businesses with employees in need of expansion financing that obtain different types of capital, using data from the 2007 Survey of Business Owners (SBO), an effort to collect data on:
The SBO reveals seven important facts about small business financing: 1. The majority (51.2 percent) of small employers needing money to expand use either their own or family members’ savings or assets. 2. Business profits or assets are a key source of money to expand; 29.1 percent of small employers use this source of expansion financing. 3. Banks are an important source of expansion capital for small businesses; just shy of one-third of small business owners report using a bank loan to finance expansion. 4. Credit cards, both personal and business, are a common source of money for small business expansion, with one quarter of small employers needing expansion funds obtaining at least some of it from this source. 5. More than one-in-ten (11.4 percent) of small business owners report using equity in their homes to finance small business expansion. 6. Government-guaranteed loans and loans from the government, such as SBA loans, aren't a source of expansion capital for many businesses; the SBO data show that less than 3 percent of small businesses needing expansion capital get money from this source. 7. Almost no small employers use venture capital to expand; the SBO data reveal that only about 0.5 percent use this source of financing. From Small Business Trends |
| Google Announces Service Shutdowns Posted: 06 Aug 2012 02:30 AM PDT Google announced it will soon be discontinuing some services in order to focus on others that are much more popular with users. If some of these lesser-used services happen to be among your favorites, we’re sorry to be the bearers of bad news, but you may be interested to learn about Google’s many remaining services and how you can leverage them for your business endeavors. Google Changes ComingLess is more. At least it is sometimes, that’s why Google characterized its cutting of services like Google Apps for Teams, Google Listens, Google Video for Business, and some of its 150+ regularly maintained blogs as a positive thing, making way for a new and better Google. Hope you agree! Google Official Blog Cleaning house. The service shutdowns Google recently announced are only the latest of a house cleaning that began after Google co-founder Larry Page took over as company CEO last year. The aim has been to merge, shut down, or donate under-performing services in order to focus on high-performing ones instead. TechCrunch Plus and MinusDead and gone. Certainly Google isn’t alone in killing off unsuccessful products and services. Matt McGee reports that Facebook Questions, a feature that at one time had been touted as a means for the social networking giant to challenge not only Yahoo! Answers but all other sites in Q&A space, has vanished without a trace. Marketing Land Spreading like wildfire. Google is not just getting rid of programs and services. It is adding them too. Take the company’s recent acquisition of Wildfire, a four year old social media marketing company with 16,000 customers, including 30 of the top 50 brands. Wildfire Social Media Marketing Blog How Google Helps Your BusinessMastering Websites with Google tools. Google’s tools are a big help to other small businesses too, especially businesses that operate online. Here are Arelthia Phillips’s tips for using those free Google Webmaster Tools to make your online business shine. A great Website is the first step in a building an online business. Create a Website Kit Other Google tools you can use. Don’t wait around for policy changes to improve the environment for your business, says blogger TJ McCue. Instead, look to “The Click House” as McCue calls Google. From Google Now to Google+ and Google Local, McCue talks about the Google tools you should be using for your business. Forbes Google in the Clouds with Business. You can’t spend long talking to business leaders these days without the phrase “cloud computing” coming up. Another batch of services Google is introducing to help those business customers is cloud computing via the Google Cloud Platform Partner Program. PC World From Small Business Trends |
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