Specialization has become a sign of the times. Largely as a result of Internet search capabilities, buyers can purchase goods and services on a highly targeted and specialized basis. Let’s say someone is interested in acquiring consulting services for his gardening business. The buyer can most likely find a multitude of expert gardening consultants and then refine his search even more by securing an expert that specializes in businesses of a certain size, in specific regions of the country, even in those that are seasonal or open year-round.
In order to stand out and get noticed as a business leader, specialize and promote yourself as an expert in your field. Here are some tips:
1. Become a speaker at trade associations associated with your business. Practice your delivery to ensure a great presentation. When you become a speaker or are on a panel at a conference within your industry, you automatically, by perception alone, become a trusted authority.
2. Hire a public relations firm to represent you. PR is a relatively low cost and highly effective way to promote yourself and your business. Make sure you have clear goals and expectations for the firm you hire. The firm can send out press releases to the media and trade publications in your industry and secure stories about your company’s unique products and services, employee news, and community involvement.
3. Create a blog on your business website. Make sure to provide interesting and compelling content and update it frequently. Don’t be afraid to be controversial and different. The idea is to get noticed and to be respected as a forward thinker and innovator in your field.
4. Host regular webinars (online seminars) in which you lead discussions and field questions in your specialty. There are many good webinar programs available today that make this turn-key.
Jeff and Rich Sloan
Co-founders
StartupNation.com
[0831 Operations & Technology]
Know What Makes Your Customers Angry
We’ve all been there as consumers: Getting so riled up by poor service that we explode and vow to never do business with a company again.
But what really makes consumer’s blood boil? We wanted to know, so we asked more than 1,500 consumers what really makes them tick. Their top three responses:
• Speaking with multiple agents and starting over every time.
• Dealing with rude or inexperienced representatives or service technicians.
• Being kept on hold for long periods of time or unable to use self-service options successfully.
In a questionable economy, losing customers is not an option. Here are some tips on how to avoid the mistakes highlighted above.
1. Deliver a consistent experience across all service channels. There’s nothing worse for a customer than being bounced around, getting the same information repeatedly, and receiving different levels of service in the different channels (including call centers, websites, and retail stores). This can be fixed. Track the customer’s behavior across all channels. This gives you the visibility to pinpoint where service breakdowns occur and where you need to focus on change.
2. Align service channels and resources (including agents) with customer needs. Understand what your customers are actually trying to do and which service mix works best for each of their unique needs. This ensures that the interactions requiring live agent assistance are being directed to a real technician. In addition, your training, coaching, and mentorship programs must support the needs of both your customers and your agents.
3. Promote self-service. Customers appreciate having more control over their experience with self-service options via the Web or automated interactive voice response systems. Poorly designed self-service deters future adoption and usage. Understand the transactions that make the most sense for self-service, and then design and monitor customer behavior. Implementing self-service will save the customer time—and your bottom line.
Taking these three steps will make your customers’ lives easier, increase loyalty, and reduce churn. In this market, you need to do all three.
Marco Pacelli
CEO
ClickFox
Atlanta
[0901 Sales & Marketing]
Understand Multilingual Search Engine Optimization
You have a small business. That certainly doesn’t mean you think small. Nor does it mean your customers reside in a small geographic area. Global business is for everyone these days, and for the company that makes smart decisions about multilingual search engine optimization (MSEO), the Web can deliver a potentially endless stream of revenue opportunity from customers around the world.
Hurried translation efforts and hastily constructed websites, however, do more harm than good when it comes to bottom-line results. For those contemplating a move into overseas markets, there are four key points to keep in mind:
1. Word choice counts. Before your company goes live with a website in another language, make sure your copy is optimized and relies on proper keyword selection. Your translation should convey who you are, what you do, and why customers should care.
2. Machine translation might be cheap, and you’ll learn why if you make the mistake of using it. Localizing copy requires knowledge not only of vocabulary, but also of nuance and regional connotation.
3. Don’t assume a visitor’s locale dictates her language choice. Perhaps your customer is in Quebec. She might speak French, but it is just as likely she’d rather see information in English or possibly even another language. Offer her a choice of languages via a drop-down menu.
4. SEO is not an add-on feature. Some companies translate their websites and optimize them later to phase in resource investments, but this phased approach can cost more money in the long term. MSEO should guide your content development and site-architecture strategy to ensure you have launched a website that will attract customers.
Phil Shawe
CEO and co-founder
Translations.com
New York
[0902 Management & HR]
Conquer Business Chaos
New businesses are being launched in record numbers by entrepreneurs setting out to find their freedom. All goes along well until they get their first customer. That’s when chaos moves in. They can’t follow-up with prospects or customers. They’ve been sucked into the business—pulling all-nighters, missing Little League games, eating cold dinners. These are symptoms of chaos. In talking with thousands of small business owners over the past decade, I’ve heard this same song play over and over. Not to mention that my co-founders and I experienced this ourselves in our business. Here are my suggestions for getting out of the chaos and taking back your life.
1. Build your emotional capital. Emotional capital is the passion, enthusiasm, and positive outlook that keeps you driving to achieve your goals. It’s the balancing of work, family, and emotional and physical health.
2. Practice disciplined optimism. It starts with the undying belief that your small business will achieve the success you have envisioned. At the same time, it helps you confront the brutal facts of your current reality and attack those brutal facts because you want to, not because you have to.
3. Assert your entrepreneurial independence. You decide the fate of your business. If you don’t believe something is going to work, no one else will.
4. Centralize and organize your stuff. You have to centralize your operations. Using separate systems for such things as e-mail marketing and CRM doesn’t make sense anymore. When you operate in the chaos of multiple systems, parts of your business start falling through the cracks.
5. Tap into the magical power of follow-up. When you fail to follow up, you’re losing out on incredible opportunities. Follow-up failure stunts your growth and prolongs your partnership with chaos.
6. Burn the to-do list and move from manual to automated. Most small businesses are havens for manual, grunt labor that wastes time, costs money, and enslaves the entrepreneur to the business. Automation is the key to liberating you from the busywork.
Clate Mask
Co-founder and CEO
Infusionsoft
Gilbert, Ariz.
[0903 Sales & Marketing]
Win Lifelong Customers Through Better Marketing
The chaos of small business life makes it especially hard to win lifelong customers. I’m talking about those customers who don’t buy from you just once, but who come back over and over again and eventually become megaphones for your company. Consider these tips to win lifelong customers:
1. Keep an organized database. It’s impossible to keep track of all of your customers’ information—including the small details—in your head. If you want your customers to know you truly care and appreciate them, you have to keep a customer database. Imagine, for example, being able to look up a customer by name—and immediately know the day she last interacted with your company, exactly what products she has bought, and see the note that she had three kids. When you follow up with her, you can ask about her kids—and gain a loyal customer.
2. Use automation to send the right message at the right time to the right people. Let’s face it: Not all customers need and want the same thing. Once you keep an organized database, you’ll find it holds valuable information that can make your marketing campaigns magical. Your marketing can be segmented based on the customer behavior you’re tracking in your database. Then, with powerful automation technology, you can let software automatically personalize and deliver the right message so that you create an immensely loyal base of customers who’ll never leave.
Scott Martineau
Co-founder and vice-president for customer experience
Infusionsoft
Gilbert, Ariz.
http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/tips/archives/2010/08/become_an_expert_in_your_field.html
No comments:
Post a Comment