Toll Free or Local Number: Which One Does Your Business Need?

  Something as simple as a phone number isn’t often on the minds of entrepreneurs starting a business for the first time. With most business tools found in the cloud or on your computer, you probably won’t need to worry about your phones until you have at least a few customers. As your company grows and evolves, the number of phone calls you have to handle will increase, and having a professional phone number will prove to be invaluable. This leaves you with an important choice to make; should you go with a local or toll-free phone number? These different types of phone numbers provide a similar user experience, but offer a diverse range of opportunities along the way, making it critical that you consider them carefully. Before diving into the differences between these number options, it’s a good idea to take a look at what they are.   What …

6 Reasons to Take a Vacation from Your Business This Summer

  Attention Business Owners: You have to take a vacation sometime. The unfortunate truth is that business owners work too hard, and they rarely even have the thought that they will get to take a vacation. Running a business is hard. It’s truthfully one of the most stressful jobs in existence, automatically requiring you to handle a wide variety of responsibilities. You have to do all those things very well, too, because the consequences of an error on any front can be much greater than those of a typical job. Making a mistake could mean an employee doesn’t get the correct pay, or a marketing decision results in the loss of hundreds of new sales, or the new person you just hired never even shows up for work. While everyone thinks that business owners have the greatest dream job ever, you’re toiling away every day just hoping that the company …

Simplify & Automate All of Your Meetings with Calendly

  There are all kinds of appointments and group meetings that are required when you’re running a business, all of which can be made simpler with software that helps you to set them up. Like so many tools that we’ve discussed in this blog, Calendly is an online tool that will make your life a lot easier while saving you a ton of time in the process. It basically provides a platform to create “events” through the Calendly site that automate the whole process for calls, consultations, interviews, and any other kind of meeting. Once you start using the service, you’ll most likely never go back to conducting them the old-fashioned way.   Stop Setting Up Manual Meetings   What we mean by “manual meetings” are those that are arranged by a human being without the assistance of software. It basically amounts to communicating directly with all parties involved in …

Why Setting Reasonable Deadlines is Essential

  You will encounter many times when you feel that you have to complete projects or tasks of any kind sooner that it seems you can capably do it, which is why it’s so necessary to put a check on yourself and make sure that you don’t promise an unreasonable deadline for those things, to yourself or anyone else. It’s a bad idea to set unrealistic deadlines for a few reasons, but as the spirit of this blog series denotes, burning yourself out is one of the key pitfalls you can run into when you use this practice, either consciously or unconsciously. There are also other consequences to consider if you don’t give yourself enough time to finish projects for your business. We’ll get into those, too.   We Tend to Bite Off More than We Can Chew   The whole reason that we’re writing this post is to address …

Top 10 Giveaways to Show Appreciation to Your Customers

  What does it mean to take care of your customers? Just about every business on Earth claims to “take care” of their customers in some way, shape, or form; but what do they mean when they make that claim? There are also plenty of cases wherein businesses say it but don’t really do anything to take care of their customers beyond charging their credit cards. The point is that you couldn’t exist without customers, so treating them in the best possible way that you can should constantly be a top priority. You might have great support and service for those who choose to give you their hard-earned cash in exchange for whatever you’re selling, which goes a really long way, but you can do even more than that to secure their undying patronage. One of the ways you can do that is to give them things for free. That …

Can Lead411 Produce Real Sales Leads for Your Business?

  No one has to tell you how valuable quality sales leads are for your business. Finding solid leads is a way of taking matters into your own hands, rather than relying solely on word-of-mouth and standard advertising channels to bring in new business. So, when you have the opportunity to use a service like Lead411 to find those leads for you, that are catered specifically for your business, it gives you a great advantage to increase revenue in a reliable way.   “Sales Intelligence and Lead Development”   Lead411 uses a term to describe an aspect of their service, “sales intelligence”, which essentially means having an ability to seek out new sales prospects with knowledge that allows you to find leads that are more likely to convert to actual sales for your company. This is one of the key elements that contributes to their success with clients because they’re …

How Creating To-Do Lists Will Change Your Life

  To-do lists are generally underrated for a variety of reasons, and that’s why we’re giving you this article to go over some of the ways they can be useful to you as a professional, as well as a business owner. It’s not likely that anyone within the sound of my voice has never used a to-do list at some point. Meanwhile, many professionals don’t regularly use them, depriving themselves of a simple tool that can help them to be much more productive and keep everything in order. Here’s why you need to start using lists.   It Helps You to Effectively Prioritize Tasks   When running a business, your day can quickly get away from you if you don’t have it mapped out. With so many things that need attention, high volumes of customers, various requests throughout the day, and internal problems, you really have to be an uncommonly …

How You Should React to Missed or Lost Business Calls

Although you can take measures to ensure that you just about never miss a call, ever, it’s inevitable that it will happen from time to time when a caller slips through the cracks for some reason. A proper phone system and call log can almost completely eliminate the possibility of missed or lost calls, but you should nonetheless have procedures and standards in place for those times when it does happen. Customers who are calling you expect to be taken care of, and quickly, which is why the tips in this post are helpful to you as a business owner. Make Sure a Record of All Calls is Saved When you miss a call, there’s going to be a record of it in your system’s log or in the actual device where it came in, but that’s not always the case. When a call is missed and you don’t have …

10 Signs That You’re a Smart Business Owner

There are all types of business owners, at all levels of talent and experience. You might be just breaking into small business ownership with a lot of skill and talent, but you also might be a veteran owner with decades of experience but not as much talent as others. Whichever category you fall into, you have to be smart, which you may be naturally gifted with or you’re in the process of learning how to run your company intelligently. If you think you’re pretty smart, take a look at these 10 attributes to see how you measure up. 1. You Don’t Shoot Down Ideas To begin with, one sign of a business owner who isn’t very smart is if you shoot down ideas from people on your team right away, before you even consider it. Many times, this comes from having a master-of-the-universe syndrome that is common to a lot …

Need a Great Logo for Your Business? Logoworks Has It

  If you’re reached the stage of your business planning when you’re creating a logo, then you’ve reached the fun part. It does take some work and special attention, though, so it helps a great deal to use a competent service that can get you through the design process and come out with a beautiful finished product. Logoworks is one of the best services you can possibly use to design the perfect logo for your business. Here’s what you’re going to get if you decide to let Logoworks help you through the design process.   Logos and Beyond   Logoworks excels at designing logos for businesses, but their services also extend beyond logo design. This post will concentrate on logo design because you can definitely use them for that purpose only, but you might want to employ Logoworks for their other services, as well. They specialize in pretty much all …