This is Why Being an Entrepreneur Isn’t Glamorous

  More and more people are pouring into the arena of small business to earn the right to call themselves entrepreneurs, but how many of them stay in the game and produce a thriving small business? The title has always had an attractive quality, even more so now, but successful entrepreneurs know the staggering amount of work and sacrifice required is what really defines entrepreneurship.   Entrepreneurs are Like Firefighters without the Glory On a day-to-day basis, a business owner is not coming in for two hours in the morning and letting the team take it from there. In fact, there are owners who run their businesses like that, and they’re the ones who probably won’t be around for very long. Not only will you need to be at work for the whole day and then some, but you’re usually going to be, “putting out fires” the majority of the …

Can You Go Analog in a Digital Business World?

  Technology has enabled us to conduct business way faster and smarter than we ever could before. You’ll find no argument here that technology clearly gives us an advantage; that’s not what’s on the table here. This is about boosting creativity through making small changes in your workflow, methods, and techniques. You may find that setting aside some of the technology you use for your work can release potential for creativity, and even productivity that you could not achieve otherwise.   It Forces the Muscle to Grow The first principle of this philosophy is that applying shock to your brain causes it to adapt by approaching things from a different angle. A good analogy for this principle is how we use weight training for the body. Most of us know that how you build muscle is by literally tearing the muscle tissue during a workout, and then the body adds …

Does Your Phone System Need a Welcome Greeting?

  Welcome greetings are a pretty standard feature used by businesses to make a good first impression on their callers. It’s the perfect way to accomplish that, but it doesn’t mean that you should automatically and always use one. There are a few reasons why you may want to skip the welcome greeting altogether.   Speed of Service When it comes to serving customers, we know that every aspect of their experience counts towards sending them away happy, including one of the customer’s most valued qualities, which we know as speed of service. Doing away with the welcome greeting helps you to give them that speed because instead of adding a delay, albeit a small one, you let the customer go straight through to what they called for in the first place—a friendly voice on the other end of the line.   We Tend to Be Verbose Using a welcome …

How to Respond to Bad Word-of-Mouth: Head-On

People talk. They always do, and they always have. How you respond to it as a business (if you should respond at all) depends on the nature and severity of what people are saying, and who is saying it. Your response to it should be essentially from two angles, and the first part will probably be painful: Take heed to the comments and actually make some changes, as needed. Then, directly interface with the people who are saying those things to address whatever problems they have with your business. Here is a pretty good action plan for dealing with bad feedback. Step One: Decide to Handle It First and foremost, don’t take the easy way out and just ignore negative comments. Mind you, what I’m referring to here is not just a random, one-off comment from an individual once in a while. You can probably ignore those. What you need …

IVR vs. Direct Dial: What Works Better for You?

Call routing for a business is essentially very simple, right? A customer calls your number, and then they’re connected with a representative from your company. That’s pretty much all it is when you boil it down, but there are a few questions that you should ask yourself when designing your phone system. 1. Do Callers Need Options to Choose from? Using an IVR is massively popular with small businesses because it evenly distributes calls among staff members, helps callers get to the right person or department, and filters out telemarketing bots, among other things. It’s very effective for managing calls and makes you sound more professional at the same time; so, you really just have to ask yourself if you want your customers to wait a few more seconds before they’re connected with someone, or if ringing straight to your phones fits your business better. 2. Does Direct-Dial Make Everyone’s …

7 Reliable Ways to Impress Your Customers

  If you want to really impress your customers, then you have to give them more than what they usually get from other businesses. It’s not necessarily grand gestures that will get their attention; the little things that prove to them that you’re devoted to taking care of them usually make much more of an impression.   1. Respond to Inquiries Quickly Whether it’s through an email, a phone call, or an in-person meeting, the time it takes you to get back to a customer always makes a huge difference. Most businesses are well aware of this fact, but we can underestimate how positively people respond to it because responding quickly makes someone feel that they matter to you.   2. Prove that You Care About Them Yes, of course you are in business to make money, and even though your customers are aware of that the whole time, they …

4 Call Forwarding Strategies to Manage Calls Faster

  We’re all familiar with how useful call forwarding can be for handling business calls. You can give customers one central phone number to call, and then send the call to pretty much anywhere you want, depending on how good the system you’re using is. No matter how capable your system is, though, it’s really only as good as your forwarding strategy. How you’re routing calls can make all the difference.   1. Ringing All of Your Phones Simultaneously The classic method of forwarding calls to your phones by ringing them all at the same time is effective because calls are more likely to be answered quickly. It’s uncomplicated and direct—someone calls in, and somebody will answer.   2. Ring Each Phone in a Specific Order There are usually going to be members of your staff who take calls more often than others because that’s their role, and those are …

Think of Your Business as a Work in Progress

Have you had some good success? Been in business for a while? If your business has been doing pretty well for a good amount of time, then you’re likely developing a false sense of security. There aren’t very many scenarios where you will be able to do things the exact same way forever and always be as successful as you are now. This is why the best way to quantify a business, no matter what size it is, is to think of it as a work in progress. Forget Your Past Successes The best way to keep making great strides is to create a great stride and then immediately move past it. Take pride in what you’ve done, learn from it, and put it behind you. It’s really easy to live off of the afterglow from a successful project or even a good decision that turned out pretty well, and …

3 Ways to Make Sure You Never Miss a Voicemail

  We all make it a top priority to never miss a phone call, but it can be just as detrimental to miss a voicemail. If a voicemail gets overlooked or accidentally deleted, you never know what opportunity was lost with that message. That’s why you’ve got to have some protocol and sensible habits in place to make absolutely sure that you receive every message your customers leave for you.   1. Don’t Rely on Consumer Voicemail Services It’s pretty risky to only utilize the voice mailbox that comes with your cell phone, or the one that comes with any of your phones, for that matter. Your phone may malfunction and delete all of your messages for no apparent reason; the caller might get the dreaded, “mailbox is full” automated response—and there are a number of other things that can cause you to miss messages when using the internal voicemail …

What Makes Your Business Special? That’s Your Key

Think of all the businesses in the world as species of fish in an ocean, and then imagine all of the individual fish within each species. In the current corporate climate, there are more species and families than there have ever been before, filling the ocean with all kinds of colors and types of fish so that it is densely populated. Now imagine your customers as ocean divers who are each searching for the fish that they need. The only way that each diver can pick out the one they are looking for is to recognize a simple, crucial difference that sets it apart from all the other fish in the ocean. Yes, You Need a Differentiator If you’re not familiar with the concept already, then commit this to memory. It doesn’t even matter if you’re entering a completely saturated industry–you can do very, very well, but only if you’ve …