Starting Second Business

3 Questions to Ask Before Starting a Second Business

  When a business owner finds that they have a successful small business, they have a tendency to look beyond it and consider opening up another one. That can either turn out to be a massive triumph or a dismal failure; it depends on a variety of factors. The bottom line is that ambitious entrepreneurs should think very carefully about the decision to take a leap into adding another business.   Is it an Emotional Decision? There’s a good chance, when you decide to open another small business, that you don’t realize what your true motivation is for doing it. You will tell yourself that you’ve found another great business model, but it could very well be a subconscious, emotional response to the success of your first business. It behooves you to take a close look at what is motivating this decision because you may find that, rather than creative …

How to Create the Perfect Welcome Greeting

Some of the simplest and most common elements of your business’ phone system can be the most nuanced and difficult to make right. The welcome greeting is usually the first thing a caller will hear, making it a pretty important impression on calling customers. There are a few things to keep in mind when creating and setting this greeting. 1. Keep it Brief Depending on how the structure of your system is laid out, you may either have it set to ring your phones right away when someone dials your main business number, or to bring them to some kind of menu first. If routing calls to a menu, your “welcome” message may just be tacked onto the beginning of the main menu prompt which describes to the caller what number they need to press to be connected to the correct department—but even then, it should be brief. Your callers …

4 Ways You Can Mess Up Your Phone Tree

  Even though the whole idea behind a phone tree, or auto attendant, for your phone system is to simplify things and minimize errors, you can still mess it up before you even start using it; that is—when you set it up. This post will point out all of the common mistakes that people make when they’re setting up the phone tree for their phone system.   1. Too Many Options People just don’t want to stick it out if you have a ton of different menu selections, especially if their option ends up being the last one in the list. Try to keep your phone tree down to as few options to choose from as possible. If you have a situation where you need one option for each of your employees, and there are a lot of them, then it’s best to create an actual extension for them. Then, …

Don’t Let Adversity Throw You Off Your Game

  Maintaining a successful small business is fraught with battles every day, that threaten to compromise what you’ve worked so hard to build, and it is enough to injure your confidence or even make you feel as if you need to change course. It’s just resistance, otherwise known as adversity, and it’s important to remember that it is something you can overcome.   Put It In Perspective When you are trying to expand, for example, and your investors won’t part with any more dough, no matter how lucrative you propose it to be, that’s not the end of the story for your expansion. You can come up with a more convincing proposal, sell it to other investors, and at the very least, continue to be successful at your company’s current size & scope and expand it later on. That’s just one example, but the point is that you can’t let …

How the Auto Attendant Changed the Game

  Adding an auto attendant to your phone system gives you a great advantage over the typical system that simply rings your phones directly for a staff member to pick up your calls. For some organizations, sending calls directly to your phones works very well and suits the nature of the business; however, an auto attendant can, in many scenarios, save time for your employees and manage calls far more efficiently. An auto attendant has many names. You might call it a phone tree, IVR (Interactive Voice Response), or as we call it at Talkroute, a Call Menu. Whatever you call it, the auto attendant was a groundbreaking innovation that provides businesses with massive benefits. These are a few.   Block Spammers & Robo-Dialers One of the most common reasons that people want a service with an auto attendant is to use it as a first line of defense against …

Is Greater Technology Becoming a Distraction?

Do you ever get the feeling that you’re not operating at full capacity? It’s difficult to pin down what the reason for that is, and though there is sometimes an event or personal hardship that takes you down a notch, it usually happens gradually. You’re plugging along, putting out the daily fires, but you wake up one day and suddenly realize that you haven’t been getting as much done as you were before. There are a variety of things that may be holding you back, most of which are totally fixable. The Distracted Age More than ever, we all have to be aware of the many things that can distract us from our work these days, especially environmental and technological factors. We’re living in the Information Age, but we could well call it the Distracted Age. There are so many things that constantly vie for our attention, from political and …

Toll Free Numbers

Toll Free Numbers Make Your Business Seem Bigger

Obviously, a simple phone number isn’t going to grow your business in a literal sense, but a toll free number will give customers the impression that you have a larger reach. There is a reason that toll free numbers exist today, and it goes beyond the original purpose of advertising a phone number that people knew was not going to cost them anything if they dialed it. These numbers convey a very effective message, telling them that the business attached to it is a solid, established business with a broad reach. The Power of Association In the memory of most people, a toll free number is what they always saw attached to large companies, like the phone company or a big-box retail store, to name a couple. A toll free number has a certain feel that seems omni-regional, large-scale, national. It is a programmed psychological connection of which we can …

How to Be Calm When Dealing with Customers

Do your customers ever make you angry? It’s pretty much guaranteed that it will happen sometimes, which is why it’s imperative that you have a plan to manage it. Some CSRs have a talent for this, and some do not; so, if you’re not talented with the endless capacity for kindness, then this post will give you some tools not just to act the part of someone who is kind (which will come off as sarcastic and disingenuous, anyway), but to truly quell your anger when dealing with tough customers. Put Our Weapons Down It’s the solution to so many different problems, where it concerns people. When you put yourself in the position of the person with whom you’re speaking and try to see the situation through their eyes, it will disarm you most of the time. That’s when you can actually help them, which then makes them treat you …

Using Call Queues to Manage Your Business Calls

What are call queues good for? We all know basically what they do, but is there a way to optimize how you use them? Every virtual phone service does call queues a little differently, approaching call management from different angles. The one constant is that they allow you to support multiple calls at the same time, which is even more valuable if you use them to their full potential. Part of a Balanced On-Hold Program Like the rest of your phone system, call queues are only as effective as their weakest link, and there are a couple of things that need to work together to create an on-hold program that does what it’s supposed to do—manage caller fatigue and keep them on the line. One crucial thing is that, even though the caller is just waiting for you to answer, there still has to be something happening on the line …

How to Write the Subject Line of a Marketing Email

  How much time do you spend thinking about the subject line of your emails before you send them out? Hopefully, you spend a good while thinking about it because it’s more important than the body of the email, by far.   Think of It as a Blog Post Headline Marketers these days are focusing a lot of their energy on blog content, written as well as video, and we all realize at this point that the headline of a post is one of the most crucial elements of the content, if not the most crucial. Within seconds, the headline is what will make the recipient decide to either click through, or ignore the post. Marketing emails are less popular now, but they are still used because they still convert. The subject line of an email is equally important.   Would You Click On It? We’ve harped on this many …