Why Small Businesses Fail and How to Prevent It

We hear the statistics all the time: “Thousands of new businesses open every day; half of all businesses tank after 5 years,” and so on. So why is the outlook for new business owners so dismal? You could have an extensive, very semantic conversation about why businesses just can’t seem to make it over the hump and stay open for the long haul. There have to be some basic, overarching deficiencies that cause them to fail so quickly, right? Businesses go under for a variety of reasons, but in this post, we will attempt to pin down the thought processes of new business owners and the decisions they make to sabotage their own success. Failure to anticipate unexpected losses. It’s important to be very mindful of the position you are in during the crucial first couple of years of a new business. Like a nascent organism waking up in the …

How to Create Memorable Extensions for Your Team

When you have multiple employees in various departments, you’re probably going to want to give each of those employees their own extension. The extension numbers assigned to employees is not something that a business usually spends very much time considering, but there actually is some method, and even a little science to choosing the right number for each extension. Whether you decide to use 1, 2, 3, or 4-digit extensions, you can optimize them for memorability and consistency using the techniques described below. Tips for helping people to remember your extensions. A study published in the British Journal of Psychiatry to determine what types of numbers are the easiest to remember, in which a group of 500 test subjects participated, concluded that there are four categories of numbers that people find easiest to memorize. In order of memorability, the categories are as follows: 1. Single-digit numbers 2. Teen numbers (10-19) …

5 Places to Find Customer Feedback You Can Use

Tracking down customer feedback can be tricky business. You would think it would be easy to find, but when you actually start looking, you end up wading through all kinds of comments that may not be useful to you, if you can find them at all. What you want to look for is the negative feedback, as well as your customers’ questions that they’ve posted in various online platforms. Yes, it is great to see comments from people raving about your business, so you know what’s working, but finding out what’s wrong with your product or service is what you need, to improve. So where do you find this kind of feedback? There are a few channels where you can look for it, and they may not be obvious at first. 1) Independent Online Discussion Forums Start with a simple Google search of your business’ name, and see what comes …

How to Look Behind the Data: An Introduction

    Many small businesses are driven by data, some using it for only some operations, and others using it to direct the entire course of the business. The problem with data, though, is that it doesn’t always give you the full picture. It can even be deceiving, if you don’t know what you’re looking at. The following suggestions will help you to look at the big picture of all that data, and see what it is really telling you.   Avoiding Tunnel-Vision Looking “behind” the data sometimes means looking at a variety of factors, not just one dataset. To see the whole picture you might need to consider things like time, demographics, or pre-existing conditions. To illustrate what I mean, imagine that you’re examining the number of units of a product that were sold for the month. It’s easy to just say, “We sold 20% fewer units than the …

Targeting Customers with Contextual Advertising

Contextual advertising is the latest method that marketers and advertisers use to target consumers online and attempt to steal their attention in hopes of converting them to paying customers. It’s a form of online marketing that we all love to hate, but those ads certainly aren’t going anywhere just yet because it is still one of the most effective forms of advertising. If everyone hates it, how can it be profitable? The thing that sets contextual advertising apart from traditional forms of advertising is exactly what makes it effective. The truth is that most of the time, the ads don’t get any bites and turn into sales, but the sheer volume of ads that are put in front of the right people means that even a small success rate makes it profitable enough for advertisers to keep doing it. Search network vs. display network The search network is the network …

Heat Maps: Worth Every Penny—or a Waste of Time?

Heat maps are a jumping-off point; they are a good start. There are some flaws that unfortunately prevent heat maps from being a go-to resource that reveals concrete data. No, you can’t be sure that the visitor is actually looking at the spot where their cursor hovers; no, the nebulous blurs and smears don’t give you exact metrics; but yes, they do provide some valuable insight that you may not have otherwise seen. Statistics and other findings of research conducted to determine the effectiveness of heat maps is beyond the scope of this article. This article discusses a general overview of the potential usefulness of heat maps for understanding your customers’ behavior, and how you might go about utilizing them to increase web sales. It might help you get your bounce rate down. People leave your site right away for a few reasons, so a heat map won’t always help …

How to Create Your Own After Hours Phone Service

Already have a phone system for regular business hours, but don’t have one in place for people who call you after hours? Though Talkroute is a fully-functional business phone system that can handle your daily call volume, you can also use it solely for managing your after-hours calls. This will ensure that you never miss a business call, even when you’re closed. So, to utilize Talkroute as your after-hours phone system, there are a few different configurations; the configuration you use will depend on your current system. Below you will see how to set this up in 3 different ways: For a business already using Talkroute as its primary phone system, with only (1) account. For a business already using Talkroute as its primary phone system, adding a 2nd account for an after-hours system. For a business using Talkroute solely for an after-hours system. Use (1) account for both the …

voicemail transcription

Why Voicemail Transcription May Not Be Reliable

As recently as a few years ago, speech-to-text was nowhere near as capable as it is now. It was highly unreliable and barely considered for voicemail transcription. Now, as the technology advances and speech recognition becomes more accurate, speech-to-text is used for a variety of different applications, including voicemail transcription offered by some telecom providers. You see it in action all the time when your device lets you use your voice to type on your computer, speak your text messages using dictation, so that you can keep your eyes on the road (which we all do, of course), and even tell an automated voice what menu option you want when you call a business, rather than press any numbers. We just posted an article that goes into more depth about how Automatic Speech Recognition works with the IVR on a phone system, which you can find here: Automatic Speech Recognition …

How to Promote Your Company by Bragging

    The method a business uses to advertise will be different in each case, and there is no single method that works for everyone all the time. Some will see a significant response from aggressive ad campaigns, while others will benefit more from word-of-mouth alone. Another important thing to consider is exactly what you are saying in your promotional materials. What is the impression that people get when they see the label on your product, or hit the landing page of your website? These are the kind of choices that will either attract potential customers, or deter them. The following are a few pointers for sending the right message as you promote your business   Treat it like a resumé. Advertising and promoting for your business is just like writing a resumé, in that you want to highlight the best things about your business that are more likely to …

10 of the Most Awful Yet Delightful Business Names

    When it comes time to give your business a name, you can actually have a lot of fun coming up with a great one, but don’t have too much fun. If you don’t pay attention to how it may look or sound to others, you could end up stuck with a name for your business that is memorable, but in the worst way. The following is a list of some of the worst company names ever conceived, while at the same time, they may be total genius.   10. Boring Business Systems Named after one of its original executives, Allan D. Boring, this company is unashamed of its Boring namesake. In fact, they embrace it, explaining to outsiders that there is “nothing boring” about their features and services. (WorldWideInterweb)   9. Frying Nemo Going strong to this day, Frying Nemo is a fish & chips restaurant serving the …