Cantawally Business Site

Leading online resource Freshbusinessthinking.com has teamed up with Sales and Marketing experts Mike Southon and Chris West – know as the ‘The Beermat Entrepreneurs’ – to produce a high impact one-day ‘Sales and Marketing Workshop’ with the aim of helping business owners and entrepreneurs of small to medium sized businesses to develop and accelerate their skills.

Serial entrepreneur and Financial Times columnist Mike Southon says: “Many companies fail because they get their sales wrong – probably more that for any other reason, including finance Companies with excellent products, able people and good-looking marketing plans: none of these matter if real live customers are not persuaded to write out real live cheques.”

He continues: “Business owners can all too often be haunted by the myths that prevent people from doing sales excellently – that sales is somehow flashy and dishonest. It is time these myths are replaced with the truth, that in the modern business, everybody sells. The sales role stretches across the entire team, from technical people to the ’sales cornerstone’ at the heart of the operation.” (continue reading…)

Aside from workplace safety training that ensures employees and the workplace itself to be as healthy and as safe as possible, there is still one important item that all companies should practice and have: first aid.

First aid is the manner of providing primary care for a sudden injury or illness. It lessens and reduces the pain of injuries and damages brought about by a variety of accidents. First aid safety trainings must be attended to by corresponding representatives. First aid is part of workplace safety services and must be strewn all over the company’s premises. There are even a set of rules for companies to abide by when it comes to first aid. Some of which are:

Employers should provide enough first aid facilities for treatment of sudden injuries especially those which are inflicted within the workplace. (continue reading…)

Going back several years I was doing a lot of coaching in large national and global companies. What used to fascinate me about these organisations was how so many people and activities could be orchestrated into what outwardly appeared (mostly) to be a cohesive unit.

One of the answers, of course, was that these organisations were built on systems. Although often far from perfect the creation of systems was what allowed these organisations to grow from small to large. Just the other day a new Costa Coffee shop opened up locally. I was in there enjoying a cup of tea and happened to be sitting near the manageress, who was doing some paperwork. Being nosey I took a few interested glances at what she was doing because, again, I was fascinated at how this organisation operates. I was thinking about how Costa can go into new premises, kit it out to look like their brand, train the staff and once open they immediately operate just like all the other Costa coffee shops. The atmosphere works, the staff are polite and efficient and it’s clean. Costa is just one example of many organisations that operate slickly, effectively and most importantly, profitably. How do they do this? What this manageress had was a load of checklists. Everything was totally organised. There was absolutely no making it up as they go along. People knew what they had to do and had a system for doing it. One of our coaching principles is to ’stop reinventing the wheel’. What this means is to stop making things up as you go along and instead create standard operating principles for your organisation. How important is this? It’s the difference between growing and stagnating. It’s the difference between increasing profits and losing money. (continue reading…)

The immediate response to surviving an economic downturn involves battening down the hatches and simply weathering the impending storm, cutting whatever is necessary to make it through the chaos. Marketing usually falls to the wayside, workers are cut, and prime opportunities to position your company as a customer service or market leader pass by unnoticed.

You may be hearing some of the most promising news that’s come along in months, however. Yes, the bleak outlook that companies had just a few months ago is transforming into a positive, though cautious, attitude. While economic experts have noted a five percent growth in the economy, your segment may not fall within one of these industries. Regardless of whether your industry is included or not, Integrated Business Planning or Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) remains a necessity not only to surviving an economic downturn but also succeeding, both now and in the future. (continue reading…)

You have set up your niche blog and parade a list of quality products. You try to improve traffic to your website by constantly posting good and high quality articles. Your tracking system shows the amount of visitors to your website has increase twice as much. However, there seems to be not much growth of buyers. You kick off to do thorough study and found that it is crucial to build a profitable list of subscribers! The goal is simple, nearly all visitors will not buy on their first visit to a website. Once the visitors go away, chances are, they will not come back to your website ever again!

The very first thing you need to do is to show off a big optin page at your website to collect your subscribers’ email addresses and names. On the whole, visitors will not effortlessly give their names and email addresses. So you need to reveal your anti-spam message clearly near your collection of email address and name. This will boost your visitors confident in signing up to your list. By the way, you need to offer excellent quality freebies to attract them. The freebies can be software, ebook or audio. (continue reading…)