idea for your business

Archive for February, 2010

I was at a gas station the other day and noticed something that caused me to look twice. At first, it appeared to be a normal occurrence, a man pumping gas and then cleaning his windshield. Thinking nothing of this, I continued with my gas purchase.When I again looked at the other vehicle, I saw a man walking to the rear of the same car, yet there was someone else continuing to clean his windshield. To my surprise, the person cleaning his windshield and tending to this gas was the gas station attendant, not the customer.

This caused me to wonder if the economy might be having an impact on the level of customer service being offered today. As businesses compete for dollars, which are being tightly held by consumers, we may be seeing more of this. Getting the consumers business through old-fashioned customer service methods, could be your competitive edge.

Back in the day, we used to be known for giving great service to our customers and the mantra of “The Customer is Always Right” was a standard policy throughout most every retail establishment and other types of businesses.

Customers were number #1 and intensely loyal. The customer service counter area was always visible when you entered a store, and everyone knew that was where you went to solve problems and get answers to questions, any question.

Briefly, Let us stroll down memory lane and look at what our customer service practices used to be. Granted, some of these still exists. Nevertheless, things have definitely changed.

?If there was an issue with an account, you didn’t have to listen to 5 or 6 different message prompts before speaking to a live person, or getting the requested information.

?If you were not happy with your meal, it would be replaced with a freshly made duplicate meal, not put in a microwave and returned.

?In a restaurant, if you needed to take home your leftover meal, the restaurant staff would prepare your carry out package in the kitchen area, rather than have you do it at your table.

?If you had some installation done in your home, cable, telephone etc., the debris would be cleaned up by the technicians, and not left for you to do.

?If you’re admitted to the emergency room, you better have health insurance, enough said on this one.

Today, our customer service industry has become more automated with pre-recorded messages, self-service, unassisted online and offline shopping, less emphasis on the customer and a general feeling of having to “jump through hoops” to get a problem resolved or redeem a rebate. I believe we have come to expect less from the businesses we support.

On the other hand, this economic crisis is forcing businesses to go that extra mile in responding to their customers’ needs. These are loyal customers who find themselves caught up in the downturn and need understanding. They need a return to the old fashioned customer service that endeared them to your business for life.

For example, have you seen the advertisements from certain auto manufacturers who say they will pay several months of your auto note, if a job loss occurs? This is an example of addressing the customer’s needs in this down economy. If this program were not in place, these people would lose their vehicles. Why aren’t they all car manufacturers doing the same?

Here are some other ways to make your customer service more compassionate during these times:

?Make it possible for your customers to talk to a live person when calling your business. This will alleviate some of your customer’s stress as it shows you care about addressing your customer’s issues and concerns quickly. Also, not having to move through several phone prompts can save time for the customer.

?Be friendly and kind to all customers and greet them nicely. Stress has taken over many lives these days, and a smiling face can make a difference in that person’s day.

?Think customer safety: Repair or clean up any area of your business that might become a hazard. For example: keep grocery store carts moved frequently from store parking lots so that they don’t roll into the customer’s cars and children. There have been many damages to vehicles and injuries to children when this is not done.

?In a restaurant, make sure the customer’s food is brought to them properly heated. If the food is brought to the customer cold, it makes for an unhappy experience and is often sent back.In addition, you could lose this customer. It may not seem like a huge deal as not everyone complains about cold food. On the other, it’s the details you want to pay attention to. There’s never been a better time to make your business stand out.

?Honor coupons even if the customer does not have the actual cut out version, especially if they know about the sale and asks for the discount. For regular, frequent shoppers, this should be standard practice. The customer’s continued shopping at your business will be assured.

Finally, today, there is much more competition and customers have a wide choice of alternatives. Brand loyalty has been replaced with buying from a merchant with the best quality and price for their product.

Yet, in times of economic stress, customers remember those businesses that can offer empathy along with the sale. A late fee not charged, an interest rate not raised a car not repossessed. Perhaps this recession will, in deed, bring us back to the day when a customer’s purchase meant more than the sound of a cash register.

If you think only big corporate names need to think about things like brand names, think again. Your brand says a lot about you and your business, and that’s as true for a one person home-based operation as it is for a multinational conglomerate. In this article we look at how creating a strong brand for your business can help you set yourself apart from the pack and lay the right foundation for the future growth of your business.

WHAT IS A BRAND?

Your brand is more than just the logo on your letterhead and business cards or your business name. It is your corporate identity. An effective brand tells the world who you are, what you do and how you do it, while at the same time establishing your relevance to and credibility with your prospective customers.

Your brand is also something more ethereal. It is how your business is perceived by its customers. If your brand has a high perceived value, you enjoy many advantages over your competition, especially when it comes to pricing. Why do you think people are prepared to pay stupid money for items of clothing with the initials “CK” on them? Perceived value. Perceived value as a result of very effective brand promotion resulting in very high brand awareness.

Now, I’m not saying we all need to rush out and start creating brands that are going to be recognized the world over. Most of us simply don’t have the time or other resources necessary. What I am suggesting, however, is that it is possible for your brand to dominate your niche.

WHY DO I NEED TO CREATE MY OWN BRAND?

=> Differentiation

We touched on this in the previous section when we looked at what a brand is and how it can be used to increase the perceived value of your products and services. The main reason for creating your own brand is to differentiate yourself from your competition. New websites are a dime a dozen. So are home-based businesses. You need to constantly be looking for ways to set yourself apart from your competition. Your brand can do that for you.

=> More Effective, Efficient Marketing

Another good reason for creating your own brand is to make your sales force (even if that’s a sales force of one – you) more effective and efficient.

Imagine if you didn’t have to spend the first 50% of your time with a new prospect explaining who you are, what you do and how you do it. What if your brand had already communicated that for you? You can spend 100% of your time focusing on sales rather than educating your prospects about your business

Another benefit of branding is that the efforts you expend increasing your brand awareness through promoting and marketing your brand to your target market automatically transfers to your products and services. So, even when you’re advertising your brand, you’re indirectly also marketing your products and services.

HOW DO I CREATE MY OWN BRAND?

OK, so you’re convinced you need to create your own brand. Where on earth do you start?

We saw earlier that your brand needs to say who you are, what you do and how you do it. It needs to do all these things at the same time as establishing your relevance to and building credibilty with your prospective customers. Needless to say, it is absolutely essential, if you are to build your own brand, that *you yourself* have a firm grasp of who you are, what you do and how you do it. If not, you’re going to have the devil’s own time getting that message across to anyone else, let alone establishing your relevance and credibility.

=> Write A Mission Statement

So, let’s start by creating a mission statement. What is the mission of your business? Obviously you’re in business to make a profit. But making a profit is a byproduct of a successful business. Focus instead on how you choose to achieve that profit. What are your core values?

A good place to begin thinking about your mission is to put yourself in the shoes of your customers. Put yourself in their target market. Let’s say your business is web hosting. If you’re in the market for a web host, what things are important to you? Different people will be looking for different benefits but you can bet that they want their website to be accessible to site visitors so reliability will be high on their list. Price is also likely to be high on the list as is 24/7 technical support. What about add-on features such as unlimited email aliases, cgi support and what-not? These things will be highly important to some and less important to others. So focus on the benefits that are likely to be highly relevant to the majority of your target market. Let’s settle for our purposes on reliability, price and technical support.

Your mission statement might read something like this: “I strive to earn a fair return on my investment of time and money by providing affordable webhosting with guaranteed 99% uptime and 24/7 telephone technical support”. That’s a pretty general statement and if you decide to focus on a particular niche of the webhosting market, such as small business, you may want to more narrowly focus on that group in your mission statement.Now that you’ve written your mission statement, you can begin thinking about creating a brand that reinforces and supports your mission. So, getting back to the fundamental questions of who you are, what you do and how you do it, you can now begin to think of your business in these terms. You’re a webhosting provider, you host websites of small businesses and you do that by offering cost-effective webhosting solutions, guaranteed 99% uptime and 24/7 telephone technical support.

When you create your brand, you need to keep the who, what and how firmly in mind but also use the brand to establish your relevance to your target market and build credibility with that market.

Let’s turn now to the nuts and bolts of creating your brand.

=> Describe What You Are Branding

List out your business’s key features and characteristics, your competitive advantages and anything else that sets you apart from your competition.

Using our webhosting example, you’ll focus primarily on the objectives from your mission statement namely, reliable, cost-effective webhosting solutions supported by 24/7 technical support.

=> Identify and Describe Your Target Market

Decide whether you want to target lthe entire webhosting community or only a segment of it such as small business websites. Describe your market.

=> List Names that Suggest the Key Elements from Your Mission Statement

The key elements from your mission statement were reliability, cost-effectiveness and customer service. List names that are suggestive of these elements. Let’s use Reliable Webhosting for our example. (I don’t claim to be a creative genius.)

Don’t limit yourself to real words, though. A coined name with no obvious meaning is a perfectly legitimate name provided it conveys something about your business. You will find coined names easier to trademark and secure domain names for too – a definite plus!

=> List Tag Lines that Reinforce Your Mission Statement

We’ll use: “Outstanding reliability and technical support at a price your small business can afford”. I know, I know. You can do much better, I’m sure.

HOW SHOULD I USE MY BRAND?

=> Create a Logo for Your Brand

Your logo is NOT your brand but your logo should allow your brand to be instantly recognized by those familiar with it. To this extent, your logo helps create and reinforce brand awareness.

The logo you create should be able to be used consistently in a variety of different media. It should be suitable for corporate letterhead and business cards, as well as for your website and corporate signage (if any). You do NOT want a confusing mishmash of logos and banners and heaven knows what else. Everything you produce needs to use the same, consistent style of logo so that, over time, your logo becomes synonymous with your brand. Instant recognition is what you’re going for here, so don’t dilute it by using several different logos for different purposes.

=> Consistent Usage of Company Name, Logo and Tag Line

Going back to our webhosting example, putting the brand name and tagline together, the physical manifestation of your brand will be:

RELIABLE WEBHOSTING Outstanding reliability and technical support at a price your small business can afford.
To establish brand awareness, this branding needs to be used consistently and frequently in everything your produce, whether that be letters to clients, business cards, brochures, quotations, invoices, advertising, promotion, on your website, on the front door of your principal place of business and on your products. And don’t forget to be consistent in your use of color schemes. These can be powerful brand reinforcers.

=> Marketing and Promotion of Your Brand

Once you’ve created your brand, you need to market and promote it, in addition to your products and services. This is how you establish your credibility and relevance to your target market. You can hopefully see why your brand needs to be suggestive of your mission statement. If, at the same time as you’re selling your products and services you also push your brand, your brand becomes synonymous with your products and services. And vice versa.

A properly descriptive brand and high brand awareness amongst your target market will allow you to more easily introduce a wider range of products and services when they’re developed without having to start by again selling who you are, what you do and how you do it first. Your brand has already presold YOU. Your job then is to sell your products and services.

These customer service tips will save you thousands of dollars and create a lasting bond with your customers. I was thinking recently about one of my worse home based business nightmares and how it turned out to be a very valuable lesson for creating excellent customer service.

It started out like a great dream. We just started our toner and ink-jet business and our first business customer was a medical firm of about 20 offices. I had known the purchasing agent for sometime and before long we got the contract to supply these offices with printer products.

We were so excited to get the order that we did not question when the purchasing agent placed a huge order for hundreds of toner and ink-jet supplies. She had mentioned that they were going to make the main office the headquarters for all the printer supplies.

The business we had set up was a drop ship company which meant we would be getting all the products from various manufacturers. We were on a cash basis with the suppliers, meaning that all funds were paid up front.

We ordered all the supplies believing that the purchasing agent knew what she was doing. Well, it became a logistical nightmare when they could not fit all the products into the storage area they had created.

Of course the medical firm was way too overstocked and we had to send back more then half of the orders. Now that makes it difficult when you are working with numerous manufacturers and their return policies. Our company motto is excellent customer service so we immediately sent a representative down to correct the errors.

Even though it was the purchasing agent who created the mess, when I look back at the situation it was my home based business that was more at fault. We had only offered good customer service not excellent customer service.

These customer service tips will save you from getting into the situation that my company did and save your time and money.

Customer Service Tips

*Pre Qualify Your Customer and their Needs

*Help the Customer with Volume Amounts

*Verify Storage Life of Product

*Test the Product and Business Relationship

Pre Qualify Your Customer

At your first meeting with the decision maker of the company you will be doing business with have a check list of questions. Your primary objective is to help the customer with their needs. First find out how long they have been doing the ordering. Ask if they are new at this or if this is a new company idea. In our scenario above, the company did not put a real strong plan together in regards to using one location as a distribution center.

Armed with these questions and the customer service tips, you can get a better idea of where your home based business products or services can fit in. Offering suggestions if they need them. Excellent customer service begins with getting the facts.

Help the Customer with Volume Amounts

If you have done your pre-qualifying you will know much more about what the decision maker really needs. Sometimes you will find out that the decision maker is not really clear on their objectives and you need to be able to help clarify them.

Did they get an accurate volume of products needed? Most times you will need to test the waters. Always go slow you can speed it up anytime.

Verify Storage Life of Product

If you are selling a product that has a storage life, be sure that the customer?s volume amounts are safely matched but not excessively over matched. You do not want too much product on their shelves. This is money tied up by your customer and also could expire. Someone will eat the product costs of this common mistake.

An extra customer service tip to add to this is that by keeping your customer too well stocked you may lose them. If they do not get a call from your home based business very often they are more apt to run into other product suppliers and you will not be ?in front of your customers?. You will want to continue to be able to work with your customers helping them identify needs that they may not even know they have and telling them about new products and services.

Test the Product and the Business Relationship

When you start with a new customer, go slow and see how the product fits into their needs. Good customer service begins with this but excellent customer service goes beyond this point. See how your home based business products and services are meeting the customer needs. Are your products a good match and are you offering the correct service? What can you do to make the business relationship even better? How can they profit from your products? Keep in mind the extra customer service tip I mentioned above about keeping “in front of the customer”.

If the products or business relationship are not a good fit, end the relationship. It will cost your business money and time as well bad public relations. Remember an unsatisfied customer will tell more people about a bad situation then a good one. It is hard to end a relationship. Sometimes it is better to never have begun one with the customer in the first place. For the sake of excellent customer service I have refused customers because I knew that our products would not fit their needs.

I hope that your home based business will use these customer service tips. Creating a successful relationship with your customers is essential for your business success. Sales will soar and happy customers mean great word of mouth advertising.

“With the continuing explosive growth of e-commerce, small- and medium-sized businesses that are able to reap actionable information from a rich online platform are uniquely positioned to compete in the online marketplace,” says Michael Emaus, President and CEO of eEnterprise (www.eEnterprise.com), a global integrator of NetSuite, the world’s leading on-demand, Web-based business management software. “Today, e-commerce demands sophistication, in terms of the online shopping experience, which products are presented to customers, and how sales are tracked.”

According to the U.S. Department of Commerce, e-commerce sales rose to $25.2 billion during the first quarter of 2006, an increase of more than 25 percent over sales during the first quarter of 2005. Adjusted for seasonal variations, the first quarter 2006 growth of e-commerce over fourth quarter 2005 was more than double that of retail sales overall.

“Although online sales currently represent only about three percent of all retail sales, that number is sure to climb,” says Emaus. “It’s crucial that online retailers position themselves to take advantage of this trend. NetSuite business management software integrates a flexible e-commerce platform with the critical, real-time information e-tailers need to make sound decisions.”

With NetSuite, online retailers can easily increase sales by automating up-sell and cross-sell recommendations on the shopping cart page, as well as by allowing customers to purchase and use gift certificates and coupons online. “Because accounting is integrated into NetSuite’s e-commerce solution, a customer can shop with a gift certificate any number of times, until the balance is used,” says Emaus. “An e-tailer can even offer downloads for purchase, using NetSuite’s ability for password protection and license codes.”

Behind the scenes, NetSuite gives a business owner or marketing team real-time, actionable information that they can leverage to increase their exposure to potential customers. “Instead of simply seeing which paid keyword campaigns are driving traffic to the site, an online retailer can see which campaigns are generating the most sales revenue, and make adjustments as necessary,” says Emaus.

The same holds true for inventory management, since NetSuite allows just-in-time restocking by dynamically calculating reorders based on seasonal demand or historical sales data. “Successful e-tailers don’t have inventory sitting around, nor are they caught with an item out of stock,” says Emaus.

He continues, “NetSuite removes the limits imposed by a traditional Web architecture and provides the online retailer with a marketing powerhouse. Small- and medium-sized businesses simply don’t have the resources to support the in-house staff necessary to design and maintain the e-commerce solution that NetSuite provides. Best of all, NetSuite is a Web-based application that can ‘turn on’ fully supported global resources in about five minutes.”

With the growth of online sales clearly outpacing traditional retail sales, NetSuite helps small- and medium-sized businesses level the playing field.

The home based business especially are becoming more and more popular by the day in todays world simply because people are starting to see the true benefits of the World Wide Web, consumers are starting to trust the web more, and more importantly, the start up costs for a home based business are next to nothing compared to the offline world of business start ups.

The only set back most people run into when wanting to start one of their own home based business is How and Where to get started.

I did a search under the keyword term “home based business” and the search results returned 64,800,000 results for that keyword alone.

That’s a pretty intimidating number for someone wanting to start their own home based business on the web would not you say?

These were the same obstacles I was up against when I first ventured into the online world of home based business.

But I did not let that stop me and I hope that will not stop you either from wanting to start your own home based business.

So, I saved you the hassle and put together 3 of the fastest ways for ANYONE(that is You) to start their own home based business with next to no investment required and can get started in less than 24 hours.

Are you ready? I hope so.

Home Based Business Model 1. Affiliate Internet Programs.

Affiliate Internet Programs are simply programs set up by the home based business business owner for others to sign up for and promote for the home based business owner for a agreed upon commission(usually between 5 – 75%).

The great thing about affiliate internet marketing is it does not cost you a single penny to get started, you do not have to worry about refunds or customer service that come with owning your own product.

All you have to worry about is generating the traffic to your affiliate link and collecting your commission cheques.

This is the quickest way to get started online… Period!

Home Based Business Model 2. Resell Rights.

Resell Rights are simply products that have already been created and are available to anybody who is willing to pay for the Resell Rights to market them.

The upside to this is you get Ready-To-Go websites with PROVEN sales letters that convert. The best part of all is… you get to keep 100% of the Profits.

The draw back is you can not claim those products as your own. The original creator of the product maintains full rights. You just get to keep all the profits.

Not such a bad trade off would not you say?

Home Based Business Model 3. Private Label  Rights (PLR).
 
PLR are simply products that are ready to be branded with your name to it.

What I mean by that is you get full rights to the product or products and are able to claim them as your own even though you did not create them yourself.

This is the fastest way for anyone to start a home based business who really does not have any experience or knowledge on how to create their own products.

The other really cool thing about PLR products is they come with Ready-To-Go websites which then again saves you time and money in having to create them yourself.

Well there you have it, 3 fast ways to start your own home based business in less than 24 hours.

The easiest way to locate any of the above via the search engines is by entering something like this into there search engine web form:

affiliate programs + “what your niche is”

(Note: make sure you use the quotations around what niche you want to target. Very Important!)

This will save you time and target your search much better, where as if you were to just enter ‘affiliate programs’ into the search engine web form you would get a gazillion results, leaving you frustrated.

Now, the only thing left for you to do Right NOW is make a decision on what you would really enjoy doing as a home based business online.

Once you have figured that out the only thing left for you to do is put together a… Plan For Profit.