CHANGE IS A CONSTANT

Monday, October 8, 2012

3/11/12

Webnsite Success

Men and Markets Observed: Webnsite Success

Five daily must-dos to keep your business humming - The Globe and Mail:

Here are some important, if not fundamental, things that should be part of your daily to-do list:

1. Keep the sales machine humming

Whether business is strong or struggling, you have to keep on selling. You can work on sales calls, cold calls, the creation of sales and marketing material, social media activity, or presentations. Whether it’s a hard sell or a soft sell, the funnel needs to be kept as full as possible.

2. Network, network and network some more

A strong network is among the most valuable assets that a business can have. It is the people and the companies within your network that can drive sales, generate new customers and opportunities.

3. Keep your books up to date

Too many business, particularly small ones, stuff receipts and invoices in a shoe box, and then spend hours wading through it every few weeks or months. A better approach is to spend time on your books every day. Even if it is only a few minutes, it can be enough to maintain control of your finances and, as important, avoid the dreaded shoebox pile.

4. Love your customers

While it is important to attract new customers, your existing customers should get a lot of TLC because they have already made the commitment to do business with you. If you meet their needs, there is a better chance they will give you more business.

5. Keep exploring ways to do business better or differently

Your business will change and evolve, customers will come and go, and the economy will rise and fall. All that means that you can’t be complacent or stick with the status quo, or your business could become stagnant.

Instead, you need to explore new tools, services and approaches to keep things in your business fresh and current.

Special to The Globe and Mail:
Mark Evans, ME Consulting (communications and marketing)

Join The Globe’s Small Business LinkedIn group to network with other entrepreneurs and to discuss topical issues: http://linkd.in/jWWdzT

Men and Markets Observed: Daily Must-Do's

Six Keys to Being Excellent at Anything

Here, then, are the six keys to achieving excellence we've found are most effective for our clients:

Pursue what you love. Passion is an incredible motivator. It fuels focus, resilience, and perseverance.
Do the hardest work first. We all move instinctively toward pleasure and away from pain. Most great performers, Ericsson and others have found, delay gratification and take on the difficult work of practice in the mornings, before they do anything else. That's when most of us have the most energy and the fewest distractions.
Practice intensely, without interruption for short periods of no longer than 90 minutes and then take a break. Ninety minutes appears to be the maximum amount of time that we can bring the highest level of focus to any given activity. The evidence is equally strong that great performers practice no more than 4 ½ hours a day.
Seek expert feedback, in intermittent doses. The simpler and more precise the feedback, the more equipped you are to make adjustments. Too much feedback, too continuously, however, can create cognitive overload, increase anxiety, and interfere with learning.
Take regular renewal breaks. Relaxing after intense effort not only provides an opportunity to rejuvenate, but also to metabolize and embed learning. It's also during rest that the right hemisphere becomes more dominant, which can lead to creative breakthroughs.
Ritualize practice. Will and discipline are wildly overrated. As the researcher Roy Baumeisterhas found, none of us have very much of it. The best way to insure you'll take on difficult tasks is to ritualize them — build specific, inviolable times at which you do them, so that over time you do them without having to squander energy thinking about them.

Men and Markets Observed: Six Keys to Being Excellent at Anything

50 Ways to Change your life

Ever since Charlie Munger recommended reading Influence by Robert Cialdini, I've been a huge fan. For his follow up book 50 Scientifically proven ways to be persuasive (also recommended by Munger) I was one of the first in line to purchase a copy. This book is a masterful work of social psychology.

Do you know when people are influencing you? Can you effectively influence others? Those two abilities will have an enormous impact on your life over a long period of time - few things offer the return on investment this book does.

The authors do a good job of incorporating real world examples into the book. However, with such a fascinating subject, I would have liked to see longer chapters with more examples. To fill the void, I've started looking up the footnotes and reading the original research which is proving very interesting.

Two examples of the types of concepts you can expect to find:

Did you know that companies who explain failure in their annual report using language that points to internal and controllable factors had higher stock prices one year later than those that pointed to external uncontrollable factors (pg 122)?
Why the phrase "if operators are busy, please call back" is more effective at influencing people than "operators are waiting to take your call".

Reading this book helped me realize a few times that I've been 'psychologically exploited' by slick tricks in the past. I think I'm much better prepared to notice the subtle tricks others use when trying to persuade me and I suspect my ability to persuade others will also noticeably increase.

Men and Markets Observed: 50 Ways to Change your life