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Gone are the days of abusing your sales team and potential customers by using cold calling door-to-door sales techniques. It’s been proven that this strategy no longer works; or hardly worked before. The same can be said for spam calling random people from hot and cold lists to generate leads; how much time is actually wasted on digging up these lists and then calling hundreds of phone numbers in the hope that some of them are active and will yield a good customer base.

A good way to build your customer base effectively is to use a combination of marketing strategies, such as Pay-Per-Click through search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc… This will ensure your site gets top visibility, and bring customers to your company. Though you will need to have a visually appealing and functional website, with a shopping cart to enable them to buy the product(s) your selling; always best to have a good customer services support network on hand as well in case the site goes wrong, or if you need to answer questions or offer assistance to those customers.

In conjunction with this, you should hire a top sales team with proven experience, as well as the ability to effectively build and maintain customer relationships. Maintain the customer email base also and always keep tabs on the email feeds that your customers have subscribed to; just avoid overuse, as you will end up spamming your customers unnecessarily.

Be different from the competition and know what makes you different from them, and be able to relay that effectively to your customers; both new customers and existing. Offer them an outstanding service and exceptional customer service; don’t just say it, do it, and show it!

Business coaching could refer to a manager who uses an approach or set of skills to promote growth within their business by motivating employees to do better with their job and be more effective, through positive encouragement, guidance, support; the manager takes on the roles of a business coach as a management style to help them effectively manage their sales, marketing and to work better with their team, or with other teams.

A business coach could also be somebody who is hired contractually to assess an area of weakness in a business that is preventing a business from progressing further, and growth has became stagnant; their job is to help small to medium size businesses manage their employees better, and coach managers on ways they can train their employees to do better with sales, marketing and work more effectively as a team, or for teams to work better with other teams.

It can be costly to hire new employees that have the desired skill-sets; taking on a new employee usually involves interviewing several or more candidates, and trying to match them to the job role the company is advertising on job boards, in the paper, word of mouth, or through friend of a friend associations.

Employers have to then take a gamble with the chosen candidate and put them to work on a trial basis and see how well, and how quickly they can adapt to the new job role; there are always risks involved in business, and sometimes it pays off, and other times it does not.

So why not invest some time and money in taking on an apprentice, and give them the skills they need to advance further in their chosen career. You will of course have to assign an experienced member of staff to train them, whereby they can learn job-specific skills, in conjunction with their course of study towards a work based qualification at their college or training institution during their working week; the apprenticeship could last from 1 to 4 years depending on the qualification the apprentice is studying and working towards.

As an employer you can get funding to employ an apprentice, by applying online on the public sector government website. Alternatively you can employ them, and start them off on the National Minimum Wage for an apprentice.

The overall benefits can greatly outweigh the risks and cost involved, as you will be essentially starting them off at a low level and building them up with your business; they will grow as your business grows.

We know now that people are going to get drunk at your Christmas party. You can’t prevent it, you can’t do anything about it but you need to learn how to handle people at the party who are more drunk than you and, perhaps most importantly, how to handle yourself if you have had a couple of drinks around people who might be quite senior or important in your company. You need to pace yourself and have a clear and sound strategy.

Eat. Eat plenty. Once you think you have eaten enough then have just a little bit more to eat. You are going some way to protecting yourself and your body against the massive influx of alcohol that is about to happen. Once there it is about knowing your limits, having just enough to have a good time and enjoying yourself at a chance to let your hair down at the end of a long year.

Going into the Christmas party season it is extremely important for everyone to know a few things about Christmas parties. More specifically you need to know a few things about etiquette at Christmas parties; whether it is your first at your new company, your 10th at the same company or your first ever Christmas party in the professional world. Let’s get one thing out the way straight away; people are going to be drunk.

That is fine. I have nothing against drunk people, I get drunk too. But knowing how drunk people are, how drunk you can be and just who you are talking to can be extremely important – and often that is where new people struggle – they don’t recognise colleagues tells because they don’t know them well enough and end up saying too much, to the wrong people and getting into trouble.

I have now worked in numerous locations. I have seen numerous ways in which people are disciplined and numerous ways that people hand out discipline to their employees. It is a fine balance between commanding authority, punishing things that are seen as out of line, but also maintaining some kind of fairness to that particular employee and the staff at large. Disciplinary action rarely needs to be made public.

Where I am now is a little different. Everyone works on creative content; writing, phone calls, press releases etc and when people do well they are praised across the office from the office manager. “Well done John! Great work!” you might hear. It works, it’s nice (if a little off putting to some individuals who might feel put out) but, unfortunately, discipline is handled in the same way. If someone makes an error or does a poor job it is announced across the office for everyone to hear. It’s shameful, embarrassing and does nothing to promote work ethic or morale.

I have been working on social media accounts for a long time now. I have seen them done in house and I have seen them done in outsourced environments as well. There are pros and cons to each, but today I wanted to talk about how outsourcing your social media accounts to other companies works (and sometimes how it doesn’t work as well.)

The main benefit is when you get someone in to do your social media from another company you get all of their experience specifically dealing with social media accounts. That makes them savvy, experienced and very on point when it comes to trends and execution. The downside, though, is they are constantly liaising with you – on things they need, questions they need answered etc The time you spend answering their questions and queries you could well have done all the work yourself, or even hired someone else in to do the job full time.

The imagined community. It is something that I have thought a lot about since my time at University where we studied critical theory and analysis. This is a very interesting theory about how people enjoy being in a community, even if it’s pretend. Take a look at a restaurant; we go into those that have more people in, assuming they are better. The same is true of social media and business.

If you build up this community; of businesses and of customers, you become more and more appealing to people shopping for your services and products. By giving them pride in their local community, joining with other business for cross promotion, you convince them that this community, and your business, is doing well. So gather up those followers, get talking to neighbouring businesses and slowly build that community up. It will take a little bit of hard work, but it’ll all be worth it in the end.

A lot of things work quickly in one of the world’s most famous capitals. The cars are faster, the tubes are non stop, the people all walk a bit faster and their minds are constantly on the move. Companies are making deals, meeting people and getting things done. Whereas elsewhere people might be considering deals for a long time, in London there is simply no opportunity to let up. As soon as you stall someone else has made that deal. As soon as you take too long to make a decision it is already too late.
That is why the sharpest and best business minds move there. The big companies need those people with great business instincts to carry them forward and secure them deals, make the right decisions at the right times and keep them ahead of the curve. If you can’t handle the pressure of that then working in London’s fast moving business world will not be for you.

We all know what business is about, right? Numbers, money, crunching, synergy and any other buzzword that you can think of. While profits were soaring things were fine but, when the global economy crashed, people started to wise up. Every pound or dollar became important and people started to shop around for the best deals, saving a little here and there adding up over the course of the year. That was good for them, but bad for business.
So businesses have had to change; instead of being faceless, greedy corporations that have had to, at least pretend, to be friendly, welcoming and personable. They have done this by taking to social media and employing people with a friendly voice to deal with customers. They have blogs, too, showing behind the scenes looks at the inner workings of a business. They might show staff hard at work, or have brief chats with higher level employees on video to show a more human side.