DATE: 10/11/2007 23:51:23 / MOOD: happy

Think like an Entrepreneur

I's all in the mind!

And indeed, it’s all in the mind when it comes to managing a uccessful business. You just don’t need a brilliant idea, but you also need the brains to convert that idea into a reality to taste success. In other words, for a successful entrepreneur, you need to think like an entrepreneur before you act in your entrepreneurial capacity.


Thinking like an entrepreneur is all about seeing what others can’t, not in physical sense of the term, but as a metaphysical reality. You need to show some kind of intuitiveness, a kind of sixth sense, and a kind of transcendental vision to sense the opportunities and avoid the unforeseen pitfalls. This might seem a much-advanced stage of evolution of mankind, but it’s a reality. Some
people are born with it and some might develop these instincts with experience. But you can vouch for the fact that every successful entrepreneur is successful first in mind and then in fact.


Self-belief is the strongest weapon of a successful entrepreneur. If you are firm in your convictions, the others will follow you. You can sell your idea only when you are confident about it. Nothing will work if you don’t exude confidence in your own product or service.


A successful entrepreneur is not a special person from an alien world. He is made of similar flesh and blood as all of us are. The only difference is the level of thinking. The successful entrepreneurs are not easily bogged down by failures. Their strong convictions and self-belief will keep them afloat even in the toughest of times. Success and failure doesn’t matter if you think like an entrepreneur because you have achieved that level of understanding where you
realize that failure is momentary and has to give way to success sooner or later, and success needs to be leveraged big time to achieve higher goals.

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DATE: 09/26/2007 11:59:15 / MOOD: happy

Given the increasing competition in the market today, maintaining and improving good customer relationship has become essential in ensuring that your business is always leading the pack. To be ahead of the competitive market, now is the time to make use of an excellent customer relationship management (CRM) strategy in your business. 

But what exactly is this strategy all about?  This strategy is primarily employed to further gain knowledge about your customers’ behaviors and needs, enabling you to build up a stronger relationship with them.  With an excellent customer relationship, your company will surely succeed.  You can employ technological components to meet your customers’ needs, while boosting your bottom line at the same time.  Just keep in mind that the success of a CRM strategy mainly depends on your ability to bring together your customers’ data and market trends, paving the way for you to effectively market your products and services.

What CRM aspects should you employ?

Depending on your type of business and the need to improve your customer relationship, you can choose from three main CRM aspects to implement in your business.  These aspects can be put into practice independently. 0 The three aspects to choose from include:

(1) Analytical CRM primarily involves customer data analysis to optimize your company’s marketing effectiveness through the use of predictive analytics.

(2) Collaborative CRM is all about your direct communication and interaction with your clients.  This usually involves the use of e-mails, web pages, SMS or automated voice response (AVR).  Your goals depend on whether you want to reduce cost or improve your services.

(3) Operational CRM entails the use of customer relationship support processes or automation (use of different CRM software packages) including the services of your marketing, service or sales representatives.  This aspect mainly gives support to your front-of-house business processes.

What should be your CRM goals?

Once you have chosen which aspect of the CRM strategy to use to improve your customer relationship, it is a good idea to have your business goals complement with your new strategy. Since this strategy uses human resources and technological components, your goals should enhance your company’s overall performance in the market, effectively increasing your revenues.

With a CRM strategy, your business should be able to:

(1) Efficiently provide products and services which specifically meet what your target market wants and needs;

(2) Offer enhanced customer services;

(3) Maintain as well as expand your market share as a result of your improved customer relationship;

(4) More effectively cross sell your products and services; and

(5) Professionally assisting your sales team in closing deals faster.

Holistically improving your customer relationship

You may be sidetracked and think that by just incorporating CRM software in your daily business operations, you can effectively enhance your customer relationship. This is not usually the case.  CRM is not all about employing technological advancements into your business.  This strategy is all about matching the right aspect of CRM with your business goals.   You must take a holistic approach by taking into consideration your company’s customer relationship philosophy vis-à-vis your situation and clients’ expectations and needs.

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DATE: 09/25/2007 10:26:04 / MOOD: happy

Small businesses and start-ups face almost identical teething problems. Mostly, the financial limitations are aggravated by lack of proper marketing skills possessed by these organizations. However, without serious and effective marketing, most of these organizations perish before they can make their presence felt. Here are some useful tips for small business and start-ups that will surely help them in marketing their products and/or services effectively and affordably:


1. Brand Identity: Having a brand identity right from the inception stage brings lots of brownie points from the prospective customers or clients. With a unique logo and a trademarked name of your organization, you have just taken the first step towards an effective marketing campaign for your business. And don’t forget to put the logo on every business card and literature. This will serve the dual purpose of information dissemination about your business and free marketing. The importance of brand identity can be realized from the simple swoosh sign or “Just Do It!” of Nike that is sufficient to identify the brand of the product.

2. Budget Allocation: The best approach towards marketing with limited budget is to earmark certain percentage of expenditure for the first 3-6 months on marketing. And also allocate certain percentage from monthly revenues towards promotion of the organization. This will not only ensure optimum utilization of limited resources but also help in consistent marketing of the business, which is extremely vital for a start-up.

3. Hire a cheap yet good PR Firm: Entrusting your marketing requirements to a cheap yet effective PR Firm is not a bad idea. A good PR Firm with solid credentials can work wonders for your organization in online as well as offline business world. Just let them know about your marketing budget and seek out the best deal you can extract from the PR Firm.

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DATE: 09/25/2007 10:22:28 / MOOD: happy

Marketing, if not done diligently or done without the application basic conversational etiquettes, can have a counterproductive effect. An effective marketing strategy encapsulates every aspect that tends to establish a relationship with the prospects. Unlike a general marketing campaign aimed at the world at large, the effective marketing strategy should be people-oriented and highly personalized campaign. Here are a few tips that’ll help you in launching an effective personalized business marketing campaign:

1. Salutation: While addressing an existing customer or a prospect in any kind of correspondence, always use his or her name instead of general “Dear Customer”. Preferably use the first name or depending on the prevailing customs in your country, you may use either the full name or the surname preceded by Mr./Miss/Mrs. This simple practice immediately establishes a personal bond with the recipient, which is extremely vital in establishing business relationship. After all, establishing relationships is the prime objective of every marketing technique.

2. Greetings: Whenever a customer or client buys your product or service, invariably, you collect certain personal data directly from him/her. Date of Birth is one such record you should always ask from the customers/clients while selling them your products/services. Just follow it up by sending a “Greetings!” message either through email or by post on their birthday. You can also send personalized Greeting Cards on special occasions, like Christmas or New Year.

3. Personalized Gifts: Most business houses indulge in distributing freebies and gifts on purchases or to the existing customers in order to market their products or services. If you are planning similar exercise for your organization, always remember that the choice and presentation of the gift will decide the effectiveness of this marketing strategy. The gifts should be personalized preferably with handwritten notes instead of mechanically printed ones. The choice of gift should represent the market goodwill of your organization, i.e., it should neither be too expensive nor too cheap, but ideal enough to showcase your personalized touch.

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DATE: 09/25/2007 10:17:44 / MOOD: happy

In business terminology, an Elevator Pitch, or Elevator Speech, is a quick (around) 30-seconds intro about the product, or service, or individual, or a business. Basically, an Elevator Pitch is the first impression you give to the prospects about your business. There are different perceptions about the nature of content an Elevator Pitch should contain. Some think that it should be just an intro, while others advocate that it should be descriptive to some extent about the product or service.

But one thing that these two views converge upon is that it should be aimed at pushing the prospect towards the product or service by several notches, just like you’d like to hop several steps on an elevator to reach the destination quickly. Here, the destination is the sale of product or service.

The importance of an Elevator Pitch to a business can never be overemphasized. It’s the first impression the prospect gets at the potential of your product or service. Most entrepreneurs tend to take Elevator Pitch lightly because they consider the time limit to be too tight to showcase their products or services in a cogent manner. However, the tight time limit is the X-factor of an Elevator Pitch. If you are able to impress the prospect within 30 seconds, he will be yours for 30 years provided you play your cards astutely!

Here are some of the characteristics that an Elevator Pitch for your business must have:

1. It should be clear and devoid of any ambiguous terms or phrases that can have two meanings under the similar circumstances.

2. It should be focused on the products and/or services you offer.

3. It should stress on the benefits that the prospect can derive from the products/services on offer.

4. It should be devoid of any verbose and difficult words that are not easily understood by an average person.

5. It should be compelling enough to generate the initial interest in the minds of the prospects.

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DATE: 09/25/2007 10:08:52 / MOOD: happy

Finally, you’ve decided to take a plunge on the Internet and establish an online business presence. However, before starting an online business venture, consider this simple fact – a vast majority of Web startups wind up in no time due to multifarious reasons. If you don’t want your web venture to meet a similar fate, read on. Here are some tips that’ll ensure your Web startup overcomes the teething problems with flying colors:

1. Focus on Niche segment: For a web startup, it’s always safe if you focus on a niche market rather than providing a whole lot of products and services to several different segments of customers/clients. Simply, narrow down your focus to start with. Having built a considerable goodwill in cyberspace, you can easily diversify with more products/services.
   


2. Unique Product/Service: You can virtually find any product/service on sale on the Internet. Thus, it becomes tough to lend the ‘uniqueness’ factor in your business. Just explore all the websites offering similar product/service and try to offer a little add-on to sound ‘unique’ on your web pages. And make sure you promote this add-on like your life depends on it! Because it’s your unique identity among hordes of other similar web ventures.
   


3. Avoid Jargon: All your web pages are targeted towards readers with average reading ability. Therefore, for maximum readability of your website, avoid the use technical words that are not readily understood by an average reader. If the use of jargon seems inevitable, try to explain it in few simple words. If the content is too difficult to understand, no one will stay on your website for more than a couple of minutes.
   


4. Easily accessible and maneuverable website: Your website should possess basic features of easy accessibility and maneuverability for maximum enhancement of user experience. If the user likes your website’s overall look and feel and loading time, chances are that he’ll visit it again and again.
   


5. High Sales Pitch: Your website should contain maximum sales pitch (with correct English and Grammar!) in order to compel the visitors to make an online purchase. You can easily hire a professional copywriter to write you a good sales-pitch content for your website.
   


6. Aggressive Marketing: No web startup churns dollars overnight without aggressive marketing strategy in place. Promote your products/services online with whatever budget you have for better results.

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DATE: 09/25/2007 10:07:47 / MOOD: happy

If you segregate the phrase ‘Business Networking’, its meaning becomes easy to decipher. Simply put, ‘Business Networking’ means networking undertaken to solicit business. The networking may be with any individual or organization but the purpose of networking remains constant, i.e., soliciting business.

 

The business network may involve employers, employees, colleagues, suppliers, and sales people etc. – basically, anyone within and without the organization. The premise of business networking is that everyone has some contacts that can be used to solicit business. It’s always better to approach a prospective business with some referral rather than a cold-calling to strangers.

 

Business networking is not just about exchanging business cards. It’s much bigger than mere mechanical gestures. In fact, an effective business network involves tremendous social skills to charm people in a relatively short period of time. The exchange of business cards should be seen more as an afterthought (but a vital afterthought!). The stress should be on building a relationship by getting to know each other. A pleasant conversation leaves an indelible mark on a stranger and invariably, a business opportunity is round the corner with this simple exercise.

 

Another premise of business networking is mutual benefit. Both the parties stand to gain by establishing a business network with each other’s organization. In an ever-shrinking e-world, geographical and political boundaries have been rendered impotent. The businesses are getting closer by the minute. And thanks to business networking, the scope of businesses has grown by leaps and bounds. The national businesses have gone multinational and the multinationals have assumed cult status. And do you think, this is achieved overnight? As a matter of fact, it is the result of “Business Networking in progress” for the past several years.

 

The concept of online business networking websites, though of recent origin, has assumed gigantic proportions and has redefined the entire global approach towards business networking. In the changing times, no business can afford to overlook its presence on these Business Networking websites.

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DATE: 05/25/2007 22:55:30 / MOOD: other

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) vs. Enterprise Systems (ES)
 

ERP is an enterprise-wide set of management tools that balances demand and supply, containing the ability to link customers and suppliers into a complete supply chain, employing proven business processes for decision-making, and providing high degrees of cross-functional integration among sales, marketing, manufacturing, operations, logistics, purchasing, finance, new product development, and human resources, thereby enabling people to run their business with high levels of customer service and productivity, and simultaneously lower costs and inventories; and providing the foundation for effective e-commerce.

There’s a lot of sloppy terminology flying around today in the business press, and one misnomer is to label enterprise-wide transaction processing software systems as ERP. These software packages support effective resource planning and make much of it feasible, but they don’t truly do it. Plus these packages contain many business processes other than resource planning.

Therefore, we need to trot out another acronym that does refer to software: ES. This stands for Enterprise System or Enterprise Software. A general and widely used definition for an enterprise systems is: packages of computer applications that support many, even most, aspects of a company’s information needs. That makes sense to us. Now for another distinction: Not all ERP business functions are contained in the typical Enterprise Software (ES) suite.

Similarly, the typical ES contains software support for business processes that are not a part of ERP. In Figure 1-1, we can see that distinction graphically. Please note the three areas on that diagram.

The rightmost part of the figure refers to those functions contained within a typical ES that are not part of ERP; the leftmost area is for those ERP functions not normally supported by an ES; the area of overlap in the center references those ERP functions typically supported by Enterprise Software. Now let’s take a look at just what this ERP thing is all about.

Enterprise Resource Planning

The fundamentals of ERP are the same as with MRP II (Manufacturing Resource Planning). However, thanks in large measure to enterprise software, ERP as a set of business processes is broader in scope, and more effective in dealing with multiple business units. Financial integration is even stronger. Supply chain tools, supporting business across company boundaries, are more robust. For a graphical view of ERP, see Figure 1-2.

Let’s now look at a complete definition of ERP, based on the description we saw a few pages back:

ENTERPRISE RESOURCE PLANNING (ERP) predicts and balances demand and supply. It is an enterprise-wide set of forecasting, planning, and scheduling tools, which:

• links customers and suppliers into a complete supply chain,
• employs proven processes for decision-making, and
• coordinates sales, marketing, operations, logistics,purchasing, finance, product development, and human resources.

Figure 1 - 2

Its goals include high levels of customer service, productivity, cost reduction, and inventory turnover, and it provides the foundation for effective supply chain management and e-commerce. It does this by developing plans and schedules so that the right resources —manpower, materials, machinery, and money—are available in the right amount when needed.

Enterprise Resource Planning is a direct outgrowth and extension of Manufacturing Resource Planning and, as such, includes all of MRP II’s capabilities. ERP is more powerful in that it: a) applies a single set of resource planning tools across the entire enterprise, b) provides real-time integration of sales, operating, and financial data, and c) connects resource planning approaches to the extended supply chain of customers and suppliers.

The primary purpose of implementing Enterprise Resource Planning is to run the business, in a rapidly changing and highly competitive environment, far better than before.

Author, Related References and Literature
ERP Making It Happen, John Whiley and Sons.
Mission Critical, Thomas H. Davenport

 

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