Smart small business owners ask their customers for more than orders

Posted by Karen Utgoff on May 17, 2012

When was the last time you asked your customers for more than their business? If you can’t recall, you may be overlooking opportunities to learn about and engage them so you can meet their needs more effectively.

While the value of asking customers for ideas, feedback, guidance, and opinions seems obvious, it is hard to do effectively. We are all bombarded by requests for information, so you need to ask about what’s meaningful to them in ways that let them know you appreciate their input. Smart small business owners and executives find creative ways to ask their customers for input in at least five general areas.

• Room for improvement (e.g., constructive criticism) – Asking customers if there is anything they have not enjoyed about doing business with you will identify opportunities for improvement based on their experiences. Have they been mystified by your telephone menu options? Confused by contacts from company representatives they don’t know? Searched in vain for information on your Web site? None of these may be deal breakers to current customer, but you certainly don’t want to annoy them or to turn off prospects. Seek constructive criticism informally and through your customer service staff.

• Input for specific decisions – All businesses are occasionally faced with decisions that are best made with customer input. For example, a grocery store used their entryway to set up a map and asked shoppers to put a pin in it to show where they lived. That information helped inform their decision on where to locate a new store. Some decisions can be turned over to customers completely, as the Florence Savings Bank does in its customer choice community grants program, which uses customer votes to make awards to local charitable organizations.

• Unmet needs – New or improved products and services are usually less risky when they clearly satisfy the unmet needs of existing customers. This can be as simple as changing your hours of operation or as complicated as inventing a new solution to an emerging problem.

Unmet needs may be more likely to be expressed in the course of open-ended conversations. For B2B companies these may occur during visits, phone calls, trade shows, or on the golf course. For consumer products, conversations on social media or at the point of sale are both possible sources. Web-based, phone or in-person surveys may make sense in either B2B or B2C situations. In executing surveys, raise participation by offering some follow up such as a copy of the results or a report on the actions that resulted. For another view on surveys read “Are Your Surveys Worth Your Customer’s Time?” by Rob Markey on the HBR Blog Network.

• New product development – Getting customers’ perspectives on a new product or service at the design or prototype phase can make the difference between an offering that is on target or a near miss. This can be critical when a significant investment of time and money is at stake. Ideally, ask a select group of customers to test an early version and give feedback that you will consider in finalizing the go-to-market product. Because such beta tests require significant effort from your team as well as your customer, it is important to design them carefully. For more on the beta process in the context of a product launch, read  “Making the Most of Every Marketing Dollar” from Knowledge@Wharton.

• Referrals, testimonials and recommendations – Many owners feel uncomfortable asking for these directly. Nevertheless, they can be effective tools for attracting new prospects that come with positive, third-party feedback about doing business with your company. Social media can be one vehicle for asking, as can personal requests that come at the end of a particularly positive project. My dentist’s office handles this gracefully with small signs in the waiting room saying that it is very much appreciated when current patients recommend the practice to others in the community.

I hope I have energized you to reach out to customers and ask. But before you do, keep in mind one final point. When you ask, it is essential that you be prepared to listen. It is natural to resist information that makes you uncomfortable or goes against your assumptions. If either you or your customers start to squirm, it could be a sign this is the most important stuff you could possibly hear.

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Karen Utgoff, principal of Karen Lauter Utgoff Consulting, is a market-oriented business strategist based in Amherst, MA. Learn more at http://www.utgoff.com.

© Karen Lauter Utgoff Consulting 2012. All rights reserved.

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Good small business reads #22: Effective use of LinkedIn, more on crowdfunding, and business cards for the 21st century

Posted by Jeanne Yocum on May 16, 2012

This month’s issue of Good Small Business Reads once again illustrates just how diverse the knowledge is that small business owners need to accumulate to be successful in an increasingly complex business world. We’ve got everything from very 21st century topics like crowdfunding and social media along with an updated look at an age-old, and too often little considered, business tool, your business card.

Let’s tackle the latter topic first. In “Business Cards in the 21st Century: 10 Tips to Follow,” published on Network Solutions’ blog for small business, the author makes the point that business cards are one of the most important marketing tools you have yet their value and importance is often overlooked by small business owners. I also have found this to be true; I often am left to wonder why someone new I’m meeting didn’t put more effort into creating a memorable business card.

Pay special attention to tip #2 about putting a picture on your card. A couple of years ago, I ordered mini-cards from moo.com that have a picture of pens on them, very appropriate for a writer. People never fail to comment on the photo and also on the unique size of the mini-card, which is half the size of usual business cards, which also makes them very eye-catching. Handing someone one of these cards almost always results in a short conversation about them so they serve as good ice breakers. Check out moo.com, by the way; their prices can’t be beat.

I am an active participant in a LinkedIn group called Linked WesternMass. Recently, Christine Pilch Mancini, who moderates the group, wrote a great post on her blog entitled “Are you obnoxious or valuable to your LinkedIn community?” which she posted to LinkedIn WesternMass. Christine points out that people who are constantly selling, selling, selling on such social networks are not doing themselves any good and are most likely annoying group members instead of impressing them or motivating them to want to make contact. Instead, she urges that when considering posting content to a group discussion you should ask yourself, “Will this help the members of this group or is my main objectives to promote myself, my skills, my product or service, or my own blog?” As she points out, “LinkedIn group members aren’t stupid. They can tell the difference between someone who is genuine and helpful and someone who is selfish.”

Finally, in early April in our post about the JOBS Act, we promised to bring you more about the topic of crowdfunding. In “JOBS Act: What Crowdfunding Means for Your Startup” on Mashup.com, Bill Clark, CEO of Microventures, which uses a process similar to crowdfunding to raise $1,000 to $30,000 in startups online, provides seven tips for start-ups about using crowdfunding. His advice touches on a lot of the questions I’ve heard people raise on this topic, so I think you’ll find it useful if you’re in the start-up stage and are considering crowdfunding.

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Things small business owners should avoid #3: Perfectionism

Posted by Jeanne Yocum on May 10, 2012

Welcome to part three of my series on behaviors small business people should avoid. Okay, okay, I can already hear the perfectionists in the audience shouting, “What’s wrong with being a perfectionist? I’m proud to be a perfectionist!” Well, there’s plenty wrong with it. When you can’t let go of something until it’s perfect, you’ll procrastinate, perhaps face cost overruns, and may not even satisfy the client because you’re so late with your delivery. What good is something to a client if it is perfect but gets there too late to be of help or so late that it causes problems with their own operations? In general, clients don’t like vendors who cause them heart palpitations by constantly pushing up against deadlines.

And if you’re too busy fussing over every single detail of a project, you will tend to make things more complicated than they need to be. Perfectionists over-analyze, over-think and in general, over-do everything. When you’re so wrapped up by the minutiae of a project, it’s very likely that you’ll lose sight of the big picture.

If you have a staff, your perfectionism will drive them nuts because you try to control everything they do. I once worked for a woman who thought there was only one way to do things and that was her way. Every paragraph of every press release had to be analyzed, redrafted, and then thought about some more. Public relations is a deadline-driven business and her inability to “let go” of anything until it was perfect in her eyes made the already crazy deadlines even crazier. It led to staff burnout and, in my case, was part of the reason I quit.

Perhaps worst of all, your ability to grow your business can be seriously stymied if you are a perfectionist. You may spend so much time perfecting each and every task that you have no time to devote to innovating new products, to attracting new clients for your services, or other activities that will support business growth.

Not advocating sloppiness

Now obviously, I am not arguing in favor of being slipshod. We all take pride on our work and want to do a good job for those who buy our products or services. But there does come a point in every project where the law of diminishing returns kicks in and you need to recognize when the amount of difference you’re making by seeking perfection simply won’t be meaningful enough to your end-user to justify the effort.

For example, every time I pick up one of the books I’ve written, I can find something that I’d like to revise. But I long ago accepted that writers are never truly satisfied so that when the deadline comes and it’s time to turn over a manuscript, I don’t fret that still one more draft would make the difference between a good book and a perfect book.

And perhaps that is the biggest downside of perfectionism. If you constantly strive to be perfect and to do everything perfectly, you may never be truly satisfied with anything, no matter how much hard work you put into it. Instead, live by this motto: “Always do your best,” recognizing that on some days, your best will be truly fabulous and on other days it will just be good but it is still the best you have to offer the world on that day.

Since I don’t suffer from perfectionism, I am at a loss to provide you with other advice on how to overcome such tendencies. Fortunately, I came across this great article, “Overcoming Perfectionism in 8 Steps,” that should be of help. Good luck!

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Free e-book will improve your knowledge of small business finances

Posted by Jeanne Yocum on May 8, 2012

How well do you understand the financial side of your small business? While many us small business owners are true experts in the field in which we operate, the financial side remains a mystery to many of us. If this is true for you, this can considerably hamper your ability to make the right financial decision and may imperil your business.

Fortunately, there are plenty of free resources available to help you fill this knowledge gap and the latest one is a free e-book from my colleague and good friend Susan C. Hammond of scHammond Advisors. The book is called 30 tips for Improving Your Financial Literacy. Susan, who has years of experience as a CFO, put it together with a couple of her colleagues who are equally knowledgeable in the financial realm. Even if you think you’re pretty savvy when it comes to your business’ finances, I am confident you’ll learn something new by downloading and reading this e-book.

I particularly liked the advice in Tip 5: Are You Paying Too Quickly. That’s something I never considered before; I tend to pay my bills within a day or two of when they arrive, but, really, why shouldn’t we all take advantage of the time we’re actually given to pay our bills and thereby manage our cash flow a little more in our favor instead of in our vendors’ favor?

Share this e-book with others in your organization so you can all become more financially literate. It will lead to better decision making all around for your small business. And some of the tips are applicable to your personal finances as well so you may see some improvement there by putting this sage advice to work.

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Small business owners: You CAN take a vacation

Posted by Jeanne Yocum on May 1, 2012

Last week I took a staycation. Although I did not wander far from home, I did get myself some first-rate pampering in the form of a facial, a trip to the hair salon and so on. It felt super luxurious to just focus on myself for a whole week, although it is impossible not to think about my clients from time to time no matter what I’m doing.

I took the time off because it had dawned on me that one reason I was feeling a little worn out was because I hadn’t really taken a vacation in 2011. (I don’t count five days off after the freak Halloween snowstorm; we had no electricity, no phone, and very little heat, so it wasn’t all that relaxing!)

This lack of vacation time is not unusual for those of us who are self-employed or owners of small businesses. It is all too easy to talk yourself into thinking that things will fall apart if you aren’t there to hold them together. But that would be wrong!

Any time I’ve gone on vacation, I always find that my clients survived nicely without me. I know it’s harder to take time off when you’re running a different kind of business than I do. A retail operation, for example, would be difficult to manage if you don’t have the right staff in place to take over in your absence. But if you don’t have the right staff in place, then you have bigger problems than a lack of time off, don’t you?

Of course, one danger of modern business life is that even when you’re on vacation, you’re still at the beck and call of e-mail. That is, unless you’re very disciplined and just don’t turn on your computer or your mobile device. I was monitoring my e-mail for the first couple of days and then I decided that it wasn’t exactly helping me achieve my goal of getting away from it all, so I stopped. And guess what? The world did not come to a halt.

I made my decision to take a week off only the week before I did so. But usually I plan way in advance because if I’m going to travel, I enjoy the planning and the anticipation that comes with knowing you’re going some place interesting. I particularly like knowing I have a reservation on an airplane going some place I haven’t been before.

Don’t get in the habit of thinking you’re indispensable. That type of thinking, while it may be good for your ego, really ratchets up the stress to your life. We all benefit from getting some balance into our lives. And the people around us, including our clients or customers, benefit, too, when we come back physically rested and mentally refreshed. So what are your vacation plans for 2012?

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A New Venture Manifesto for Small Businesses

Posted by Karen Utgoff on April 26, 2012

In recent blogs I’ve written about the importance of both small business management and entrepreneurship in sustained success. I’ve also offered some ideas for how to organize for new and innovative efforts within an existing small business and for how to fund them. With those posts in mind, I read this recent excellent blog post from Steve Blank as a challenge me to try to come up with similar points for growing a new venture within an existing small business (or within any business for that matter). Here goes…

A New Venture within an Existing Business Is a Temporary Arrangement to Search for a Business Model that Can Add Significant Value to the Going Concern

1. Use the knowledge and relationships your business has accumulated as the starting point, not the final answer.

2. You are doing something different. Venture team members don’t know what they don’t know. Send them out to learn.

3. Pair customer development with product development to find what works in the marketplace.

4. Assess the value of new ideas. Test and validate them with existing and potential customers, suppliers and partners.

5. Don’t assume your existing market is the right one for the new venture. Prove it.

6. Designate a member of the executive team to champion the new venture.  Pick someone totally committed to its success who can make things happen when needed.

7. Expect the new venture to cause discomfort. Manage it proactively, especially if the project disrupts (threatens) some or all of your existing business.

8. Embrace failures and setbacks. Everyone will learn from them.

9. Apply insight from failure and setbacks to make your venture stronger.

10. Success depends on buy-in from investors (including lenders), owners and especially employees – whether they are part of the new venture team or not.

11. You wouldn’t expect a baby to bring home a paycheck; don’t expect the new venture to perform like an existing business.

12. Expect the new venture plan to change often and evolve rapidly; use milestones to manage development. Everyone needs to know what’s expected.

13. Challenge the new venture team to make do with minimal investment until there is confidence in the business model. Be prepared to invest more when the time is right.

14. Job titles, roles, responsibilities and compensation for the new venture team will be different from those in established parts of the business.

15. Communicate and share what you learn as broadly as possible within your company.

16. Not all new ventures prove to be worth continuing.  If the market says stop, then listen.

17. Don’t let failure stop you from trying again. No established business can rely on the status quo forever.\

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Karen Utgoff, principal of Karen Lauter Utgoff Consulting, is a market-oriented business strategist based in Amherst, MA. Learn more at http://www.utgoff.com.

© Karen Lauter Utgoff Consulting 2012. All rights reserved.

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In your small business, success can come from telling employees the numbers

Posted by Laurie Breitner on April 19, 2012

Have you ever overheard an exchange between an employee and customer and cringed? You might have asked yourself, why on earth did they say that? You knew that they could have suggested a solution that would have been much more profitable for your business. Why didn’t they?

The answer could be that you’re not giving your employees the information they need to help you make your small business more successful. There are lots of reasons to keep your employees in the know about your financials.

Informed employees make better decisions. What should you share? At minimum, employees need to understand key indicators for your particular business – where your business is now and where you’d like to be in the future. Are you carefully watching sales/day, average dollars/sale, inventory turns, leakage, or number of units produced/day? How might things be different if all your employees knew about and were trying to improve on those same success indicators?

Let’s say you want to increase average dollars per sale and tell employees that now your average sale is $25 and in two months time you are striving to reach $30? Specificity and actual numbers gives everyone something to go on. Each time an employee makes a sale over $25, they know they are moving the business closer to the goal. It’s motivating to know where you are and when you’re making progress. Be sure to give periodic progress updates. In this example, weekly would be appropriate. It’s a long enough period to see trends and short enough to make mid-course corrections.

Another benefit of sharing information is that it’s easier to keep employees engaged. Routinely sharing confidential financial information – and you should be sure to stress that this is not for discussion outside your business – demonstrates your trust. It helps build team spirit and a sense of involvement. Sharing confidential data shows employees that they are valued and appreciated. It’s one thing to say that you appreciate them and quite another to communicate it through your actions.

What if one or more key indicators slip? The last thing you want to do is withhold information if things aren’t going well, especially in organizations that have been open about financials in better times. When there is no information, often employees will make up scenarios that are much more dire than what’s actually happening.

The CEO of a local mail order company shared with employees that they were losing money, breaking down where every dollar of a $100 sale went – so much to inventory, staff, overhead, etc. Working together, each member of every department learned what they could do to turn things around. By knowing and concentrating on those key indicators, the company turned a significant loss one year to a healthy profit the next. Employees felt much more engaged and everyone felt a stronger sense of company loyalty because of the experience they shared.

When employees feel that they’re kept in the dark, suspicion and resentment often build. They may feel unimportant – that their actions have no impact on results. Last week when buying a few items in a store, I noticed an item in the bag that wasn’t tallied. When I brought that to the salesperson’s attention, she actually said to me that this was a big store and it made no difference. If the company made or lost $5 on a sale, what was the big deal? Imagine the bottom line impact if all their staff felt that way.

What information should you share with employees in your small business? Everything they need to know to make informed decisions and feel they are included and contributing to success.

_________

Since 1991, Laurie Breitner has assisted organizations with operational improvement, organizational development and strategic planning. Learn more at http://www.breitnerandassociates.com.

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Thoughts on the second anniversary of SucceedinginSmallBusiness.com

Posted by Jeanne Yocum on April 18, 2012

April marks the second anniversary of SucceedinginSmallBusiness.com. Over the past two years, we brought you 193 posts covering a very wide variety of small business topics. In one way that seems like a lot, but when I think about it further I know we’ve just scratched the surface.

Indeed, when I look at past posts, I almost always realize that we could dig deeper and broader into the topic at hand in future posts. And isn’t that what is so challenging about operating a small business? Being an expert in the field in which your business operates is not near enough. You have to understand numerous other topics as well.

The part that is really scary is that something new is always coming down the pike that needs to be mastered or at the very least explored for its potential for your business. Take, for example, social media. Tools like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter have all come along in recent years to offer amazing opportunities for promoting your business and your expertise. But getting up to speed on these tools takes time and then implementing a plan to leverage their power to the greatest extent possible adds yet one more responsibility to your already full plate.

When I look back at my own career of self-employment, I can point to a long list of new skills that I have had to add to my repertoire over the years. After all, I was using an Smith Corona electric typewriter left over from my grad school days when I first started! One of my first clients couldn’t stand the fact that when she edited something I had to type if all over again so she insisted on giving me a loan so I could buy my first computer. That was in 1985. Well, we’ve come a long way since then technology wise haven’t we, baby? Each decade since has brought amazing technological advances that in many ways have made our work easier but have also required us to buckle down and learn something totally new.

Back in February I wrote a post about small business lessons I learned from my father. Looking back, I realize that the business part of his work as the owner of a small lumber mill was transacted solely by phone or in face-to-face meetings. Agreements rested on a handshake, although I believe the Pennsylvania Railroad did send him purchase orders when they wanted some railroad ties. He wrote his invoices out by hand in a tablet that made a carbon copy so he had a record of the bill. No money was spent on marketing, except for the occasional ad in a program booklet that a local charity was putting out.

From the time he started his own business in the late 1930s to when he retired in the mid-1970s, he operated more or less the same way. How amazing is that?

Oh, if only running a small business could still be that simple! But it isn’t. And that’s why I created this blog, knowing that small business owners need all the help they can get these days, when achieving success has never been more complicated and challenging.

As always, I want to thank my contributors, Laurie Breitner, Silvana Gravini, and Karen Utgoff for the value they have added to this blog since they began posting last year. We all look forward to helping you learn more about how to succeed in small business in the year ahead. And so ends post #194!

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Project management: Creating a great web site takes solid teamwork

Posted by Silvana Gravini on April 13, 2012

My recent posts have been about how to hire a good partner to help you build your Internet presence. Now I’d like to turn to a most important topic: project management – or how you’re going to work with your Internet partner to  create a great website. Perhaps you thought all the many distinct variables inherent to creating a website would just come together on its own? Think again!

The task of the project manager (a.k.a., the website developer) is to complete the website process (or process plan) on deadline and within budget. Sound simple? Yeah… try it! It takes real work, discipline, and a plan.

What are some of the things that can go wrong?  Here are a couple of big ones to consider:

1. Copy: Think about it… your site will need words on every page! Regardless of whether you’re a facile writer or not, content must be created and placed. It is the your responsibility to deliver good quality text to the developer. Depending on who you’re working with, that developer could/should act as an editor of sorts,  placing your text and checking it for typos, grammatical errors, and shaping the copy (strong headlines; short paragraphs; bullet points) for optimal advantage on the Web.

To complicate things, you’ve heard of organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO)? If you’re unsure what SEO is, it’s the work you do to your site that helps it rank well on Google (as well as other search engines). Well, how you treat the text on each of your site pages has a dramatic (or not) effect on whether you win position #3 on the first page of search results(for certain keyword phrases) or end up on page 30!

If you and your developer are optimizing your site– and, these days, you must optimize or your site can easily get lost–this adds another intense level of complexity to the work, which absolutely MUST be managed or it will languish.

2. Assets: These would be logos, photos, videos, pdfs, whitepapers, and the like. At the outset of a website project, the project manager will meet with the client to determine the status of these items.

For instance, what if you don’t have any photography for the site or (more often), what if the catalog of imagery is not of good enough quality? Then decisions need to be made as to whether it makes sense to hire a professional to capture custom imagery or perhaps to purchase royalty-free (leased rights to use a photo) imagery.

If it’s decided that photos must be purchased, the next decision is who does the research. Or if you decide to hire a photographer, more decisions must be made. Who hires the photographer and negotiates price and expectations? Who tells the photographer what sorts of compositions to capture? Or, what kind of ambiance you’re after? What sort of “feel” the imagery needs to convey? As we all have heard, a picture says a thousand words, right? I guess it’s important then to be certain that what your photos “say” lines up with your organization’s culture, brand, and effectively “speaks” to your all-important target market.

A good project manager makes sure that first and foremost your initiatives are met but also their own! A solid business arrangement is where all parties benefit… more about this next month.

___________

Silvana Gravini is an Integrated Online Marketing Strategist with over 15 years experience in Website Design, Social Media, and Search Engine Optimization (SEO). For more information phone (413) 585-0985 or visit www.silvana.net.

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Good small business reads #21: Time management, making virtual teams work, and alternative funding sources

Posted by Jeanne Yocum on April 10, 2012

It’s time for the April roundup of interesting articles for small business owners that I’ve come across recently. First up, Julie Kay, who blogs at www.developingleadersonline.com, has provided some time management tips that I haven’t heard before in “Tried and Tested Time Management.”

My favorite new tip that she offers is to create a “done” list. As someone who has to jump back and forth among various client projects on most days, it is often possible to get to the end of the day without feeling that I’ve accomplished anything major – just a whole pile of minor things. But these little things do eventually add up to something bigger, so taking stock at the end of the day can be motivating for the next day as you realize just how much progress you actually are making toward the end goal. Check out Julie’s other tips; I think you’ll find something useful.

More and more of us these days work as part of virtual teams. For example, I am part of several virtual marketing teams with my clients and I also work virtually with ghostwriting clients not only in the U.S. but even in Europe. In “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Virtual Teams,” written for the American Express Open Forum, Alexandra Levit gives valuable advice on how to make such virtual team arrangements work smoothly. While she’s writing about employees, I think the advice also holds for vendor relationships.

With all the talk about the JOBS Act the president signed into law last week making it easier for startups and small businesses to access funding, I thought you might be interested in reading “Access to Alternative Financing for Small Businesses,” from business financing expert Karlene Sinclair-Robinson’s blog. The article talks about private sources of funding knowing as alternate lenders. Definitely food for thought if you’re looking for new funding to grow your business. You might also want to check out the blog author’s book on this topic, which is described about on the site.

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