The Best Sales Tool is Good Customer Service

Have you ever just given up on a professional? I mean just walked away and decided it was worth paying more or starting the process over or just not getting it all together.  Whether it was groceries or a new roof, the company you were ready to give your hard-earned money to just made you walk away and take that money somewhere else.  Come on.  You have done it. What is different about your clients?  Nothing.  Which is why having good customer service is crucial to sales.

Does your bad customer service have the effect of a nuclear bomb?

You can get and retain more sales through good customer service. Be it getting new customers, having existing customers return or recommend you to their friends and enemies, customer service can be your biggest sales tool.

According to Ruby Newell-Lenger, “A typical business hears from 4% of it’s dissatisfied customers.” (Note this is a quote that I am quoting from another site https://www.helpscout.net/75-customer-service-facts-quotes-statistics/). Sorry to digress.  So according to this if you had one person complains 24 just go away, never come back and tell their friend you are not worthy.

Yes. This is the woman who is being quoted all
over the internet. The one and only Ruby Newell- Lenger

 You want to keep those 25 clients you have already paid for through advertising and other marketing costs to attract them.  How do you sell more by keeping them happy?

Try one or all these five ideas to better your customer service..

  1. Track your response time to calls for one week. Include zero time for answering the call, email or text immediately. Average the time before you responded.  Then set a goal of lowering that response time by half.
  2. Follow up every time a person contacted you with a question or problem and ask them if they are happy. You can ask if they are satisfied. You can ask if they need anything else. Use any language you want to show your concern for their satisfaction. Want to make it really make a difference.  Do it with a phone call.
  3. Publish a list of frequently asked questions on your website. This will reduce the number of calls and give your tech savvy clients instant answers.
  4. For big ticket items send a thank you. Snail mail (a note in the mail) has the biggest impact.
  5. If you don’t already, keep a log of calls, texts or emails clients make. Mark when its done. First thing each day, review the list of unfinished work and try to get ‘er done.

The man who got me to start using the phrase “get ‘er done”,
Charlie Behran’s host of the Manitowoc Minute.

Customer Service is not for the weak.  It is for those who want a great reputation, feel good about what they do and those who want to sell more.

 

Why Business Plans are the Oldest Best Tools for Small Businesses

Why are business plans helpful?

Well for some small businesses they help get a loan, investors or qualify for programs. The people who run the banks, investments and programs want to make sure the business is well thought out.  That is will be successful.  The people or person at the top knows what they are doing. There are few areas I believe are even more important than incoming money and a business plan is one of them.

I’m going to start out with one that is a needle in a haystack but can really hurt.  I’m talking a needle that is perpendicular to the floor and you step on it and it goes most of the way in. FIND OUT ISSUES BEFORE THEY HAPPEN. There are many parts to a business plan.  Each area should lead the leader to question “what if?”. What if there are more competitors than you thought? What if you don’t have enough cash to start with? What if the machine you need is more than you thought?  What if a supplier goes out of business?  By answering the questions posed in a simple MS Word Business Plan template the questions will start to come.  Then you can come up with an answer before it happens.

(note from the writer:  I found a photo of a needle in a foot but it gave me the chills.  Sorry no photo here)

A business plan will help you take a serious look at your competitors and realize maybe you need to expand your geographic market. It may help you realize that not hiring your niece right away will help you to keep cash flowing until you have enough monthly income to cover that expense. The analysis included in a business plan will help you identify who will be your supplier, who you would use as a back up and how would their higher prices affect your revenues.

USE NUMBERS TO WAKE YOU UP!  Most small businesses are led by someone who has been in the business a long time and/or have a real passion for the focus of the work.  They’ve lied in bed thinking, thinking, thinking about the business and how they want to do it.  They’ve done the work day in and day out and know how habits can help to oil the machine of day to day operations. But sometimes these positives can become the blinders on the racehorse. Running at full speed but not seeing excess overhead nipping at the right flank or loss of a demographic market ready to trip up the thoroughbred.  By writing business plans that include setting goals, making budgets, estimating cash flow and MEASURING THEM PERIODICALLY, the small business may not notice issues until it’s too late.

 

Just one more reason, for now, business plans are important.  The world is full of opportunity and those OPPORTUNITIES CAN BE A GODSEND OR A DISTRACTION.  By defining your meaning, knowing your goals and identifying your unique place in the market you have the ability not to be distracted from your plan.  By reviewing your business plan periodically and changing it as you grasp new opportunities, you begin the process again of planning, executing and succeeding in your business.

So, don’t look at it as a requirement of bankers.  Look at business plans as one of the oldest and reliable tools a small business can have.

Happy Analyzing!

 

 

 

If It Sounds Too Good to Be True

A long time ago I was sitting at a bar talking with my oombff (one of my best friends forever), Amy who was bartending when she introduced me to a masseuse who was sitting next to me.  He told me about his website and how he figured out that if he put “best massage” in his metadata he came up at the top of the search list.  It worked! Guess what? That was a long time ago and if you think you can come up with tricks to show up at the top of searches you are probably going to find you were wrong. Just as you cannot coerce clients into recommending you by word of mouth, sites such as Yelp and Google are finding ways for you not to use coerced reviews.

uh yeah…good for Hollywood, not for business

A client of mine just explained that she/he has been offering clients extra goods and services for reviews on sites.  The client wrote a follow up to clients suggesting they write one review and just copy and paste it on a list of sites that accepts reviews. Now all those reviews are gone.  Why?  This is what I found.

I googled “what happened to my reviews” which led me to a support site for Google business and then I found a lovely post from Joy Hawkins of Sterling Sky from 2015.

She wrote:

It is likely that your review got filtered or removed for violating Google’s review policies. Based on cases I’ve looked at, here is what I’ve come up with for reasons why reviews go missing:

    • URLs in reviews
    • The same review appears elsewhere online (Yelp, a testimonials page on your website etc)
    • The person who wrote the review is a manager of your G+ Page
    • The person who wrote the review works for you
    • The person wrote the review from the same computer/IP Address that you sign into to manage your local listing
    • The person wrote the review from the same IP address as other users who left you reviews
    • The person tried to post a review for you several times on different dates (Ex: they wrote one August 5 and it got filtered so they tried again on October 10)
    • You’ve been collecting reviews in mass within a short time frame
    • The person reviewing you has also reviewed multiple other businesses with the same name (if you have several locations and they reviewed all of them)
    • The person reviewing you has a completely blank G+ profile and has never had any activity on that Google profile before or after they left you that review.
    • You hired an SEO company to post reviews for you
    • You have an onsite review station (Ipad, Computer etc) at your location
    • You are offering incentives for people who write you reviews.
    • Your # of reviews is abnormally higher than most businesses in your industry.

The internet and technology are changing at warp speed so some of this may not apply, but my guess is that the people who run these sites are more likely to make things more complicated than less complicated and they are continuing to have these same requirements of posted reviews.

My client that had this experience is very nice person and is terrific at what she/he does. But they did something that many of us do.  They misunderstood that the internet and technology are reflections of our humanity; they are another way we communicate.

So what is the best way to get your company to show up on the first page of a google search?  The same as it always has been. Provide excellent products and service.  Be nice to your customers.  Be nice to your employees so they are happy and they are nice to your clients.  Market your products and services in a straight forward, honest manner. Be competitive in price and delivery.  Then, when you feel your clients are happy, ask them if they would recommend you to their friends, family and community…through Google or Yelp or Facebook.

 

 

Simple, Yet Effective – Four Steps for a Business to be Seen

Being a presence on the Web is not necessarily a $2000 investment.  There are four steps to starting.

ONE – Buy your domain name.  Your Domain name is your address. Just as my mailing address tells people how to find my home, my domain name tells people where they can go on the internet to find me.  I am Christine Yeager so my domain is christineyeager.com.

  • If your business name is ABC electronics you want to use ABCelectronics.
  • If you are a business you want to use .com (Commerce).
  • See if that domain name is available. I love my old standby site betterwhois. If you’ve done some good thinking your business name will be succinct, memorable and descriptive, so your chances are the domain is still available. If it isn’t available, ask yourself why.  If it’s because someone is already operating with the same name in the same business you may want to check out if you should change your business name or stop whoever is using it.

Extra Free Advice – Be careful about buying your domain from a site that offer free websites with templates.  They are really awesome, but if you grow and decide to have a super duper site developed for you by a pro, you may not be able to keep your domain.  Read your agreement carefully and see if you can transfer the ownership to another hosting company.

TWO – Make a home page

While people are curious about details, sometimes a simple one page website is all that is needed.  Giving a business credibility and basic information is better than having no presence on the web.

Crocus, a wonderful store in Cambridge, Wisconsin, was not in a position to go full blown website.  Featuring many one of a kind items, an online store would not be a profitable endeavor since the cost of quality photography, time to post each item, shipping costs, etc, would exceed the profit on the items sold.  This store benefits from foot traffic generated by vacationers going “up north”.  So the purpose of the website was to help visitors identify the shop should they forget it’s name.  The coupling with a google search would allow for the store to be found and referrals to be made.

THREE – Try a little SEO Action

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. What’s a search engine?  Google and Bing are search engines.  They are systems you use in an internet browser to find websites.  Want to learn more about options for search engines read this great article.

Lifewire post about the best search engines

An interesting challenge is the Google search.  If your business doesn’t come up when you search google, you can add your business. Expand the search choices and scroll down to the bottom.  You will see an option to Add a Missing Place. Follow the instructions and voila’ in a week your will be one of the businesses that appear in a google search.

FOUR – Set Up your Social Media Pages

What’s social media?  Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter and many more websites are places where we see what our social contacts like and say. When you set up a Facebook Page or begin to post things on twitter, people who want to see what you have to offer will begin to “follow” you. After they choose to see what you post, whenever you post it, your posts will come to their attention.  It’s a great way to offer advice, tell customers about promotions or share your civic pride and volunteering.

Extra Free Advice – Keep your personal stuff, personal.  Create a separate page for your business so people don’t see you mentioned when your Grandmother thanks you for taking her to get her festering toes infection taken care of. As we build good relationships with our clients by sharing small personal stories, keep it small on your social media sites.  Always ask yourself, would you say this to your most formal business clients? If not, keep it off social media.

Those are the four steps.  They will help build credibility with new clients and keep your current clients proud and loyal when they are recommended to your competitors.

 

 

My new buddy Sanderson Marsh

I received a Facebook friend request from Sanderson Marsh. I read the name and realized it is put together from two of my friend’s last names.

Just because you recognize part of the name doesn’t mean it’s someone you know.

I clicked on the person and, whoa, all of Anderson’s friends have middle eastern names and photos. I know plenty of people with darker complexions who have ancestors from Pakistan and India, but none of them were friends with Sanderson Marsh.

Conclusion

Friend One’s Last Name + Friend Two’s Last Name <> a Friend

Friend One’s Last Name + Friend Two’s Last Name = someone who wants to get into my FB network.

Reports said that the 2016 election was swayed by posts to FB users by Russian’s throwing dirt on candidate Clinton. My husband sent money to the Clinton campaign until he read about her email issues. It worked. How did they target my husband? They used information to identify him as a supporter. My family hates when I ask it, but, I bet he didn’t check the source of those FB posts. Had he checked the source, he may have seen that it wasn’t credible and ignored the posts.  He didn’t and stopped his contributions.

Conclusion

Posts by credible sources = news

Posts by not credible sources = propaganda

Propaganda = unnecessary fear and dangerous consequences

Stop! Thief!

I was speaking with a client who was talking about a process that seemed like overkill to me. When I asked why the step was taken she explained that clients are really worried about identity theft. Her serious tone brought out my belief that people are overly afraid of identity theft and she should help pass the word that identity theft is not as frequent as she thinks. So I asked her how many clients have had a problem with identity theft. She told me of a wealthy woman that spent $5,000 fixing a theft issue. I asked what website it occurred on and she said it happened before computers.

Conclusion

Computers<>Theft

Talking to Strangers = Theft

Not all strangers are this good looking.  But they will seem charming and normal.  Here are better ways to avoid getting viruses on your computer, receiving unwanted correspondence or propaganda – think fake news.

  1. Think of the face behind the words on their computer.  Just as you would not tell a person on the street your address, phone number or social security number, don’t give that information to a website you just met or wasn’t introduced to by a trusted friend.
  2. Change your security settings on FaceBook so the world can’t contact you.
  3. Don’t respond to emails from strangers – don’t even open it unless it makes sense. If you posted something on Craigslist, be ready for strange email addresses, just as you would see strange faces at your home if you have a garage sale. Don’t panic, just be careful.
  4. If a company or government agency sends you an email, try to remember when you gave them your email address.  If you can’t recall doing so, call them. Find a number on their official website.
  5. If you are tempted to open an email, look at the email address.  The part after the @ sign should be a credible website. For instance “Take a look at this part time position, it’s interesting and you might be interested nbnsz732e.ristenfow.com” The link made me want to see who ristenfow was so I went to www.ristenfow.com.  The site is under construction.  It is not credible.

Ristenfow.com isn’t very credible. Do you wonder why it’s similar to Fox, Iranian Muslim and Beer?

  1. Made in the USA is good.  Addresses with foreign suffixes are a red flag unless they have been introduced to you by a trusted source.  I received a job offer from supertenkaluk2016@yandex.ru.  .ru stands for Russia.  Why would a Russian Company contact a consultant/business analyst in the united states?  Turns out yandex is a website like yahoo.  Which brings us to the next point.
  2. Offers from email addresses that end in .yahoo, .gmail or .live are all easily available and are not as professional as those from sites that are made for commerce.  Tread carefully and see how they may know you.

I started this post by talking about someone being a little too nervous about identity theft.  I then proceeded to tell you all sorts of ways to avoid it. That seems contradictory. My intent was to show you how to use your existing common sense in the new world of communications. The internet and electronic communications are a wonderful thing.  Enjoy them and if you would like me to speak to you or a group on this topic feel free to contact me.

 

 

Are Small Business Operations and Marketing Services Needed in Small Towns?

Lately, I’ve been trying to work with tradesmen on a bathroom rehab.  My husband and I have always been DIY-ers and he’s done some great work before on bathroom and kitchen rehabs.  We own a wet saw!  This time we thought we would skip the pain and have someone else do it.  Living in a city of 12,000 people I’ve come to the realization that the whole trades culture is different here than the suburbs of Chicago, where we used to live.

When the market is big there are big players.  They have good branding, systems, billing and customer service.  There are so many potential customers that they can fill all their worker’s time, all the time and when they have too many requests, they have access to more workers, so they can get someone to work for them tomorrow.  They have a logo or motto that sticks in people’s heads so when they need them they call them first. The plumber has a system of squeezing in a quick fix in between projects and calling on their extras when needed so they can do the work soon. The roofer compares their rates to their competitors and undercut slightly, but still make a profit. They answer the phone.  They do good work.

When the market is small there are big tradesmen.  They might have a logo. They talk to people and kind of give an estimate when they get to it.  There is no need for advertising because they get quite a bit of work from referrals.  For carpenter’s it’s either feast or famine. Plumbers answer their phone when they aren’t working and if they’re busy they don’t answer or return voice mails.  They’re too busy.  They pick their rate and it’s higher than what an MBA makes.  They do good work.

In both large metropolitan areas and small towns tradesmen do good work.  Similarities seem to end there.

I was talking to a banker recently.  He really enjoyed his early career when he worked with new businesses and helped them stay liquid; helped plumbers, printers and bakers have money needed to grow and become stable.  He confirmed what I’ve always thought – many small business people are good at what the result is, but they really struggle and dislike all the background requirements.  They are painters, not personnel managers.  They are flooring installers not accountants.  So, the question is does a small town need a business services center?

 What could a business services center do?  

  • Write business plans that help guide the business, identify issues and assist in obtaining loans
  • Write a marketing plan that helps identify the way to get recognized by the most wanted customers
  • Help develop branding through logo and motto
  • Identify areas of pain for owners and find some operational medicine
  • Provide professional customer service through phone services, guaranteed response time, responses to social media critiques and praises,
  • Keep intelligent bookkeeping that will identify profitable and unprofitable practices
  • Provide cost benefit analysis of marketing and operations initiatives before money is committed
  • Arrange for risk management through insurance, review of government requirements such as licensing, identify existing unethical or libelous operational practices
  • Provide technical solutions for tasks and procedures which drain the owners and employees time.
  • Utilize social media to keep in touch with existing and possible customers.
  • Provide the proper website and email addresses with SEO (Search Engine Optimization) so people can find you and be confident in your professionalism.
  • Much more

In researching small business operations services, I found the following interesting post:

13 Best Practices for Building Solid Small Business Operations

If marketing, operations, scheduling, customer service, payroll bother you, call me.  Maybe I can help.

Better Image for Christine Yeager

I changed the main image on my home page.  Before it was a lovely Dessert night scene. Lovely, with no connection to what I do.

Previous Home Page Image

Now I have a collage of where how I act as a Business Analyst.

New and Improved Home Page Image

 

The collage should convey that I am an interpreter between regular people and computer people.  Not that computer people aren’t real people.  It’s just that they speak a different language.

Serious Example of How Computer People think differently from the geniuses at HBO who make Silicon Valley

I digress.

While being a Business Analyst is a big part of what I do and services I offer, this is not the perfect branding for me.  I consult.  I advise about cost benefit decisions for businesses.  I connect businesses with the best artists, computer people, computer applications and channels for promoting their business. So, what is a better image.  Stay tuned…

Toggle, Baby, Toggle!

TOGGLE

How do you go from one program to another?  How do you check your email, when you are watching a YouTube video?

I believe most people move from one open window (or program) my minimizing what they see. They click on the dash in the upper right hand corner of the screen and that view disappears.

toggle

Common tools for opening and closing programs

They continue to do that until they see what they were looking for.  Many times, they wander; looking to go back to where they started.

What I consider a better way is to toggle. When you toggle, you get to see icons of all the open windows (programs) and select the window you wish to use.

To toggle:

  • Use your left thumb to hold down the Alt key, located to the left of the space bar, on your keyboard.
  • While continuing to hold down the Alt key, use your index (pointy) finger to press the Tab Key once. The Tab key is located to the left of the Q key.
  • Each time you click the Tab Key you will move to the next icon.
  • When you remove your thumb from the ALT key, The Window (program) highlighted will open.

Toggle

View of screen when toggle is used.

It may be a little tricky at first, but soon you will find yourself buzzing between open programs faster than lightning.  Be careful.  Those watching may go into a shock as the screens flash by!

 

This post is for newbies to computing. When working with others I’ve found them using methods that seemed more cumbersome and time consuming than some ways I get the same results. For that reason, I offer the following tricks.

This information is for people that have computers that use Windows (Microsoft Windows Operating Systems).   If you use an Apple device you are in the wrong place because the Apple Devices use MAC OS.  Get it?  Mac equals Macintosh, a type of apple, and OS equals Operating System. In the last millennia when Sheryl Crowe had a hit with “If it makes You Happy” and Bill Clinton was President, computer geeks considered Apple to be for artists and Windows to be for business people.  I am a closet artist, but I really like business so that is why I am focusing on windows.

Bad Data. Bad, Bad Data.

A long, long time ago in a company not so far away I was head of data entry at an insurance company.  It was a rather forward company and they were embracing all sorts of technologies such as imaging.  We would go to one computer station, look up the document we wanted and then see it that disk was the one that was in the computer in another room.  If it wasn’t we would call the mystery tech dude and he would change the disk.  We would then select the document and wait about five minutes for the image to come up while we started at a blank screen.  No one liked it.  Prior to this we would walk over to the room, say hi to friends on the way over there.  Chat it up with the file clerks while they got the file.  It took longer, but there was no time spent starring at a blank screen waiting.

Today I am working on adding some faculty scholarship data to my database.  I have a large spreadsheet with some bad data.  Now, most of us would look at it and say, “It’s fine.  I can see who published what when.  I can see what each project entailed.  The problem is when I want to do something with this information.  For example, I have other faculty information in my database, such as the campus they work on, their education, work experience and the courses they teach.  If the data identifying the faculty is the same for all data I can create a report that tells us all of those thing for one person.  I can also pull information for faculty at one location or for one program.  But the list I have has bad data.  The faculty field has:

The full name

Only the last name

Two, three and four names

As a result I need to scrub the data and make it all the same and matching the format in the other areas.

While the Dean may be able to look at all three of those forms and know immediately who did this great work, we can not provide aggregate data.  We can not drill down to identify levels of faculty commitment to scholarship by program.

Another example of bad data is the form of the scholarship.  The author of this report created three columns for PowerPoint, abstract and poster.  All data needed to show how our faculty are communicating their findings and something that leadership wishes to report to accreditors.  However, if the three options were part of a single column, it is easier to summarize the methods and ensure that only one method is selected.  Again, while viewing the report a Dean or Administrative Coordinator could easily get an idea of who is doing what, but to aggregate the information would be less streamline and errors could occur more easily.

So if I send this list back and say, I need a line for each faculty/scholarship combination with their full name (better yet their ID) and I need the method combined into one column, the writer of this report will find it annoying and time consuming.  If they were old they would say “I never had to do this before”.  That is because before computers a bank of analysts would compile the data by counting and tallying and reporting.  That bank of analyst has been replaced by a bank of computers and part of the analyst’s work has trickled down to the initial reporters.

In both cases, the work of the front line has increased.  More work is required and the fruits of that work are not apparent.  The people staring at the screen waiting for the file, don’t realize that the document will not be lost and one day will come up faster than they can imagine and the gatherer of the faculty data does not realize that their work will enable a quick reporting of the data and no need for the bank of analyst.

So when you hear about bad data and think it means stopping big machines, remember that its more refined than you think and that someone who knows how to format the questions and the possible answers can save you and your company time and money and make the subtle machine work better.

 

 

 

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