10 Questions You must Ask in Customer Survey

June 16, 2010


In the previous post on “How to Hold onto Your Existing Customers” we mentioned that regular customer feedback is one of the important tools you should use to keep a pulse on your business and understand how your customers perceive the value they are getting from you. The customer feedback also will raise any red flags that you need to address before they get out of control and the business is deteriorated significantly.
There are several avenues you can use to get customer feedback. If you have a web site for the business you can use the online poll using free survey tools such as Surveymonkey , Free Online Surveys. If you have a physical store you can use a simple typed form that customers can fill in while they are waiting. Even social media sites such as Facebook have poll utilities you can use to get customer feedback.
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Filed Under: Customers, Technology Tagged With: , ,

How can you Hold on to your Existing Customers

June 15, 2010


As mentioned in previous post most businesses lose large percent of their customers on a regular basis. We identified several reasons why customers leave. In this post we want to give you tips on how to make sure you retain large portion of your existing customers.
Losing a customer can cost you lot more than you realize. Research shows that it costs multiple times over to get new customers than to hold onto existing ones. You have to spend money on marketing and advertising as well as offer them incentives to come to you again. Our advice to all business owners is this – DO WHATEVER YOU HAVE TO DO TO HOLD ON TO YOUR EXISTING CUSTOMERS.
Here are the steps that show how you can accomplish this:
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Filed Under: Customers, Management, Marketing, Sales Tagged With: , ,

Do you know Why your Customers are Dumping you?

June 14, 2010


If history is any guide; you will lose about 20% of your current customers by the end of the month and 40% by the end of the year. I know it sounds terrible; but that’s fact of life. While 30-40% of sales for any business come from existing customers; the rest comes from customers using revolving door. They will come and go for a variety of reasons.
This customer churn can be costly for your business. You need to constantly recruit new customers to fill the gap left by those customers who have dumped you. This costs money reducing your profit. It is said that it is 4 times more expensive to get new customer compared to retaining the existing one. We will look at the ways to stop customers from dumping you in a later post; but let’s understand why they leave you in the first place. The reasons are quite varied and some are easier to correct than others.
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Filed Under: Customers, Employees, Management, Marketing, Operations Tagged With: , ,

5 Effective Techniques for On-boarding New Hires

June 11, 2010

Onboarding
Many business owners miss an opportunity to get the most out of new hires because they do not have well-thought plans to acclimatize new hires quickly. First few days of new hire play a large role in determining whether the person will contribute effectively to your business or will be dud.
In the previous posts we have identified several insights for hiring best employees and reducing staff turnover. Our goal here is to get the best use of your employees once they are hired.
I know several managers and owners who would give a written training manual to the new hire and let him figure out how things are done. In our experience nothing is more effective than on-the-job training by letting the new hire dive right into operations from day 1. In addition, there are several other techniques you can use to get the most out of your new hires. Below we show 5 most effective ones:
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Filed Under: Employees, Management Tagged With: ,

10 Questions You must Ask before Hiring an Employee

June 10, 2010


In our previous post we mentioned that hiring best employees makes a big impact on how your business performs. We also showed how to go about hiring best employees for your business. However, we have felt that many employers are at a loss when they think about what questions to ask in the job interview. They end up talking about different things before wrapping up the job interview and making hiring decision based on their gut.
In this post we give you ideas on how you can to go in the interview well-prepared plan; so that you can get a clear picture of the job candidate and make informed hiring decision. We also mention what type of personal quality of the job applicant they aim to find out (in parentheses). By understanding personal qualities you can get a pretty good idea of what drives the person and whether he will be motivated and successful after you hire him. Here are the questions:
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7 Proven Techniques to Hire Best Employees

June 9, 2010

Hiring Techniques
It is fair to say that the owner of small business builds the business; but it’s the employees who make it a success. It has been our personal experience and those of countless other owners that if you want to make your business successful pay careful attention to who you are hiring. Hiring a “right” employee can improve your sales by almost 15-20%; while hiring the “wrong” one can bring it down by the same amount.
How do you make sure you are hiring the “right” employee? What are the good practices you can follow to ensure you don’t end up with someone who will bring your sales down? Here we outline suggestions that can help you do that.
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Filed Under: Employees, Management Tagged With: ,

5 Low Cost Ways to Motivate Employees

June 8, 2010


Let’s face it. Motivating employees that are making pretty good salary is hard enough. Now try to do it for those who are making minimum wage in a small business and you understand the magnitude of the problem.
However, all is not lost in this battle. There are ways to motivate the employees who are working part-time, on a minimum wage as long as you know what makes them click.
Below we highlight the 5 best ideas we have collected from our own experience and those of our colleagues and business partners.
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Filed Under: Employees, Management Tagged With: , ,

Effective Techniques to Reduce Employee Turnover

June 7, 2010

Employee Turnover
If you own a small business and are not seeing employee turnover of greater than 30% per year you are doing something right and need to advise all the other small businesses. As we all know; for small businesses the employee turnover is a fact of life. One of our clients tells us – “I am not in the restaurant business. I am running a training business because of the constant need to train stream of new employees that I have to hire because of turnover”.
In order to find ways to reduce the turnover it is important first to understand the causes behind it. Some of the causes listed below are obvious and are common across majority of small businesses.
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Filed Under: Employees, Management Tagged With: , ,

5 Proven Ways to Reduce Credit Card Processing Fees

June 3, 2010


Most small businesses are overpaying for credit card processing. After the Mafia was eliminated from Italy this has become the next legitimate way of extorting money from businesses. Visa and Master Card are making billions of dollars in profit every year just for acting as a middle man to process the credit cards.
Is there anything businesses can do to lower this cost rather than just give this “extortion” money to credit card processing companies? Although there is no way you can eliminate this cost; there are few steps you can take to bring it down. Here are 5 steps you can explore:
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Filed Under: Finance, Sales Tagged With: , ,

Are you Giving your Heart or just Hands to your Business?

June 2, 2010


If your heart is not in your business (or anything you are doing for that matter); you might as well not own the business. Your business is just going to drag along at best and in worst case it will fail causing you financial and emotional pain.
We say this from our experience at a concert we attended this past weekend.
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