How to Keep Control Over Your Cloud Data

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StrategyDriven Risk Management Articles | Cloud Security | How to Keep Control Over Your Cloud DataMore people than ever are using cloud platforms for both business and personal use, and the numbers are set to continue growing. Consider how recently it used to be that photos and documents had to be emailed or sent over via a USB flash drive. Nowadays, large volumes of data can be shared quickly and easily, making cloud platforms one of the most essential priorities for businesses and individuals. Now that so many people use cloud technology, the onus has shifted to more security awareness. All online processes are vulnerable to risk, and cloud technologies seem especially vulnerable. If you’re concerned about your levels of security when using cloud platforms, here’s what you need to know.

Access Issues: Your Priority

One of the biggest benefits of the cloud is that you can access your data from any device and from anywhere in the world. While this is very convenient, it also means that hackers have similar access options. It’s vital to remember that although you own the data that you upload to the cloud, you do not own the security infrastructure. Being more responsible for your data is the key to better online security, and if you’re using a cloud platform then you should consider the following strategies to boost your own security:

  • Know what they do: If you haven’t read your user agreement then how do you know how those platforms are planning to protect you? It may take some time, but reading the user agreement will help you to understand how cloud platforms work and how they plan your security. McAfee has some in-depth assessment guides, so if you’re asking ‘what is cloud security’ then this could help you understand just how in-depth the security measures that they use can be.
  • Password Protection: Everyone knows that they need stronger password management. No matter how many times you read and ignore this piece of advice, it remains as true as ever. Never use the same password on multiple platforms, and consider making use of a password management system to give your online security a serious boost.
  • Essential Encryption: This is by far the most effective way of protecting yourself and your data. You can encrypt your cloud data by using software that necessitates an additional password before full access is granted. That way, even if hackers do get into your system, they cannot gain access to the encrypted data. This is essential for more sensitive information. Some cloud providers offer encrypted services as part of their package, and this could be the key trend to watch in the future.

Whatever you use the cloud for, be it personal photos or business documents, keeping your data safe should be a high priority. Understand what cloud providers are doing to protect you, and improve your own personal online security. Don’t assume that hackers only target large corporations. Both small businesses and private individuals are common targets, and you will be able to relax more knowing that your cloud security is fully optimized and as strong as it can possibly be.

Time to Expand? How to Get it Right

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StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship Article | Expand Your Business | Time to Expand? How to Get it RightIf the time has come for your business to expand and take things to the next level, you need to tread carefully. Of course, growth and expansion are vital parts of running a successful company but expansions should always be undertaken with great care and consideration. Get things wrong and your business could be left in a worse position than it started in and that’s not what you want. Here’s how to go about it the right way.

Plan to Mitigate the Challenges That Come with Growth

Expansion is all well and good, but you must also remember that growing businesses bring their own challenges that shouldn’t be ignored. If you’re going to succeed with your business, you should do what you can to mitigate the challenges that come with growth. That means ensuring you have processes in place to deal with more customers and things of that nature. Even in something positive, challenges and problems can emerge if you’re not careful.

Scale Up the Workforce

You must also scale up the workforce if you’re serious about expanding. There’s no sense in asking your small team to deal with an expanded business and a raft of new clients and customers. That will only place pressure on them that they might not be able to deal with, and that’ll backfire badly in the end. So hire more people and bolster your business’s workforce.

Take Over Another Business

Mergers and takeovers give you the chance to make your business bigger and expand its scope at the same time. Many big businesses have grown by swallowing up others and growing along the way. This applies to just about any business too. Whether you want to view dental practice listings to buy up other local practices or take over retail operations, it’s worth exploring and considering going forward.

Introduce New Products or Services

As part of the expansion of your business, you should also aim to introduce new products and services to your business. People will be more interested in your business and what it’s offering if they can see a clear improvement and more options. If they already know what you’re offering and there’s nothing new, there’ll be no incentive for those customers to take a second look.

Look to New Territories

Expanding into new territories is definitely a good idea if you have the resources available to you to make that happen. It’s a natural and productive way of expanding your offer because you’ll be giving potentially millions of new customers a chance to engage with your business that wasn’t there before. Be sure to carry out market research and see if this is something you feel your business could benefit from.

Expanding a business is always a big challenge and there are plenty of things that can go wrong along the way for you. But expansion is key if you want your business to have a sustainable long-term future. There’s only so long you can keep your business at the same level before feeling the need to expand it.

Three Ways to Make the 4AM Club Work For You

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StrategyDriven Practices for Professionals Articles | 4AM Club | Three Ways to Make the 4AM Club Work For You“Early to bed, early to rise makes a [wo]man healthy, wealthy and wise.” – Ben Franklin

You’ve heard it said a million times before: the early bird catches the worm, and in the opinion of many highly successful people, the phrase is much more than a cliche. The benefits of an extremely early morning routine have been touted by so many self-made celebrities that the “4 AM Club” has become a part of the public vernacular. Any web search will pull up a dozen articles with contradictory research on the benefits and downsides of the routine, along with firsthand accounts of people “taking the 4 AM challenge.”

These trials are often full of negative impressions: disorientation in the dark hours before dawn; a mid-afternoon slump that belies productivity; and by dinnertime, the inability to form coherent sentences. And then, almost as quickly as it begins, the challenge is over, sworn off forever as an unrealistic, unachievable, and borderline inhumane goal.

Yet 4 AM remains the magic hour for many world changers like Oprah, Michelle Obama, and Tim Cook, and experience has taught me why. In my world, it’s a time of quiet, focus, determination and accomplishment.

My routine is not without naysayers. An 8 PM bedtime with a 4 AM wake-up call has made me the subject of much critique over the years. Many people feel uncomfortable with my choice, claiming that my practices are unhealthy and not sustainable for the long term. Yet I’ve found deep joy in the practice.

As an entrepreneur and the mother of a growing family, high-paced days at my desk and endless days on the road, are only outpaced by high-energy evenings and weekends with my family of five. My favorite use of this early morning time is for my own personal development and self-care so that I can be at the top of my game during the remaining hours of the day. By waking up at 4 AM, I’m able to routinely take time for myself. I work out while listening to audiobooks, I meditate while I stretch, I prepare a healthy breakfast — and most importantly, I tackle my most critical work of the day while enjoying my espresso — all before 7 AM.

If this is something you’ve wanted to try but haven’t yet managed to find success in, here are a few keys I’ve found to making this routine not only possible, but extremely enjoyable as well:

Check your DNA

Have you ever referred to yourself as a “morning person” or “night owl”? We typically use these terms to indicate our preferred time of productivity — but they can signify something much more fundamental to our being. Our tendency to be productive at certain times of the day is often hard-wired in us, an internal clock that’s determined by our DNA. This genetic predisposition is called our chronotype. If you identify as a night owl, then you can stop reading now. This method is not for you and it never will be. In fact, research shows a correlation to weight gain, diabetes, and heart disease if you try to force an extra early wake-time when your DNA is telling you otherwise. But if you feel like you do your best work in the morning, or maybe you’re not sure, than the 4 AM club could be for you.

Check your Watch

The key to making this system work, and to sustaining it, has everything to do with getting to bed at the right time each evening, and being consistent about it. Knowing the exact number of sleep hours that support your peak performance is requisite to success — mine is eight. While I can certainly make accommodations when my schedule forces me to get less sleep, more than a few nights of that in any given month effectively compromises all the systems that work together to make me successful in my day-to-day life. Without enough sleep, my motivation to exercise is zapped, my food choices start moving in a downward spiral, and my productivity at work takes a nosedive.

Check your Excuses

If you’re going to take a shot at creating a new early morning routine, you must go into it knowing that this is a no-excuses kind of practice. Follow the 21/90 rule — on average, it takes 21 days (or three full weeks) to form a habit. If the system seems to work for you, another 90 days (about three months) practice is recommended to turn it into a permanent lifestyle change. That said, you can bet your money on the fact that the first few days will be brutal. The first morning your alarm goes off at that other-worldly hour, your instinct will be to hit snooze with your inner voice pleading, “just a few more minutes.” A few more minutes inevitably turns into another hour or two, which is not getting you any closer to seeing if this system really works for you. Try combating this sleep trap by using the Rule of 5 as soon as you hear your alarm go off. When you hear the buzzer, count to five, pop up, and start moving out of bed, no matter how you feel about it in that moment. It’s totally normal to move through the motions of the first part of your morning like a zombie at first, but don’t let that stop you from making a routine of it for a least three weeks. Watch out for that sneaky 10-day slump too — for some people, the excuses come out after we feel like we’ve accomplished something, and we let our guard down.

Above all, know that every person is wired in their own way, and successful habits look different for everyone. Do not try to define yourself by what works for others — instead, let them inspire you to find your own routines that drive you toward your goals.

StrategyDriven Practices for Professionals Articles | 4AM Club | Three Ways to Make the 4AM Club Work For YouJudith Nowlin, Chief Growth Officer with Babyscripts. Judith created iBirth™, a mobile care companion for pregnancy, birth and postpartum, to help healthcare practitioners deliver better health outcomes for women and children in the United States and beyond. The original idea for the app was born out of her prior decade of service in maternity care. The technology platform she and her team built has since impacted nearly 1 million families on their journey toward optimal health and wellness during one of life’s most precious times. iBirth was acquired in June 2018 by Babyscripts, Inc., the leading virtual care platform for obstetrics. You can find her here

Female Sales Professionals: Take Out Your Head Trash!

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StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article | Female Sales Professional | Female Sales Professionals: Take Out Your Head Trash!If you are a woman who sells for a living, let me suggest that you begin 2019 by taking out the trash. I am referring to your “head trash” – those limiting beliefs and notions that lead to self-doubt, remorse, and subservient, and generally wimpy sales behavior. This is something I can’t do for you. You can’t get anyone else to get rid of your head trash. You have to do it for yourself.

What I can do, though, is point you toward the best tool for taking out your head trash: a journal.

You really can begin to shift your disempowering beliefs toward a more productive, empowering perspective by incorporating journaling into your daily routine. Using just a few minutes of scheduled journaling time to you start your day from a place of optimism and possibility will have a dramatic positive impact on what transpires through your day. Why not start your day on the empowering side?

Grab your coffee and your notebook and jot down the answers to the following questions first thing each morning. If you prefer, you can use your smartphone to voice record your journal entry on your morning drive to work.

What am I grateful for today? Journal about something good in your life. It could be your cat, your family, your garden, Netflix – anything that makes you smile counts!

What is my empowering belief toward myself, and my sales role? Journal about a specific empowering belief. For instance: “I have every right to be a saleswoman because I not only know my stuff, I am excellent at getting to the real problem at hand. While not everyone has a need, for those who do, I will make a difference.”

What will I do to show courage, or step out of my comfort zone today? Journal about a clear commitment to move outside of a routine that is comfortable for you … but is holding you back. For instance: “I will begin my sales meeting with clarity of purpose and a clear spoken agreement of what we wish to accomplish in our meeting.” Or: “I will walk away from business that is not a good fit for me, and be OK with that.”

How will I “lighten up” today? Journal about something you can do to not be so serious, and stop worrying about being “perfect.” For instance: “Sometime today, I will decide that a challenge I am facing is not all that important in the grand scheme of things.” Another great option is voicemail. I find leaving myself a voice message complimenting me on how amazing I am puts me in the right frame of mind every time!

While you can’t control many things in sales, you can control how you perceive yourself, and you can control how you react to situations that are bound to come your way. “Head trash” makes you less grateful, disempowers you, keeps you mired in routines that don’t support you, and makes you take yourself very seriously indeed. Journaling helps you take out the “head trash” and reverse those patterns.

One thing is certain – you will always perform in a manner consistent with your self-concept. In 2019 and beyond, use journaling to remind yourself that there is no need to apologize for being a woman, or for selecting sales as your career of choice! Respect yourself first … and others will respect you.

About the Author

Lorraine Ferguson is author of The Unapologetic Saleswoman: Breaking The Barriers, Beating The Odds. Ferguson is a dynamic trainer and coach who accelerates growth in companies by focusing on the right behaviors, attitudes and techniques that drive success. She has brought the Sandler Selling System to hundreds of selling professionals and businesses. Companies and individuals have transformed their business development ability by working with Ferguson.For more information, please visit this link

Meeting the Needs of the Modern Consumer

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StrategyDriven Customer Relationship Management Articles |Customer Service| Meeting the Needs of the Modern ConsumerIt’s 2019, and the power consumers have in today’s marketplace continues to be unparalleled.

In particular, today’s savvy consumers have access to and can communicate with companies around the world at virtually any time of day, allowing them to not only compare the value of products and services, but also determine whether they share the same core brand values.

Indeed, it doesn’t matter if you represent a big corporation or are a solopreneur — your customers are calling the shots. In many ways, your customers expect to be able to engage with you on their terms and on their preferred channels.

Here’s a look at ways many of today’s successful companies are meeting the needs of the modern consumer.

Multi-channel Service

These days, communicating with companies of all sizes is easier than ever. But with a multitude of options with which consumers can communicate with your brand — from phone and email to SMS and social media — you’ll need to employ a strategy that covers these bases and more to be successful.

According to Shopify, more than 85 percent of today’s consumers use at least two communication channels when interacting with companies, albeit to shop or raise a customer service issue. This is true whether they research online and buy in-store or vice versa.

With this in mind, ideally, you will need to ensure your company has — and maintains — a presence on the digital channels most popular with your customers and prospects. The exact combination could be very different depending on your industry.

Ultimately, your best bet is to ask your customers, typically via email or an online survey, the contact methods they prefer and see which channels your competitors use as well.

Social Media Monitoring

When it comes to social media, meeting the needs of the modern consumer becomes more complicated. Your customers expect you to be listening at virtually all hours of the day and respond in kind in a timely manner. That means you can’t create social media pages, monitor the inboxes for those channels and call it a day.

While some of your customers will use those channels to contact you directly, many more are posting about your company, its products and its people on various social media sites. Some of these will include the ones on which you may already have a presence, like Facebook, but there will be others that you might not use, like WhatsApp or Yelp.

With this in mind, it’s a good idea to have a program in place to help monitor mentions of your company and its offerings so you can respond as quickly as possible, to both positive and negative comments.

Calls are Not Going Away

While it’s important to offer a variety of online communications channels for customers and prospects to reach you, you should also realize traditional phone-based customer service isn’t going away anytime soon.
That’s because multi-channel communications typically do not replace the need to speak to a live person. Instead, they enable previously dormant or silent followers to ask questions and otherwise engage with your company.
Phone support is one of the top ways that companies representing all industries provide support. It is efficient, empathetic and responsive.

Personalization

Not all phone support is created equal, though. According to Entrepreneur, roughly 80 percent of consumers say the customer service agents with whom they interact are unaware of any past communication with the brand. The other 20 percent are doing something right.

Some companies have contact center agents standing by who look up information as the caller speaks. Other services, such a cloud call center, take it a step further by integrating a slew of self-service options to direct the call to the right department. The idea is to provide context to the current conversation — and, perhaps more importantly, any future ones — wherever possible.

When these efforts are integrated into a robust customer relationship management solution, it becomes easier for agents to determine whether specific customers have had previous interactions with your brand.

More to the point, keeping a record of what transpired on the previous customer service interaction means customers don’t have to repeat the same information — and become frustrated — over and over again. Customer service then improves, which can bolster consumer loyalty, creating a win-win for both parties.

Letting Customers’ Voices be Heard, Loud and Clear

Today’s modern, savvy consumers expect to have multiple channels to communicate and do business with their favorite brands. They also want their voices heard — and to be amplified when necessary — on social media if their brand experience is anything less than stellar. Of course, that doesn’t mean they won’t turn to and rely on phone-based customer service.

Oh, but the times are a-changin’ — and it’s up to forward-thinking brands to continually come up with new ways to allow customers to be comfortable and in the driver’s seat when making important buying decisions so these customers become repeat customers.