How to Avoid a Business Bankruptcy

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StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship ArticleThe number of small businesses filing for bankruptcy increases every year, and while bankruptcies don’t always lead to the full closure of the company, in a lot of cases they do. If your dream business is currently on the verge of bankruptcy, don’t panic. There are some steps you can take that may help you to turn things around. Try to think as positively as you can and put the following steps into action.

1. Look at the Figures

The first thing you need to do is work out how much you need to make each month to survive. This includes both the money you need to actually live, and the money you need to repay your creditors. Add 20% to this figure to give yourself a cushion. Finally, add in the costs of running your business. This includes everything from your bills to your payroll to the cost of inventory. With this information at hand, you need to work out how much your business is earning each month. If you are facing bankruptcy, it’s likely you have a deficit between the two numbers. The next steps are going to focus on decreasing costs and increasing profit to give you enough to cover everything you need to pay.

2. Cut Costs

Okay this sounds simple, but there is sure to be some ways that you can lower your expenses to meet your spending goals. Consider getting rid of your traditional phone plan and switching to VoIP, look into cheaper packaging options, and look into obtaining new quotes for any services you receive that aren’t under contract. The aim here is to look for redundant costs that your business can do without and either eliminate them entirely or reduce the amount you are spending.

3. Renegotiate with Your Creditors

Phone your creditors and let them know you are considering bankruptcy. The majority will be happy to come up with a payment plan that works for you so long as it means they will still receive what they are owed (with bankruptcy there is no guarantee they will be paid). Some may be willing to waive the interest, while others will extend the terms of your debt so that you have longer to repay it. You could also file a consumer proposal with your creditors if you don’t want to speak to them directly.

4. Look at Short Term Cashflow Options

We’re not necessarily suggesting that you take out loans to cover your cash flow. Instead, speak to your vendors and ask them for more lenient payment terms. If they can extend their terms, you will free up more cash in the short term. Another option is to ask your clients to pay you quicker. You could offer them a small percentage off their invoice if they are willing to pay faster. Both of these options will provide a boost in the short term.

Sometimes filing for bankruptcy is the only option. However, it is worth giving the above a try first if it could mean saving your business.

7 Things You Should Consider When Choosing a Cloud Solution

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StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship ArticleCloud technology is expanding rapidly because of its many benefits. However, not all cloud solution providers are the same. Yet there are many cloud service providers offering themselves as the solution to your business’ needs. The question for many is what they should use as deciding factors when searching for a cloud solution. Here are seven things you should consider when choosing a cloud solution.

Your Core Needs

Before you start shopping for a SaaS service or cloud service provider, determine what your core needs are. What infrastructure and software do you need to keep your business going and remain profitable? Does it integrate with other applications, including those you consider crucial? There’s no point in shopping SaaS service providers that don’t have what you absolutely must have to keep going. Extras are just that, extra. So signing up for a Cloud Computing course may help you to decide what you want for your business according to your needs.

Support Versus Your Needs

Look at the level of support the service provider needs relative to what the cloud service offers. If you need 24/7/365 support to meet the expectations of your consumers, you can’t afford to hire a cloud service that limits support to office hours. The problem is amplified by relying on a service provider in another country that limits support to office hours that don’t line up with yours. Don’t let them tell you that their online documentation is good enough, though you should give preference to a SaaS provider with good documentation on everything from how to use the service to troubleshooting issues that may arise. Ask how they handle upgrades and whether or not you have input on when and how these are done.

We would like to warn you that an organization that promises excellent support during outages may be a warning sign in and of itself. The provider should guarantee 99.9% uptime at a minimum. Anything less than this level of uptime indicates trouble.

Trust

The trust factor is a major factor when you’re deciding which cloud solution to use. You are, after all, going to keep all of your user data and probably the data critical to your business’ operations on their servers. If you going to be posting medical data that needs to be protected in accordance with HIPAA standards or financial data that requires an extra layer of protection, make certain the service provider meets the industry standards for such. How are they protecting your data? If the vendor doesn’t use their own data center and cloud technology, what does their service provider do to protect your data?

Value

Price cannot and should not be your overall deciding criteria. After all, the cheapest service may lack the memory space or support that you need. You’ll also pay for the services you use, such as the number of users accessing the site and the number of transactions processed. Cloud service providers tend to charge based on “tiers” or levels of service. You can learn more about cloud storage tiers and their prices here and about SaaS pricing strategies here. When you’re shopping for a cloud service provider, determine your needs now and in the near future. Then compare the overall value of each provider’s package. You might want to pay a little more per month for an automatic backup of your data that is easily restored if there is a problem. If maintenance and support are included at a higher tier and you expect to hit that volume of transactions soon, it may be worth paying for the higher tier now and locking in the rates.

Reviews

A business may have an excellent service plan at an affordable price and say they meet industry standards. The experience of their customers may prove otherwise. You can find this out by checking their reviews. Reading reviews on a variety of sites, not just the business’ chosen testimonials posted on their website, allow you to really know if they respond to tech support calls in a timely manner. You’ll learn if they actually meet the terms of their Service Level Agreement or if you have to have an SLA in order to get that fast turnaround on a memory space increase or restoration. Reviews may be the only way to learn about data loss from mistakes by the service provider.

Go ahead and ask for references, so that you can ask their current customers about what they think of the cloud service provider.

Usability

You want to know what it is like to use the software as a service hosted on the cloud. How hard is it to log in? What do they offer in terms of software relative to what you’re familiar using? How fast can you log in? How quickly do the apps respond? You can ask these questions, or you can ask for a fully functional trial period to test drive the cloud service yourself. Make sure you know what service level they’re providing before you commit to another tier in a contract, so you don’t pay for something slower than the service you loved when you tried it out.

Something else to check is how well the cloud service provider supports usability across devices and operating systems. Can you check your email on their server using your smartphone? Does it work with all the various laptops and personal computers in use around the firm? Will it work with the next generation of tablets you want to use?

An Exit Strategy

An often overlooked factor is how easy it is to move the data if that becomes necessary. If they use proprietary data, it may be hard to move your data somewhere else, whether you want to change service provider or your service provider goes out of business. Incompatible data formats or unusual software applications could also create problems if you backup data with a different service provider simply to benefit from redundancy. Find out how well they support the export of data, regardless of the reason why.

Conclusion

Take these factors into account, and you should be able to find a cloud service provider who meets or exceeds your needs without breaking your budget. And you’ll be able to be confident you’ve made the right decision.

4 Ways to Improve Your Internet Marketing

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StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales ArticleFor any small business, having an effective strategy to market the business well is important. Any company that doesn’t use the internet in a productive way is going to find their peers overtaking them and getting well ahead within a few short years. It’s necessary for every company to ‘up their game’ with internet marketing.

Here are four ways to help improve how your business is being marketed online.

Video Intros to Capture Attention

Video introductions are all the rage with YouTube, Vimeo, vlogging and commercial videos. It gives a chance for the presenter or company to provide a standardized beginning to every clip. For YouTube creators, using a standard intro lets viewer know that they’re on the correct channel and primes them for what to expect next. It creates a sense of anticipation of an entertaining or informative video and extends the average viewing time which helps videos rank higher in the YouTube and Vimeo search engines, respectively.

For businesses, they can also benefit from creating an introduction using software to complete the task. Having the software to hand makes it much easier and faster to change the introduction to update it as needed. A branding change or a new sister brand are easily accommodated with video intro software designed to make that fast and uncomplicated to complete. You can read more here about the features and options available with the IntroBrand Logo maker software.

Outreach to Higher Quality Websites

When starting out with a website, it’s likely that the site didn’t have much trust or ranking and found it difficult to reach out to industry sites. Making contact directly was often more successful. Using LinkedIn, attending expos on related topics and pursing other business connections having already met tends to work well.

You’re no longer doing a cold approach via email which is how many internet marketers on behalf of small businesses attempt to make contact. Because everyone is doing this, it tends to fall flat. The SkyScraper technique is a well-worn approach, but that’s why it’s increasingly become less effective as time has gone on; everyone is copying the same idea and inboxes are flooded with email.
To interest business owners and bloggers with what you have to say, it helps if you already have something of value to offer their customers or readers. If you have a blog on your site, what’s the writing quality like? Does it capture the reader’s attention or does it fall flat? If you’re making contact to eventually get a guest post published and score that all-important backlink, then your existing content is your advertisement to what they’ll receive. Putting your best foot forward in this regard is vital if you’re to attraction high-traffic, respected websites in related niches/industries.

Answer Questions Online to Demonstrate Authority

Another effective way to improve on the marketing side is to demonstrate authority in your industry or niche by answering questions. This can be done in the frequently asked questions section on your website, but you should also be interested in reaching people who don’t know your brand yet.

Answering questions on a site like Quora.com is useful because once a question is added, multiple answers are posted by different people. Visitors of the site vote on which answer was the most helpful or factually accurate. When you’re in a position to answer relevant questions factually and in an easily digestible manner, it gives you a leg up over your competitors who may not have even thought to do so. And even if they’re not directly competing with you but are impressed with your answers, this may encourage them to ask you to write a guest post on their site.

What do you do if you don’t write well or feel that you don’t have the time to do so? Jot down some bullet-points about how you would like the answer written out and then hire a writer on a per assignment basis to provide a written answer. Then, once an account is created and verified on Quora, the reply can be posted. This gets around any quality and time constraint concerns.

Develop a Popular YouTube Channel

If you’re working with a company and they make use of video intros for their corporate training videos, that’s great. However, they can do so much more with video content. An active YouTube channel is an effective way to attract interest from viewers, demonstrate knowledge, and drive traffic from YouTube to your website. This can be for email opt-ins to your newsletter or to promote a related product line.

A larger following doesn’t grow overnight but when you post on relevant topics that have searchers’ interest on YouTube, the videos and channel will start to show up more often in search results and get more views as a result.

Looking at the YouTube Analytics provides insight into total views per month, average viewing time and other useful data points. However, other software add-ons like vidIQ Vision or TubeBuddy, and a website like SocialBlade provide greater insight into popular search terms used to reach related video channels that compete with your site. By creating similar content that answers searchers’ questions better and includes keywords that match their search query, your video marketing content can rank higher sooner as well.

Concluding Thoughts

As the competition heats up for the increasingly fleeting attention span of their target market, all companies must do what they can to maximize the effectiveness of their marketing budget. Getting a high ROI is critical here.

Smart tools that provide analytics offer clues as to what is working for competitors to avoid reinventing the wheel. Similarly, building brand reputation online (and diligently protecting it) are necessary pieces of the internet marketing puzzle for companies that wish to get ahead while protecting what they already have.

A single misstep can cause more damage than a wide-reaching plan to expand your online presence by posting to social media channels more often or publishing excellent content. Strike the right balance to ensure mistakes aren’t made while forging ahead.

How to Improve the Customer Experience Throughout Their Journey

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StrategyDriven Customer Relationship Management Article

There’s no getting around it; the customer is king. Without them, your business will be going nowhere fast. They have the power to make or break your business, and your aim should be to do everything in your power to make their experience a good one. Once upon a time, it would have been the quality of your product or service that made you stand out from the competition. Nowadays, however, the focus has shifted to the experience a brand is able to offer the customer throughout their journey. Improving the customer experience is not the easiest thing to deal with. There are certain things your customers will expect. These include being able to interact with your company, however they decide to do it. It’s also important that their experience is a personalized, rewarding and effortless one. Above all, they want this to be provided in an efficient amount of time. Here are some things you can do today.

The Customer Experience vs. Customer Service

You might think that they’re one and the same, but they’re actually quite different. Customer service focuses more on the way a service is delivered, before, during, and after a purchase. Customer experience, on the other hand, is the sum of all the experiences and interactions the customers have from your business relationship. The two work closely together, and you can’t have one without the other.

10 Steps to Improving Your Customer Experience

The first contact your customers will have with your business will be via the phone, email or one-to-one interaction, and this is where you can start making improvements.

Create a Customer-Focused Culture

There is little point in trying to make improvements if the whole of your workforce are not behind the changes. From the bottom to the top, everyone has to be focused on customer satisfaction. A good way to do this is to create a list of statements that can be used to guide company principles and focus your staff. Principles can include delivering an excellent service, to show humility and welcome change. Take steps to introduce a staff training program and focus on etiquette, how best to address customer complaints, and the standard responses to use.

Know Your Customers

If you don’t know who your customers are, how can you address their needs to improve your customer experience. The beauty of humans is that we are all so different. We don’t have the same needs, desires or expectations. As well as understanding demographics such as age, race, and residence you need to consider several other things. For example, how will they use your products and services, what are their expectations, and how will they prefer to interact with you.

Understanding who your customers are will result in a deeper understanding. Your employees will be able to empathize with them and look at the service they’re providing from their point of view.

Live Chat

Providing your customers with a live chat option is crucial to improving the customer experience. If your audience is within the 18-34 age bracket, you might do well to appreciate that more than half of them prefer this option over phone interactions. It is particularly popular among online retailers. However, there’s more to providing live chat than just having a person to answer customer questions. It can include co-browsing, which is where an agent takes control of a user’s browser to provide technical support or to direct them to pages where they will find what they want. Audio/video chat services, integrated knowledge bases, and Chatbot services are also being added to the list.

Mobile Customer Support

More than 91% of adults in the US own a mobile phone, and more than 63% of them use their phones several times a month to search for products and customer support. Providing a mobile interface for your customers is vital. Unfortunately, many are poorly designed and cumbersome to use, even if there is an optimized website. The result of these poor designs is that customers are forced to contact a business directly for simple queries. Contact centers are then flooded with queries. Allowing customers to solve their problems using their mobile phone will improve the customer experience.

Social Media Support

It’s possible to use social media to communicate with customers in a customer-centric way. Many large companies use it very effectively. Using a variety of social media platforms, companies can share content and answer questions from customers. The marketing department can also ask interesting questions and gain a better understanding of the customer base.

Self-Service Portals

There are two ways self-service portals can help a company. Firstly, they improve the customer experience. Secondly, they reduce workload and thereby increase company capacity. A self-service portal provides customers with instant access to information. A series of self-help functions are open to the customer and accessible through a company’s website. Features include:

  • Self-resolution of issues through the use of a knowledge base
  • Password reset
  • Self-logging of incidents
  • Service request
  • Collaborative spaces
  • Chat services

Empowering customers to find information, request services, and resolve their own issues is a great way of improving the customer experience.

If you think outside of the box a little, you can probably work out some pretty ingenious ways that you can help people to improve their own experience with these kinds of portals. You might have a visitor sign-in app, for instance, so that you know who is in the building. However you approach it, the fact is that these kinds of portals are growing in popularity with good reason, and they are some of the best ways to make sure that the customer’s experience is so much better throughout the journey.

Provide a Range of Communication Channels

Not so very long ago, customers would have been more than happy to call customer care to get assistance. Those days are long gone, and today’s customers want to have access to more options. These should include text, email, and social media, depending on which your customer is most comfortable with.

Younger age groups may prefer to use social media while those over 40 might prefer to call customer care. The industry you’re working in can also influence the channels you choose to use. In a more professional industry, phone calls or post might be more appropriate. There is no one size fits all, and some experimentation will be required to find which fits best.

Customer Experience Manager

This is a relatively new role and has come about because customer experience requires effort from across a company, which means someone needs to be managing it. A customer experience manager will look across a range of departments such as customer service, sales, market, production and more. They will act as the link between customer and company, coordinating work across all the different departments.

Researching and Gathering Data

A crucial part of the customer experience is conducting research and gathering data. Customers expect a certain quality of service when calling your company. The service you deliver has to be above average. If the service received is excellent, it is more likely they will pay more for your products or services and return time and time again. To provide exemplary customer service, you first have to do some research and gather feedback from your customers. Asking customer testimonial questions will help you to establish their needs, wants, and expectation. It will also help you to grow your company with the help of customer reviews.

Benchmarking and Evaluating

There is no point in implementing any changes if you aren’t going to spend time evaluating whether the processes, teamwork, and technology are paying off. It’s important to measure the return on investment of customer experience. Finding the best strategy will be much easier if you’re able to try different things. Collecting data to ensure you know what works and what doesn’t. A good question to ask customers that will gauge the effectiveness of a strategy is “Would you recommend this service to a friend or relative?”. Provide a point-scale to measure how happy or unhappy they were.

The Benefits of Optimizing the Customer Experience

Companies who invest time and effort in improving the customer experience will reap the rewards, both in terms of revenue and financial health. There are many benefits of providing an excellent customer experience including increased customer loyalty and higher customer retention. It’s also interesting to learn that a high percentage of customers will pay more for a better customer experience.

There’s no way you can anticipate every customer issue, but you can anticipate there being an issue and making it easy for customers to contact you. Being reactive and proactive will pay off. Customers want to be treated well, respected, understood, and get what they want. They want a good experience when dealing with your company and an assurance that every time they get in touch, the experience will be equally good. The modern consumer has an immense amount of power, and they can choose to wield it as they see fit. Providing an excellent customer experience will instill trust and boost revenue.

Providing the best customer experience can help you to build meaningful relationships with your customers. The experience you provide is a reflection of your business. Your brand image depends on more than just a single moment when a purchase is made. It is a culmination of every interaction they have with your company. Provide a superior customer experience, and you will have a competitive advantage, build customer loyalty, encourage positive word-of-mouth, personalize relationships, and provide customer satisfaction.

Five Key Aspects You May Miss Out When Starting Your Business

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StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship ArticleStarting a new business can be simultaneously exciting and terrifying. You have this idea in your head, and now it’s time to make it into reality. But it can be easy to get caught up in the excitement of starting something new and wholly yours that you might neglect some parts of the process. And as the saying goes, “the journey is far more important than the destination.”

Here are five things you may miss out as part of your business endeavor that proves to be essential in the long run:

Make sure you have a detailed and well-researched business plan

This is the foundation of your business idea. Without a business plan, you might as well be grasping in the dark and may even jeopardize the running of your business in the long term. It’s easy to make mistakes when it comes to business plans, and you may miss out on certain things so do your research, and you’ll thank yourself later.

Customers, products or services, operations, sales and marketing strategies, management and competitors – these are the absolute minimum, and when writing up your business plan, you must include all of these key areas. Show that you have done your research and that you did not just run into the business industry with an idea and no plan by including industry trends and market analysis. As well as this, your plan must include a detailed financial flow, from month cash flow to income statements.

That being said, don’t get caught up in the details. This can be common with technology-based start-ups where technical jargon is thrown around, without taking into account the reader. But if you must include such keywords, make sure to include an appendix to increase accessibility. A business plan must be easy to read and understand so lay down your idea and your plans as succinctly as possible. Take into consideration that you may be required to submit a business plan when asking a bank for a loan or applying for business grants to further grow your business. Without strategies set in place, whether this is for sales and marketing or otherwise, you cannot persuade a bank to lend you what you need.

A business plan is not only useful when applying for loans or grants, but also acts as a guide to grow your business. This helps you identify and pursue goals and objectives that lead to the growth of your company and details the steps that will need to be taken to accomplish this.

Invest in reliable security

Whether you are starting an e-commerce or are venturing into opening a physical store, investing in reliable security is one of the most important steps you can take.

This is particularly relevant to data security. Chances are, your business will use electronic systems and these use data to operate. From information regarding your employees to your customers, these are all data.

With such sensitive and confidential data in your company’s system, you must put into place to keep these as secure as possible. Your customers, particularly, are trusting you with their sensitive information, whether these be bank details or home addresses, whenever they buy your product or use your service. When there is a breach in security, it is not only revenue that is at stake but your customer’s trust – and as a result, your company’s reputation. It is important that you invest in reliable security to keep sensitive and confidential data as safe as possible.

Likewise, keeping your home office or store safe is also a priority. There are many security technologies that allow you to monitor the location through real-time updates and notification systems and you can find out more from this website about the options available.

By increasing the security for your business and ensuring your customers know that you take their data protection and safety as a priority, you can increase customer satisfaction and loyalty and increase your business’s reputation.

Check if you are legally allowed to use your business name

Make sure you check if your business name is taken by another company before you start printing this on business cards, social media and other marketing and sales related areas. A simple search can let you know if the name you have chosen for your business is already taken or if you are free to use it. If the name is already trademarked and you have used it, then this can land you in legal trouble.

Don’t forget to set up a business bank account

Combining your personal and business finances leads to confusion – and it can create suspicion if ever your local or state tax bureaus or the IRS start asking questions. You’re far better off keeping personal and business monies separate for those reasons – and certain legal structures require you to do it that way. As a bonus, you’ll appear more professional and credible when writing checks from your business versus your personal account.

Know your competitors

You may think that your new product or service has no competition, is novel and above existing products – you’re wrong. Most often than not, it’s extremely rare to not have any competitors in an increasingly saturated business industry. But this doesn’t have to be a weakness; instead, do your research. Find out who your competitors are and how your business can be better.

How can you differentiate your business from an existing one? By researching your competitors, you can not only find ways on how you can improve your own business but also learn more about your own business as a whole, your customers and their habits.

By constantly improving and adapting to a constantly changing business industry and customer base, you can ensure your business stays on top and beat out competitors when the tides change.
Making your business idea, a reality can be exciting. With these few things in mind, you can ensure that even if the road towards your business goals and objectives is rocky, that you will know exactly where to go for success.