Leverage your strengths

Experienced marketers know that being specific about your offerings and your audience is crucial for professional success. Segmentation, targeting and positioning are not some abstract concepts any more. Instead, these three activities form the basis for any successful attempt at grabbing the public's attention. Knowing what, how and to whom to make an offer will get you a job, a donation, a sale, or even all three, if you're looking for that. With that said, finding the right audience and that unique feel can take quite a long time, and most of us don't have years to wait for such an epiphany before getting what we want. Today, Nick and I prepared a three-step outline to ease and, hopefully, accelerate the journey to our readers' goals.

E-mails or your life!

Suppose that you have to leave your computer for a mere twenty minutes. It may be a coffee break or a phone call; we won't ask. By the time you are back to your work station, many of us will have twenty newly unread e-mails in our inboxes. This can happen for a variety of reasons, and the truth is that the majority of those e-mails that regularly flood every inbox they can is that nobody reads them. All they do is take away our precious time. Moreover, if, for the reasonable sake of higher priorities on your task list, you let these unwanted e-mails pile-up for a week, bringing order back to your mailbox will take you an eternity. Luckily, there are several simple rules that generally apply to all professionals and that help clear away any unwanted junk and free up that precious time for activities that are more important and, more often than not, more pleasant.

Going beyond the PowerPoint presentation

PowerPoint is a great tool that saves us from having to construct our presentation materials from cardboard paper and markers. In fact, PP's latest versions do such a good job at that that any presentation still looking less graphically advanced than PowerPoint 2007 is dismissed by the public as not professional. In short, PowerPoint can be a great tool for organizing one's thoughts into a presentable product. With that said, the process of creating that presentable material can take an entire weekend or longer. That sounds like a lot of time. Yet, let's see what there is in the end of all that labor. The presentation makes for a solid visual support to your speech. It can help you stay on track and keep your thoughts organized and convincing in front of an audience. These uses for PowerPoint are the most obvious and they are the reasons why most people open PP in the first place. However, the best news of all is that the life of the presentation that took so long to make does not end after the lecture.

A sales management system on your desk

Think about some important components of a successful business. What comes to your mind? Some of our readers would mention reliable front desk staff, a team of trained salespeople or a solid website that attracts new clients. Maybe some will think of a referral-rewarding plan and a customer retention program.

Now that we have this list, I can see a pattern emerging. All of the techniques mentioned above target one area of business development: sales. This consensus is here for a valid reason. Sales management is simply the most crucial aspect of a successful venture, be it a mom-and-pop grocery store, an environmental activist organization or a multi-national corporation with headquarters on nine different continents.

True enough, sales may not necessarily be a particular organization’s primary goal (like in the environmental agency’s case.) Nevertheless, sales, be they in the conventional form of soda bottles sold, or be they in the more atypical form of donations raised, are crucial to the continued survival of any establishment that incurs expenses during the course of its existence.

Six (small) steps towards a paperless office

As members of a consulting firm, Nick and I get to see plenty of small and big businesses from industries that often have no connection with each other. Of course, every organization finds a unique path towards its goals. However, to paraphrase Leo Tolstoy’s famous opening line for Anna Karenina, all professional mistakes are alike; each successful business is successful in its own way.

7 Reasons to Go Paperless

Paperless office is very much like adopting a new technology: the only difficult thing about is transitioning from paper-based operations. After that, there are only benefits on the horizon. Just as a sample, consider these seven big and small business boosters that will appear as paper usage disappears.

1. Easier document sharing
There are often certain documents that are needed in several places simultaneously. This can be a client’s personal file that different offices of the same dentist may need to retrieve. This can be an unfinished flyer that you started at your office and want to edit at home during the weekend. In either case, relying on only a paper version of the document complicates the work process for you and your employees. Electronic documents, on the other hand, are easily transportable through the Web and programs like MS Access.

Five best-kept secrets about Outlook

Now that you know the basic functionality of the professional communication giant that hides behind the simple name Outlook, it’s time for us to unveil some tricks that can make the life of a busy person surprisingly easier.

1. Business Contact Manager
BCM is a powerful add-on to Outlook that allows any businessperson manage their business contacts and marketing campaigns, monitor sales people’s and campaigns’ performances, give order to one’s business opportunities and try out other ways to increase work efficiency.

Outlook: The Supernatural Inside Your Computer

If we were asked to name a single quality that one should always strive
to improve for the sake of success in the small business world, we
would, without hesitation, say: interpersonal communication. And when,
after that, we would be to pick one piece of software that would propel
one's communication ability the most, we would quickly and surely
respond: "MS Outlook."

If reading a software review makes you feel uneasy, do not fret: We
would not be recommending a particular program if we were not sure of
our choice. Just consider this: Nick and I counted how many separate
programs come together under one roof in Outlook, and found seven
disparate sets of functions comprising just the basic foundation of
Outlook. That's seven programs that would otherwise be scattered around
your computer and not connected into one secret communication weapon.

Let's review the basic functionality sets in Outlook and their meaning
to professionals today, so that next time, we can reveal some best-kept
secrets about using the entire program.