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  • Better Customer Service Through Effective Time Management

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    Being able to manage and prioritize is an important skill when servicing customers. Planning events, activities, and tasks on a yearly, monthly, weekly, and daily basis-that is, prioritizing time-can be rewarding from the standpoint of allowing you to be more proactive in preparing to deal with situations. Such planning can reduce your need to be a crisis manager. It is important on and off the job because, if you do not manage your personal life well, you may carry over personal stress into the workplace. This is not only inefficient; it is also unfair to your employer, peers, coworkers, and external customers.

    After you have scheduled key events and tasks using some type of scheduling system (e.g., time management software, written planning system or calendar, or electronic scheduling device that can download information into your computer), review the information regularly to avoid forgetting something.

    One way to manage events, rather than having them manage you, is to create a list of activities each day and assign a value to each based on importance. The key is to be consistent and prioritize each day. Some people make planning the last activity of their workday. When they arrive to work the next morning, they are ready to begin rather than spending time preparing.

    Guidelines for Setting Priorities

    Three guidelines can help you in determining what tasks to do first. These can help you create a realistic and achievable list of daily tasks. As you learned when you read about goal setting in other chapters, goals must be attainable. Use the following standards as a guide when setting priorities.

    Judgment. You are the best judge of what you can accomplish in any given day. You know your strengths and what has to be done. When selecting priorities, remember that the ones having the most impact on customers and others should be placed high on your list. On the other hand, do not put so many priorities on a daily list that you will not get them done. If this happens, you might become discouraged and give up.

    When you find that you have more high priorities than you have time, you may need to ask for help or guidance from your boss. Many times, simply asking for assistance helps develop your relationship with others. They feel respected and trusted by your gesture, as long as you do not abuse their help or appear to be unloading your tasks onto them. Also, consider other resources that you might use to accomplish tasks (e.g., technology, outside vendors, or customers).

    Relativity. Assigning priorities is a matter of relativity. Some tasks and projects are readily rated higher than others. You should be guided by the question “What is the best use of my time?” Many people fill their daily schedule with frivolous or easy tasks and with tasks that they like to do. This produces a hollow feeling of accomplishment. They may get a lot done throughout the day and enjoy doing it, but they have not added a lot of value to customer service or aided in accomplishing organizational goals. Keep in mind when setting priorities in the workplace that your primary focus should be your customers and activities that support them.

    Timing. Reality and deadlines have a way of dictating priorities. The starting time of a project or task also may establish priorities. Once you begin a task, there must be enough time to finish it. If this is not possible, you may have to re prioritize or seek assistance.

    Be realistic about the time it will take to complete a task. Make sure that you schedule that much time, plus a little extra, on your daily planning sheet. Also, consider your peak time period for performance. Each person typically has a period of the day in which he or she has more energy and can get more done. Capitalize on your peak period and schedule high-priority tasks during that time, if possible.

    Prioritizing System

    To set up your own priority system, list all of your pending activities and then group them according to their level of importance. How you assign value to a task is not as important as long as you use the same format each day. Many people use an A, B, C system, and others use a 1, 2, 3 format. Here are suggested criteria for assignment:

    Priority A-Must do or critical items. Some things must be done because of management directives, local, state, or federal regulations, importance to customers or clients, deadlines, or opportunities they provide for your success or advancement (e.g., state tax reports, actions requested by a customer, or application for a position in the organization with a specific cutoff date for submission).

    Priority B-Should do. Items in this category are of medium value. Although they may contribute to customer satisfaction and improved performance, they are not essential or do not have critical deadlines (e.g., mailing an unsolicited information kit to a customer about a new product or developing a proposal for changing an existing system or process).

    Priority C-Nice to do. This is the lowest category and includes tasks that are not a direct link to customer satisfaction. They may even be fun or interesting, but could be omitted or left undone. Postponing or scheduling such priorities until a slower time period will likely have little or no impact on customer service (e.g., meeting with team members to brainstorm ideas for a more efficient layout of cubicles, cleaning old e-mail files, or neatly lining up the products on a shelf).

    Note: As you go through your e-mail and voice mail messages at the times you have scheduled throughout the day, prioritize them, and add them to your list of things to do.

    The key to effective time management is to have a plan and work that plan. If you control your time, you and your customers both stand to gain from your efforts.

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    Source by Bob Lucas

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  • Direct Marketing – 5 Essential Components of Successful Direct Marketing

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    Direct Marketing produced $2.05 trillion in sales in 2012. That represents about 8.7% of US GDP in 2013. This implies several key points.

    First, competition in direct marketing is stiff. With all those advertisement dollars being spent on direct marketing, you need to ensure your message is getting through and being heard. Second, with stiff competition, you need to craft compelling messages, not once, but repeatedly. You need to do this effectively and efficiently, if you want to do more than just tread water.

    Thus, it’s important to develop a marketing strategy that optimizes your budget spend by employing direct marketing more effectively. Here are 5 essential components of successful direct marketing.

    1) Deliver a Compelling Sales Message

    Several elements go into creating a compelling sales message. Successful sales letters and other marketing content must be relevant, useful, and persuasive. Marketing content that works grabs your prospect’s attention, shows uniqueness, and builds trust with your prospect. Employ these three elements in all your direct marketing content.

    · WIIFM – Tell your prospect exactly what’s in it for him or her.

    · Unique Selling Proposition (USP) – Clearly describe why your solution is the superior one.

    · Testimonials – Let your satisfied customers “sell” for you.

    2) Follow-up Leads Promptly to Attract and Engage Your Prospect’s Attention

    You might have a lead-generating sales letter, but if you don’t follow-up, valuable leads will slip through the cracks. Follow-up a live event with a phone call, an email, or a letter that invites the prospect to take the next step.

    Offer a free demonstration of your product or service. Set up an appointment with a subject matter expert who can go into greater detail on how your company’s solution works, and why it’s better than the competition’s. Then, before the scheduled demonstration, send a white paper that explains your product in detail.

    Follow-up, engage and spark your prospect’s interest in your solution.

    3) Promote Your Brand

    Benefits from branding give companies and edge over competitors that don’t brand. Branding helps position your product or service favorably. It also gives you pricing and distribution power. The takeaway is: never miss an opportunity to brand.

    Direct marketing affords you many online and off-line media to build brand awareness. Online media: (1) Banner advertising; (2) Blogs; (3) Email; and (4) Website. Off-line media: (1) Print advertising – sales letters, postcards, brochures; (2) Press Releases; and (3) Public Relations.

    4) Nurture the New Customer Relationship

    Lead nurturing is just as important as lead acquisition. Most companies want to develop long-term relationships with customers. That’s because they become repeat customers. And, over time, repeat customers generate more sales and profits to your bottom line.

    Outbound marketing provides many ways to build and maintain a thriving lead nurturing program. You can employ email, direct mail, social media, mobile, podcasts, seminars, phone calls, and videos.

    5) Integrate and Synchronize Online and Off-line Direct Marketing

    To optimize your message and direct marketing budget, success lies in finding the right mix of online and off-line methods. One method isn’t necessarily better than another. Instead, the secret sauce to successful direct marketing depends on how you weave these various methods together.

    You can integrate and synchronize these methods along the sales cycle beginning with message delivery. Start with a sales letter, follow-up with a phone call or email. Refer your prospect to your website for deeper marketing content, and don’t forget to brand throughout this process.

    Achieving the right marketing mix produces a “multiplier effect” that helps you close sales faster and easier. Employing different media in a consistent and coherent manner working towards the same goal optimizes your marketing efforts.

    Don’t Overlook the Value of Direct Marketing

    With so much attention focused on inbound marketing lately, it’s easy to overlook direct marketing’s benefits. However, as you can see, it still commands the lion’s share of sales. Therefore, it’s prudent to examine your marketing strategy’s focus and align your budget accordingly.

    Before you undertake a direct marketing campaign, employ these five essential components to compete effectively and efficiently for that $2.05 trillion market.

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    Source by Alex M Milo

    Views: 1

  • What Marketing Strategy Is the Best for You?

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    If you pick the right marketing strategy, you’ll be like that little guy in the middle of my diagram above. Yes! Winning! Fist pumps!

    The problem with marketing today is that there are way too many options and it’s much too confusing. It makes me dizzy just thinking about this stuff and I’ve been immersed in it for 35 years.

    Well, I lay down on my bed last week with a notepad and started to map out my “Unified Theory of Marketing Strategies” with an emphasis on online marketing.

    And I actually came up with something that’s not totally confusing, and might even be helpful to a few people.

    Here goes…

    It’s yet another four-quadrant grid where the vertical axis is a scale from easy to hard and the horizontal axis is a scale from passive to proactive.

    I emerged with these four snappy quadrants:

    Hard and Passive = Multimedia

    Easy and Passive = Publishing

    Hard and Proactive = Presentations

    Easy and Proactive = Email

    Now, all of these strategies can be effective. But, yes some are easier than others. And the passive ones tend to take a lot longer than the proactive ones.

    Hard and Passive = Multimedia (Videos)

    Everyone is crazy about video these days. It’s a challenging, yet passive strategy. You put a lot work into creating a video and then post it on YouTube hoping people see it.

    It’s difficult to do well. It’s time-consuming and it can be expensive. And most videos are pure crap. If you want to do it well, it takes a chunk of change and a lot of time.

    Throwing up a lot of little videos on your website can be a nice touch, but they usually don’t get people to call you in droves.

    So, as you can see, I’m not crazy about a video strategy for self-employed professionals. I’m not saying they can’t work, but it’s a whole lot of work to do right.

    Best example: A non-duality teacher named Rupert Spira (non-duality.rupertspira.com/home). He does live workshops and films everything. Then his staff chops them up into questions and answer segments and posts them on YouTube. They’re five to fifteen minutes long. And what you see is what you get. No pitch, no hype. It’s his teaching unadulterated.

    He has hundreds of videos on YouTube with hundreds of thousands of views. Does it work? Well, his workshops are always full and all he does is a low-key email announcement to his list every month or two.

    I like this approach a lot. Got a lot of good content? Look good on video (unlike yours truly)? Then you may want to emulate Rupert.

    Easy and Passive = Publishing

    I happen to like this strategy a lot as it, ahem, built my “Empire.” It’s relatively easy: Write a how-to article on your subject matter once a week, send it out to those on your e-list and publish on your blog. Fame ensues.

    But online publishing can be a lot more than that. You can take those same articles and publish them on Medium, LinkedIn, and Ezine Articles. And then you can announce them on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. Sometimes you can get big exposure when writing an article for a major online publication. Web traffic multiplies.

    The cost is zero; an article takes from two to five hours to write (unless it takes you several days). And your ideas are online for eternity to be discovered by those looking for practical ideas. Some will opt-in to your e-list and perpetuate this virtuous marketing circle.

    The downside, of course, is that, according to my extensive research, (a 10 second Google search), there are 2 million articles published online every day. The mind reels. So your stuff will be out there, but somewhat lost in a very big haystack.

    I’m still a big advocate of online publishing, but the mountain is getting steeper and steeper. Just writing an article or two here and there won’t help you much.

    Best Example: Well, other than mine, of course, check out Henneke of Enchanted Marketing. She has a wonderful, readable, fun blog on business writing and blogging. And she walks her talk. It’s all about well-written, relevant content. If you don’t have that as a foundation, it’s a total waste of time.

    Hard and Proactive = Presentations

    I built my business on presentations in front of live audiences at professional associations and chambers of commerce. It got me attention, added people to my mailing list and generated warm leads for marketing coaching.

    And I still do presentations today in the form of webinars. I just filled my recent group program with the help of a couple webinars (also called video conferences). They most certainly do work.

    But I put presentations in the hard category, not because they are all that hard to give, but can take a long time to prepare. The last one I did took me two full days. There were about 200 slides (whew).

    Yes, that’s not the only way to do a webinar. You can just go live on Zoom Video, and that can work as well. You ultimately have to find your style and test what works.

    Presentations are proactive in that at the end you can ask for the business. And, of course, you can turn the recording of the webinar into a video in a snap and send it out to those on your list. Watch it here.

    So presentations will always play a big part in my marketing toolkit.

    One other thing though – If you don’t have a LOT of people on your email list, good luck in getting much of an attendance. Yes, you can do guest presentations hosted by others, but you don’t have the same control and ability to pitch your professional services.

    Best example: John Nemo of LinkedIn Riches (linkedinriches.com). His webinar is a blast. There are a lot of them out there in the online marketing world. And many, Like John, have set them up as evergreen webinars that are scheduled to play automatically several times a day. These are kind of a hybrid between publishing and presentations.

    Easy and Proactive = Email

    In my opinion, email is the most powerful overall marketing tool. And it gets the least respect. But I can’t imagine even being in business without email marketing.

    Social media gets all the PR and all the attention, but email gets the business. A recent study showed that email generated 40 times the business results of Facebook and Twitter combined.

    Email is the online tool that’s been around the longest, and I think it’s taken for granted. Promotional emails have expanded exponentially over the years, but most of it isn’t very good.

    We wade through our email boxes like we sort our mail over the trashcan. Delete, delete, delete. Why? Because it’s either not relevant or it’s boring. Usually both.

    I feel that email has the greatest potential of all the online marketing strategies because it’s both relatively easy and the most proactive marketing medium of all. Your message goes right into the mailbox of your potential client. Nothing else can do that.

    Marketing email holds great opportunities for improvement in several areas:

    1. How to incorporate humor as the most powerful attention-getting device in existence (that almost nobody is using).

    2. How to telegraph your value proposition straight to the minds and hearts of your prospect.

    3. How to make your emails clear, focused, and easy-to-read.

    4. How to craft a compelling call-to-action that is hard to resist.

    5. How to get emails to thousands of your prospects without looking like spam.

    If you’re not working on ALL of these, your emails will not get the attention and response you want.

    Best Example: Therapy Practice Accelerator. Visit this site and get on the list just to see the brilliance of the email marketing. It’s all about demonstrating results.

    What marketing strategies will you choose?

    Take the four marketing quadrants into consideration. The easier a marketing activity, the more likely you’ll actually do it. And the more proactive a marketing activity, the faster the response you’ll get.

    Cheers, Robert

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    Source by Robert Middleton

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  • The Enduring Nature of Love

    The Enduring Nature of Love

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    Love Endures and we are reminded of this idea during this month of February, when Valentine's Day is celebrated .. Now- a- days, people buy cards and send e-greetings to their beloveds. But long ago, people expressed their love via post or letters delivered on horseback.No telephones, Internet and mass media were utilized to convey the message from one lover's heart to another. I adore the old romantic movies from early US history, where letters are hand crafted with delicate calligraphy to express the heartfelt passion of the lovers heart.The letters are then carefully sealed with wax and given to an entrusted delivery person or mail service to ensure that their beloved, however near or far away will receive it. Upon receipt of the letter, that may have taken weeks or months to arrive, the cherished recipient opens it, and is reminded that love endures through time and distance.

    How very different this delayed gratification is, from the immediacy of sending a text, email or Instagram post as we do nowadays.With technology so highly advanced, one can reach out to many people at one time and express their love and they can voice their love many times a day to one or numerous friends and lovers near and far. Also, there is no need to wait for a response, as in days gone by, instead one can receive immediate feedback that their loved ones care for them. But perhaps this instant gratification of love expressed virtually has outweighed the benefits of love that is cultivated slowly and held closely to one's heart over time and space.

    I imagine that years ago, before mass communication was available, that love was more tenderly cherished and expressions of love, although more infrequent, were possibly more genuine.The innocence of love that endures over time without the constant need for a barrage of proof that comes from texts, calls, emails and Instagrams that one is loved is a special gift. Consider the friend whom you haven't heard from in many years, who suddenly resurfaces in your life (maybe from a Facebook search) Upon reconnecting with one another, the love that was there may be instantly reignited and a bond that was formed eons ago can come to life again.This is proof that love endures through time and doesn't diminish because of lack of contact. remember that just because you have not heard from someone in a while, that does not mean that they don't love you.

    Perhaps you have been lucky enough to connect with a person who feels incredibly familiar to you upon first meeting them. You may have a sense of loving them automatically. This could possibly be a divine union that began in another lifetime, only to be continued in this time and space.When true love is present, the power of that formidable force can transcend all physical limitations.This applies to our loved ones that have moved on to the other side of life as well. Their love is still accessible to us. True love endures ceaselessly.

    During this Valentine's month, look deep within your heart and see if there is someone you could reach out to and express your love for them, even though time may have passed since your last encounter. You just might be pleasantly surprised to discover that love endures through time and space.

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    Source by Liah Howard

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