Harvard Business School professor John Kotter, author of A Sense of Urgency and Leading Change,
talks about the importance of bringing a sense of urgency to your
organization. The trick is, there are two types of urgency: a good type
which is characterized by scrutiny and focus, and a bad type driven by
panic and breathless activity. How can you tell which is which? One dead
giveaway, according to Kotter, is your schedule. If you are overbooked
with meetings, you are probably engaged in the wrong kind of urgency.
Clear your calendar, so that you can better focus on the truly urgent
matters in your business.
2. Engage Your Employees
Kevin Plank, founder of the athletic apparel company Under
Armour, says that the key to motivating employees is to communicate with
them face to face. When his company was smaller, he would gather the
team together once a week to go over key strategic and operational
decisions. Invariably, they brought up issues and offered suggestions he
had not considered. Not that Under Armour is quite large, an all-hands
meeting is not feasible. Instead, Plank invites a half-dozen "potential
stars" to MVP lunches held several times a month.
3. Tweak the Language on Your Website
Do you find that people come to
your site and then leave without buying anything? There are ways to
reduce shopping-cart abandonment and keep prospective customers on your
site longer. Stamps.com founder that using the phrase "sign up" was
actually a negative; customers saw it as a high-pressure sales tactic.
Once the site replaced that phrase with "Get Postage," sales increased.
4. Measure Demand for New Products on the Cheap
Lean product development can help a company develop new products with a minumum of waste and expense. One trick: TPGTEX
Label Solutions, a Houston based software company, creates mocked-up
webpages that list the features of a potential new product along with
its price. The response to those webpages enables the company to test a
product's marketability.
5. Improve the Accuracy of Your Sales Forecasts
During difficult times it may seem hard to set realistic sales
projections. Jeffrey Hollander of Seventh Generation discusses looking
at your products item by item and finding out what is going on with your
customers' business so you can best meet their needs, In particular,
identify the cash-flow issues faced by your distribution partners. That
will not only give you a clearer sense of the health of your business—it
may also present you with a new business opportunity.
6. Shed Your Problem Customers
Are all customers worth keeping? The answer is an emphatic no. So
how do you identify which customers you should drop and which you
should hold onto? Try conducting an analysis that shows each account's
contribution to overall profits and cash flow. Consider creating a fee
structure that rewards lucrative customers with discounts, and penalizes
slow-paying or unprofitable customers with additional "service" fees.
7. Turn Freebies into a Search Engine Optimization Play
Search engine optimization can raise your website's profile,
delivering more traffic, more customers, and bigger revenues. The most
effective way to optimize your site is to encourage other sites to link
to yours. One easy way to do that? Offer a free e-book for download on a
subject of broad appeal or a product sample
8
. Encourage Your Staff to Chip in Their Ideas
More companies are using software to collect staff ideas and
finding that there can be gold hiding in the office. Mike Hall of
Borrego Systems, a solar-panel business, used SurveyMonkey to allow all
his employees to vote on the best idea that was put in the virtual
suggestion box. The winner received a $500 prize. While only a handful
of employees submitted ideas, the majority of Borrego's staff
participated in voting, reinforcing the message that every employee has a
stake in the outcome.
9. Look for Partners in Struggling Industries
Paul King, CEO of Hercules Networks, which operates ATM-like
machines through which consumers can charge mobile phones and other
gadgets, has been cultivating relationships with real-estate developers
who run malls and amusement parks. Most of them are struggling
these days, and are looking for new sources of revenue. As such, they
are more than willing to work with King.
10. Share Information More Widely
At Stranger's Hill Organics in Bloomington, Indiana, farmers now
post updates using a laptop to see which tasks have been assigned from
inside the farmhouse. The result is that tasks are completed more
quickly than ever, and news of trouble spreads rapidly.
11. Play Sales Games With Your Employees
To boost employee motivation, the franchise College Hunks Hauling
Junk uses sales contests. President Nick Friedman and CEO Omar Soliman
kicked off a rivalry between their country wide branches to see who
could haul the most junk. What was the incentive? How about a vacation
to the Bahamas.
12. Write a New Marketing Plan
Careful planning is integral to marketing success. To help set
objectives, develop what Deb Roberts, CEO of Synapse Marketing calls the
5 Cs—the consumer, channel, company, competition, and
climate. "Your understanding of the 5 C's should run deeply enough that
when you finish, you should understand your point of difference in the
market and where your opportunities lie."
13. Turn Tweets into Cash
Rose Associates, an 80-year-old real estate agency in New York
City, searches key terms such as "moving to New York" on
search.twitter.com. Whenever another Twitter user types one of these top
phrases, a member of Rose's marketing staff sends them a message
offering real-estate listings or related service. The result? A hundred
qualified leads a month.
14. Look to Learn More From Lost Sales
By building win-loss analysis into your sales tracking process,
you can learn important lessons about your sales force, your value
proposition, and your key competitors. Consider putting together a
questionnaire for clients and would-be clients to discover in which
categories your company excells and in which it falls short. But don't
ask reps themselves to reach out for feedback; customers may feel that
the request for information is yet another attempt to re-open the sales
cycle. Instead, have your marketing director call customers and ask a
few simple questions concerning why your business lost out on a sale.
15. Prepare Better for Your Presentations
Your presentations skills are just as important as the
information you are presenting. David Parnell, the founder of an
attorney-placement firm who recently finished a book on the psychology
of effective communication, asks his clients to write
down questions that are sure to come up. This simple exercise primes
your brain to handle interruptions with poise.
16. Cut Costs with Green IT
Cloud computing, power management, and other green technologies
can help you save money. For example, Baltimore IT consulting firm
Analysys saves more than $13,000 a year by using software which helps
their IT department turn their servers into several virtual machines.
17. Streamline Your Decision-Making Process
Do you ever find yourself inviting an employee to sit on a
meeting just so he or she won't feel left out? If that's the case, then
you may have a culture of over-communication. Entrepreneur Joel Spolsky
says that the way to ensure the efficient flow of communication and
speed up decision making is to appoint a manager to each project whose
sole responsibility is to make sure that over-communication does not
occur.
18. Find Some Amazing Interns
Interns are a cheap way of filling in gaps on your staff and
bringing energy and new ideas to the table. Of course, a bad hire, even
at the lowest level of an organization, can cause stress. So how do you
find an exceptional intern? The clothing line O'Neill found a novel way
to identify talented teens for its internship program: The company set
up a contest in which candidates designed clothes in order to compete
for a job.
19. Use Crowdsourcing to Control Inventory
ModCloth's Be the Buyer program lets customers go online and tell
the company exactly what products they want—before they've been
manufactured. Now the company can confidently gamble on what were once
risky items by securing the most valuable of opinions before taking the
plunge -- those of its customers.
20. Mine Your Data
What can start as a useful database of customer information can
become a slow or unresponsive monster when it grows to more than a
terabyte -- or about 1,000 gigabytes -- of data. Hadoop, an
open-source project, takes massive amounts of data, breaks it into
smaller chunks, and distributes the pieces across a cluster of computers.
It can track customer logs providing stores the ability to look for
shoppers who bought diapers six years ago and target them with
back-to-school promotions.
21. Advertise on Facebook
After initially eschewing social networks, more marketers are
looking to promote products and services on Facebook. How can you make
sure your ad stands out among the site's status updates, party photos,
and comments? Choose your target, test your ad's among different
demographics, perform your own tracking with analytics programs like
Google Analytics and HitsLink, and come up with catchy slogans. Our
favorite: "Springtime is here. Time to get waxed."
22. Create Some Cool Viral Videos
By creating clever Web videos, companies like Smule and Kiva
Systems have been able to explain their technology to customers. "What
people seem to like about the videos is that they are clearly made by
the same people who make the app," says Smule Co-founder Ge Wang. "Our
wackiness and quirkiness show through."
23. Send Customer Coupons on Their Mobile Phones
Applications like Yowza and Foursquare let you send coupons to
customers' cell phones. Tasti D-Lite, the frozen-yogurt franchise,
rewards frequent customers who check in on Foursquare, for example. Did
we mention that these coupon programs are (for now) free to use?
24. Say Thank You More Often
Saying thank you for a job well done can pay huge dividends. A
recent survey by the International Association of Administrative
Professionals and OfficeTeam found that, while managers ranked
promotions and cash bonuses as the two most effective ways of
recognizing employee accomplishments, workers said they actually
preferred an in-person thank-you or having a job well done reported to
senior management.
25. Don't Forget to Take Care of Yourself
It's often hard to achieve work-life balance when you're running
an entrepreneurial company. But don't. "It's important to re-charge your
batteries," says cosmetics entrepreneur Bobbi Brown. Her routine
includes exercising in the morning, stealing a walk when she can,
stretching between meetings, yoga--and enjoying the occasional martini.
