Short of going door to door in a Santa suit, how can businesses increase profits and prevent a blue Christmas? Despite economic gloom, industry leaders have found that an e-mail follow up strategy can increase sales by a cheery 35%! To weather ailing economy, use a follow up autoresponder during your holiday campaigns.

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Follow up autoresponders follow up with your leads for you. You create a series of messages, and decide when they should be sent, (daily, weekly, etc.). Your autoresponder will send messages to each new lead automatically. With no further intervention from you, your leads will remember you throughout winter chill. And this regular reminding will mean more sales during all-important holiday shopping season.

Give yourself gift of a higher conversion rate! Follow up automatically using these simple steps:

* Offer Useful Information * Personalize Your Messages * Track Your Leads * Broadcast Tailor-Made Offers

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Write your follow up messages for your leads - not for yourself. You want to talk about your great service, but your leads just want to know what they'll get out of it!

At some point, you must have purchased something like your product. What were you looking for then? Was it information about pricing, styles, or holiday gift wrapping? Maybe just a clearer explanation of product? Figure that out, and put answer in your follow up messages. That's what your leads want to know.

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You don't open postal mail addressed to "Current Resident", and your leads aren't going to read e-mail addressed to "Dear Internet Friend." People are simply more likely to read messages that address them by name.

What is Management Quality? Practically all management development is aimed at individuals. Management Quality is an organizational concept, which describes organization's capacity to meet high quality objectives in its management functions. This leads to better customer satisfaction and financial and other performance. Many enterprises and organizations have programs for Total Quality Management. These are supposed to cover management quality, as one of several topics. In practice, however, improvements in this area are often given a lower priority, than within processes, more directly concerning flows of products and money. To apply quality concepts and methods to area of management includes measuring present level of quality, establishing desired goal and necessary actions, and finally measuring progress. It is not sufficient to address symptoms, obvious deficiencies; you must also consider fundamental values, policies, systems, processes and programs, i.e. quality assurance. Management quality is not synonymous with Quality management (to manage quality improvement). Nor is it synonymous with Quality of managers (a narrower concept, often represented as "wish lists" of desired personality traits). Is Management Quality really important? All enterprises or other organizations with competition and/or pressure to reduce costs must find means to improvement, that continuously give customers, clients and other stake holders more value for money. The most common way is to simply cut costs, which directly hits employees and indirectly customers. In area of management there is a great, unexploited area for improvement. Such improvement has a direct and positive impact on results. Those organizations that are pioneers in using this opportunity will create greater value for customers and clients, a better working environment and competitive advantage. There are no real arguments for not taking advantage of this opportunity.

Management Quality - is there need for improvement? Consider following illustrations as "evidence": Evidence 1. I have conducted benchmarking studies in more than 10 major Nordic and multinational organizations representing industry, commerce and government. On a 1000-point scale for management quality these enterprises end up in 350-550 interval. The study includes companies with an excellent reputation in areas of general management and human resource management. The conclusion is that even those that are considered leading edge today have substantial room for improvement -and there are thousands who are lagging far behind. Evidence 2. Ask any group of employees if, during last year, they have observed examples of lacking management quality, which have directly and negatively impacted performance of organization. Almost all hands come up. Then ask how many who, during last three months, personally have had such negative experiences, resulting in decreased motivation or possibility to do a first rate job. About half group will confirm this. Evidence 3. Consulting companies have conducted studies, reported in press, indicating that variations in management quality result in productivity differences as high as 25 %. Evidence 4. Other calculations show that value of good management quality, as compared to poor quality, is 1,8 MUSD per year in a marketing group of 10 people. Corresponding numbers for a manufacturing group is 0,3 MUSD annually, and for an administrative group 0,2 MUSD. Evidence 5. In hundreds of interviews with employees and managers I hear statements like: "Personnel policy is non-existent in this division. I am not making an effort anymore" "Decisions are taken and orders are given, but everyone does whatever he likes to do. There is no follow-up, no questions asked." "You cannot trust top management. Decisions are often reversed, without explanation. I am not motivated to act strongly and promptly", said one manager. Each of these and many other statements are real-life examples of negative impact on business of poor management quality.

How good is your Management Quality? "How good is management quality of your organization?" When I ask this question, most often I get an answer. But answer varies from one person to another, and is based on subjective impressions and feelings. In some cases, reference is given to Personnel surveys. Such surveys, at best, give an indication of how immediate manager is perceived, and only from employee perspective. The Management Quality benchmarking mentioned above is a continuous project, all time open to new participants. The result is a comprehensive review of management quality of organization, a detailed list of identified potential improvements, and sharing of best practices with interesting organizations. You can make a first estimate by making simple Self-assessment, below. (It is designed for senior and Personnel management. Interpret questions "from their position" - or give them a copy. Use a scale from 1 (I do not agree at all) to 5 (I fully agree)).

SELF-ASSESSMENT A. WE KNOW THAT OUR MANAGEMENT QUALITY IS EXCELLENT 1.Every employee can identify their own and company's customers are and their expectations. Everyone can describe his/her own responsibility and mission.