Succeed the natural wayWritten by Roy Bartell
Succeed natural way Getting ahead needn't be a complicated, contrived process of scheming and manipulating your way to top. It ca be as simple and natural as "doing right thing". Here are some tips to succeed in business natural way: n Develop a reputation for kindness. Genuinely caring about needs of others - customers, managers, co-workers and suppliers alike - is a powerful key to success. n Keep your ego in check. Be willing to put aside your agenda to benefit mutual goals. n Remain positive. Resist impulse to get entwined in office grapevine. Instead of complaining, try to look at negative situations another way and make a point to say positive things about people, instead of joining in on office feuds.
| | Test Marketing: Fast, Cheap and EasyWritten by Stephanie Yeh
If you’re a sole proprietor or small business owner, marketing can seem like a headache that just won’t go away. You might have lots of good ideas, but you’re not sure which ones to pursue. And, if you’re like most small business owners, you only have a limited budget to invest in marketing, so which marketing options should you pursue?A really quick and dirty way to check out your ideas is to use test marketing. When you test market an idea, you implement idea on a very small scale to a limited portion of your customers or “audience.” For instance, if you’re in dry cleaning business and you want to try out a volume discount idea, you might test idea by offering it selectively to people who regularly bring orders of $50 or more for dry cleaning. The people in this test market obviously do high volume and are probably interested in saving money. Set a time limit for your experiment and keep track of results carefully. Look back through your records and see how many orders these people brought in, how often they came in and how large orders were. Then, see what changes, if any, your promotional discount created. See if you get an overall increase in revenue and profit. If there are no changes, talk to those high volume people and find out what’s on their mind. It may be that they already bring all of their dry cleaning to you and have no more volume.
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