Monthly Archive for "August 2007"

Participants highly appreciated our second workshop titled “Growth Strategies - Beat the Unbeatable”. They gave 4.5 stars. Here are few comments from the survey:

“The Speaker brought some excellent ideas and much food for thoughts”
“These are the Ideas that I can use in my business right away”

We at cpSphere appreciate your comments. As promised here is the presentation that you can download and share with your colleagues.

Download Presentation

Marketing is the common headache of a lot of business managers around the world, but especially here in the United States where cutting-edge technologies opened up new venues and platforms while at the same time intensifying the competition over a new generation of well-to-do consumers with fickle tastes and short attention spans.
In that struggle, after the eye-candy wears out and the dazzling animations fade into our 30-second memories, content emerges as the real currency of our information-hungry age.

In that unforgettable 1989 movie “Field of Dreams,” the protagonist Iowa farmer Ray Kinsella was told by a voice that “if you build it, he will come,” even if he happened to be in the middle of nowhere in Iowa.¼br /> Similarly, more and more businesses are finding out that, if you provide fresh and useful content, clients and customers will come no matter where they are.

One market-proven way to use content to elevate your company’s profile is to write articles in your topic and then post them to carefully selected high-traffic web sites on the Internet. The result is increased web traffic in the short run, and a higher bottom-line in the long run.

There are two different strategies that managers can follow in article marketing.

First strategy is to post the articles to a web site that attracts a lot of readers and page views in the short run but taper off eventually. Your company web links embedded into the articles and/or into the author’s info box generate new traffic for your web site and business. For example: www.americanchronicle.com

The second strategy does not provide such volume of readership right away but builds up steadily over the long run. In top-notch article web sites like www.ezinearticles.com, for example, articles posted years ago continue to find new readers and create a steady exposure.

What’s more, such sites also provide a professional interface to have the articles reprinted by web site owners and other ezine publishers. That way, your links embedded into the article gets propagated like a nuclear chain reaction. Once an original and useful article is posted on a high-traffic reprint site like Ezine Articles, there is almost no way to completely stop the generation of new readers and visitors due to the constant reprints.

If you haven’t tried article marketing in the past you should try it now. You might be pleasantly surprised with the results.

Are you on MySpace yet? 197 million registered members are at this writing, and the number is growing by almost 1 million new subscribers a week.

If MySpace were a country, it would be the fifth most populous in the world after China, India, Indonesia and the United States.

I realized the kind of marketing juggernaut MySpace has become when I did a search for “real estate” and came up with none other than Donald Trump on the first page of the search returns.

MySpace might have have started initially as a social platform for young people to find friends and dates. But in 2007, it ’s a must marketing venue for all businesses and moreover, it’s free too!

One powerful marketing lever MySpace provides to its members is the fantastic Bulletin functionality.

Basically, when you broadcast a Bulletin, your message is distributed instantly to all the “friends” you have on your friends list.

Some people have ten and others have 10,000 friends. In theory you can have millions of friends too but there is a catch – there is no automatic wholesale way to add friends. Each needs to be sent an individual invitation. And each needs to accept your invitation to become your “friend.”

That’s why building up your distribution list takes some time. But once it’s ready, you can fire away any message or offer you like to an opted-in list of people ready and willing to receive your communication.

If you haven’t considered MySpace as a way to promote your products and services, you should because the payoff can be significant.

If you don’t believe me, go ask Donald Trump.

If the energy spent over discussing the pros and cons of outsourcing since year 2000 could be bottled up and reused we would probably have solved at least a part of our energy crisis.

But seriously, humor aside, there are an increasing number of businesses these days discussing different aspects of outsourcing that we never used to hear in the past.

Until 2007, the case for outsourcing was clear and overwhelming – lower costs and higher profits. Period.

But as the years went on, things that did not bother customers and corporate clients earlier started to rise to the surface.

Lower quality of service, or at least perception of it, is one of them. That’s why Citibank and similar others switched back their customer service operations to local vendors here within the United States.

Rising costs of outsourced services is another, as evidenced by the fact that the recent salaries of Indian programmers have reportedly started to approach those of their Silicon Valley counterparts.

However the list of 100 top outsourcing companies shows that Fortune 500 giants like IBM, Hewlett Packard, and Accenture still continue to rely on outsourcing for their bottom-line.

On the other end of the spectrum, I personally know quite a few small businesses that also rely on outsourcing providers in India and Philippines for their web page designs, web hosting, email list management and accounting chores. These are mostly companies with less than 50 employees. They do not have huge public exposures and thus they do not have to worry about outsourcing-country labor practices like (for example) Nike must. And they operate in small niches with competitive profit margins, which makes outsourcing still an attractive survival strategy for them.

Nobody knows what will happen to outsourcing in the long run. But my guess is, small businesses in the West will make sure that their Indian, Chinese, Thai and Philippine business partners will be around for years to come.

The recent emergence of countries like Egypt and Jordan as the new outsourcing partners in the Middle East is a new trend that would further strengthen the attraction of outsourcing for small to mid-sized companies. Click here for more info.

Priorities are important in business as well as anything else in life, including urban development.

When you prioritize things, you select certain items over the others and thus take risks.

What if your list of priorities generate results not totally in line with your original intentions?

I found myself thinking about such issues as I was reading a very interesting blog post about the way Cerritos, California grew into a viable community ( http://www.planetizen.com/node/26490) .

What made this piece especially interesting for me is the fact that I know quite a bit about one of the cities, Baltimore, that the author has mentioned to compare and contrast different growth priorities (the other being Cleveland).

“The key to Cerritos’s success may be the timing of its investments,” the author says. “Cities such as Cleveland and Baltimore poured money into museums and other grand projects in the vain hope that they would lure businesses and young, creative folk. Cerritos began by building pipelines and roads, then moved on to business parks, policing and schools (including California’s best high school). Only when it was rolling in money did it break out the titanium.”

It’s true that Baltimore for years tried to attract business and tourism dollars by pouring a lot of resources into its famous “Inner Harbor” project. And to a certain extent the project worked. But even today, if you just drive a few miles into the interior of the city, old pockets of poverty and neglect are still there, intact.

The lesson for businesses big and small is the same – are you going to opt for short-term projects to build up a cash-flow in a hurry and win the short-term marketing battle (like the city of Baltimore) but then exhaust your resources for the long haul?

Or, are you going to grow slowly, by making sure that your fundamentals, the “infrastructure” of your growth is in place before you scale up and expand your operations?

Question – what if your competition catches up with you and eats your market share while you are taking your time (like the city of Cerritos) to nail down the fundamentals in place? That’s when the local “business environment” also becomes a crucial component of the overall growth equation.

Growing cities and businesses into healthy self-sustaining organisms is a complex chess game played against time, with limited chances for making a mistake, and against multiple opponents. Perhaps all entrepreneurs can learn a thing or two by comparing the way Cerritos and Baltimore became what they are today.

Getting a constant supply of new prospects is a do-or-die issue for most businesses. In real estate it’s called “farming.” In some other businesses it’s called “prospecting.” But the core task never changes – finding new customers ready to buy your goods or services.

A blog post recently has started a lively discussion on the best methods of prospecting and 51 readers joined in, generously sharing their best tips and practices. (See here)

Here is a summary of the many excellent answers provided to the question “where and how does one find the next prospective client?”

• Trade shows.
• Host an information gathering “workshop” at a local hotel.
• Working the personal connections through friends and associates.
• “Member-gets-member” type of social-networking campaigns. 
• Faxing, emailing information.
• Encouraging referrals by providing “appropriate incentives.” 
• Using professional networking sites like Linkedin, Ecademy, and BNI. 
• Going back to existing happy customers for repeat sales.
• Public speaking.
• Inviting them to lunch with another satisfied customer. 
• Calling people with a good phone script in hand.
• Joining local and national professional organizations.

After all is said and done, however, I personally believe that there is no substitute to delivering a top-notch product or service to a satisfied customer and keeping up the relationship with regular business  communication. Once you establish the genuine value of your service, networking builds up its own momentum and rewards in due time.

The simple fact that genuine value is always rewarded by more business sometimes gets lost in this day and age of hi-tech wizardry and cornucopia of management “techniques.” Sometimes sticking to the fundamentals is the best long-term strategy to grow your business and raise your bottom-line at the same time.