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Small Business CRM Editions - salesforce. You may be a small business, but your challenges loom large. You have hundreds of contacts and interactions to track and manage, new deals to pursue and close, and existing customer relationships to cultivate and maintain. Because small businesses come in so many varieties, sales automation solutions span the spectrum from contact manager software capabilities all the way to full-featured small business CRM. Whether you’re on your own, maintain a modest staff, or add new employees every month, salesforce.com has a small business CRM solution to help you keep the customers you have, win new ones, and drive business growth.

Read more Contact Manager Software in the Cloud To start with, salesforce.com gives you a key advantage over conventional contact manager software and small business CRM: Our solutions run entirely in the cloud. With small business CRM from salesforce.com, you don’t have to buy contact manager software or spend money on special hardware to run it.

Unmatched ease of use. Planning for Next Year? Get a Fix on These Numbers First. I saw a great line the other day in my reading and the gist of it was, "Do your homework before it's assigned. " As we wind down the year, it's never too early to get a jump-start on planning for next year. Nor is it ever too late to get a handle on some of those "homework assignments" that you may have neglected, but can have a profound and positive effect on your business. So, before you get too bogged down in the details of a new social media blitz or what you think is a great branding campaign, take time to answer some very basic questions about your current plans or the state of your start up. Do you know how many customers you need (or how many sales you need to make) today to make a profit?

How about to break even? Do you have a systematic way to generate consistent cash flow? Get a handle on these questions, and you'll get a handle on your business. The uneasy truth is that most business owners I've coached over the years have no clue what their true numbers really are. 1. 2. 3. How to Create Systems That Enable Business Growth. Four Rules for Pricing Products. Before pricing your products and services, you need to understand how customers perceive value. I continually find business owners price their products or services based on what they cost, versus what their customers are willing to pay. Even worse, I find businesses that base prices simply on what their competitors are able to get away with. A bicycle shop will mark up the price of its bikes 20 percentage points because that's what the shop on the other side town does. Same goes for the 30 points on bike parts and the 50 points on bicycling clothes.

Related: Why You Don't Want to Be the Low-Cost Leader In both cases, these businesses are failing to put real thought into their pricing, and I guarantee they are missing out on profits and are putting themselves at risk of losing out on potential customers because they aren't charging what those customers are willing to pay. Contrast that with Brooks Brothers, where a suit might easily run $150 more than a suit at Men's Wearhouse. 1. 2. 3. 4. Streamline your team’s communications | SmartBlog on Leadership. Michael Feuer is CEO of Max-Ventures, a venture capital and retail consulting firm, and founder and CEO of Max-Wellness, a comprehensive health and wellness retail chain.

A co-founder of OfficeMax, he is author of “The Benevolent Dictator: Empower Your Employees, Build Your Business, and Outwit the Competition.” Today, with a few key strokes and hitting the send key it’s easy to communicate with one person or thousands. Too frequently, however, the message gets lost in the medium and fails to resonate with the intended audience. The lessons I’ve learned in launching OfficeMax and my newest venture Max-Wellness have convinced me that a leader’s management style should mirror that of a benevolent dictator. The “dictator” side makes the difficult decisions when the time for talking is done, but the “benevolent” side does so by putting the interests of the organization ahead of the leader’s personal interests.

Be clear about what you need. 7 Ways to Maximize Your Shipping Budget for the 2011 Holiday Season | Network Solutions Small Business Blog. Disneyorgchart1.jpg (JPEG Image, 1200x1340 pixels) Marketingguide2.pdf (application/pdf Object) Employees want advancement opportunities more than better compensation. A new survey by Right Management, part of ManPowerGroup, of workers in September and October revealed that the number one priority for those looking at their next job is the opportunity for advancement, beating out better compensation and a more flexible work environment.

“Despite all the workplace complaints we hear, most employees are still highly motivated about their own development and careers,” said Michael Haid, Right Management’s Senior Vice President for Talent Management. Workers were asked, “What is your highest priority in your next position?” Greater opportunity for advancement – 27%Better management team – 21%More flexible work environment – 21%Better compensation – 17%Less work pressure – 14% What this means is that workers realize that, amidst the sluggish economy, raises and bonuses may be infrequent and that they are looking for other recognition for their efforts.

Quiz: Are you satisfied in your career? Pay cuts: How to deal. By Laura Vanderkam, contributor FORTUNE -- Once, people assumed income was linear. You'd start out on the low side during your salad days, but then you'd see your income rise as you rose though the company ranks. Whether that image was ever true or not, it's definitely not now -- particularly for people who generally do quite well. Research from economists Jonathan A. Parker and Annette Vissing-Jorgensen at Northwestern University found that, during recent recessions, households in the top 1% (those earning over $380,000 in 2008) experienced larger income shocks than any other group.

Before the early 1980s, these well-to-do households had less income volatility than other people. "What you earn today is much more lumpy than it used to be," says John Challenger, CEO of outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. "Today, more and more people have done it, have had to do it, and have come to terms with it," says Challenger. 1. 2. 3. 4.

Blog Archive » Avoid a potential identity crisis with a well-planned logo project. For over three decades I have been working with small businesses and startups in the creation of logos for new ventures, or the updating of existing company identities. With that expertise under my belt comes one major piece of advice to be shared with all business owners: Don’t wait until the last minute to consider the logo design needed to represent your business.

Again and again, I’ve received panicky calls and emails from those preparing to open a new business conveying the message “My business is opening in (insert “one week,” “two weeks” or “three weeks” here) and I don’t have a logo.” Seriously? In the course of posting entries to this blog, many tips about business logos will be shared. Make your business identity part of your business plan When initially mapping out the plan for your new venture, give your potential customers’ possible visual perception of the business some serious thought. Budget realistically for a logo design Define all possible needs for your logo. The Risk-Taker's Dilemma. How to Break Up with Employees. To Kim N.: I’m sorry you were dismissed with anger and haste.

To David S.: I wish I’d told you that even though you worked with us just 89 days, I don’t regret that we gave it a try. To Sam C.: I apologize for sending a signal that we didn’t value every minute you were employed by us. To David W.: I wish we’d thrown you a going-away party after you resigned, given all that you contributed to our business. To countless others: I was a coward for having someone else deliver the news of your termination, and I wish I’d met with you directly before we parted ways.

After employing–and saying farewell to—hundreds of people over the past two decades, my list of apologies could go on forever. For most of my life as an entrepreneur I got angry when employees resigned. When I felt rejected I turned against departing employees. A “bad break up” with an employee is a huge mistake. It wasn’t until I’d sold my company (to Tesco in June 2011) that I realized how deeply these relationships mattered. Channel Management: How to Improve Partner Sales Forecasts. Channel management executives are troubled by sales forecasts that routinely show a greater amount of variation from actual sales than their direct sales counterparts.

In the summer, our analysis of 152 companies indicated that best in class companies had a 5% variation whereas the median was 25%. You might be wondering how many firms saw 25% more channel sales than forecast – two of them. The rest received forecasts for sales that never materialized. The Challenge As much as your CEO or CFO may want a tighter forecast, you are in an arms-length relationship and have less control over external partners.

Put yourself in their shoes. A typical partner: Represents hundreds of products that range from simple items to solutions that require complex sales expertiseHas no fixed sales cycle lengthServes many masters (Customers, internal executives, vendors) The payoff just is not there for them to allow you to impose more control over their forecasting. Root Cause The Cure Key Takeaways: The Power of Acceptance : Lifestyle. Do we worry too much about the quality of our decisions, and too little about creating widespread acceptance for them? October 27, 2011 A few months ago I read and reviewed Too Many Bosses, Too Few Leaders, by Rajeev Peshawaria, who blogs for Forbes, is the CEO of the ICLIF Leadership & Governance Centre, and was formerly the Global Director of Leadership Development at American Express.

I was recently rereading a part of the book that talked about the quality of ideas and decisions in relation to their effectiveness. Rajeev maintains that, in business, we worry too much about the quality of our decisions, and too little about creating widespread acceptance for them. The reason I was so interested in rereading that section was because I experienced the phenomenon in working with a client. What happens is that we tend to assume that if the quality of a decision or strategy is rock solid and undeniably rational, people should have no problem buying into it. Q x A = E. How to Choose a Charity to Support | Business Charity Partnerships | Ways to Give Back to the Community. You want your business to find a way to give back to your community, but choosing which charity to support can be a real challenge. Paul Damico, president of the Atlanta-based Moe's Southwest Grill, a fast-casual restaurant franchise with more with more than 420 restaurants, has faced this very dilemma.

After much deliberation, Moe's decided to support the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, whose mission is to cure and treat Type 1 diabetes. "We felt that they met our criteria and offered an opportunity for our corporate team, our franchise partners and our customers to get involved at a variety of levels," Damico said. Damico offers other business owners and managers advice on how to decide which charities to support . Make sure you're keeping your No. 1 goal front and center: helping the cause. Europe Edition - Wall Street Journal - Latest News, Breaking Stories, Top Headlines - Wsj.com.

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Peter Fader on Customer Centricity and Why It Matters. Starbucks and Apple stocks have been trading at record highs, but are these and other businesses doing everything they can to ensure growth over the long term? Peter Fader, Wharton marketing professor and co-director of The Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative, argues that too many companies are customer friendly, but not customer centric. In other words, they treat each customer the same, missing an opportunity to discover who their best customers are. Without that data, they cannot make their most valuable customers even more profitable to the firm. In his new book, Customer Centricity, part of the Wharton Executive Education Essentials Series, Fader describes what customer centricity is, what it isn’t and why it matters. He also demystifies customer relationship management and emphasizes the importance of gathering customer data in meaningful ways.

Stephen J. An edited transcript of the interview follows: Stephen J. Peter Fader: Too many people think that they are the same thing.