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Is Your Answering Service Helping Your Business?

business virtual answering service

Call answering services can be a great, cost-effective way to enhance your customer service without taking on a full-time staff member. A phone call is likely to be your clients’ first interaction with your company, so it’s important that you choose the right service for your business.

How can you make sure your service will make your business look good? Remember that:

First impressions matter. Are the virtual receptionists answering your calls happy? Do your callers hear ring after ring before they pick up or are they greeted right away by a live person?

Call your perspective answering service several times before you sign up and you’ll see what your callers will go through when you finally forward your line.…

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5 Ways Entrepreneurs and Small Business Owners Are Bootstrapping Their Companies

5 Ways Entrepreneurs and Small Business Owners Are BootstrappingStarting a small business is hard. And in today’s economy, getting the most for your money often equates to the creative distribution of your financial resources.

That’s why so many entrepreneurs and small businesses are inventing ways to bootstrap their operations.   Luckily, there are a number of affordable tools and strategies that cost little but deliver big, which is ideal when your business is on a budget.

As a provider of business services and entrepreneur myself, here are five resources I’ve found that are currently working well for small businesses.

  • Inventive marketing – Generate interest in your business through creativity. For example, try promoting a contest like The Royal Society of Chemists.
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3 Critical Financial Steps to Starting a Local Business

3 steps to starting a successful local businessStarting a business is an exhilarating time. It can also be a very stressful and busy time. As a local business owner, you often end up wearing all of the hats (CEO, Accounting, HR, Marketing, etc.) in the beginning due to lack of funding early on.

In all honestly, this isn’t such a bad thing because it’s nice to know how things work and how all the pieces fit together if you’re the one running the business. At the same time, the goal is to be able to hire experts to handle other departments at some point in the future so you can focus on building and growing the business.…

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College To Work – Building The Leader In You

preparing for job interviews after college

I was recently asked to help a college student prepare for interviewing, and it reminded me of how important it is to be well-prepared when looking for a job, especially transitioning out of college. In this blog post I provide several tips for the earliest leaders – those entering the professional workforce for the first time. This is your first shot at presenting yourself as a leader to your desired place of work.

Make your resume “pop” with accomplishments and leadership.

It’s very important to show all of your work experience that includes summer and seasonal jobs and internships. Organizations look for good work experience.…

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Due Diligence for Mergers and Acquisitions – Why Include IT?

include IT in merger due diligenceAs we start to see mergers and acquisitions activity ramp up, we shift focus to the value of technology due diligence.

What do you review during due diligence? You probably look at financials, customer lists, markets and existing executives. You may even review operations, eyeing potential efficiencies, such as those gained by integrating departments like HR, accounting and IT.

Randy Myers, CFO Magazine, states “For CFO’s, valuing the synergies to be realized by eliminating overlapping or redundant systems and operations is a fundamental aspect of M&A due diligence.” But how often do you review the technology area itself?

Not planning ahead can be painful.…

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Creating Happy Customers: 3 High Impact, Low-Cost Techniques That will Make ‘Em Smile

In a world where consumers have an almost unlimited number of places to shop, small businesses must work even harder to stand out from their competition. One way to differentiate your small business from other small businesses (and big brand retailers) is to humanize customer service by ensuring that your website is as customer-friendly as possible.

creating happy customers

Don’t have a lot of time or money, or you simply aren’t sure how to get started?   Here are three low-cost, high impact tips you can use to help improve your site’s customer service capabilities while generating more conversions at the same time.

Create an FAQ Page

An empowered customer is a happy customer-and nothing empowers your customers more than ensuring that they have all they need to make the smart decision to do business with your business!  …

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5 Ways To Use Twitter Strategically For Your Business

using twitter for your small businessWhen using social media tools like Twitter to promote your business, it’s important to use them strategically so that you’re not wasting your time.

To take advantage of the below tips, I generally recommend using a 3rd party application such as Seesmic, Hootsuite or Tweetdeck since they offer column based layouts which typically makes it easier to navigate, in addition to features such as scheduling tweets.

1) Use Lists to Keep Track of People That Are Important to Your Mission

If you’re following a lot of people, it can be hard to keep track of who’s who and to make sure you see updates from the people that count.…

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7 Ways to More Effectively Use Twitter for Business

twitter for business tipsTwitter has not only received quite a bit of press in the past year, but it has also become an important tool for many trying to market their business, product or personal brand. Of course, people and businesses alike are doing this with a varying degree of success and some have a much better handle on the whole social media for marketing thing than others. Here are a few tips to improve your Twitter experience if you’re floundering or if you’re not seeing the results that you had hoped.

1. Read what your followers are saying. The point of social media is that it should be a two way street.…

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Improve Performance Through Time Tracking

time trackingIf you want to improve performance, or likewise increase capacity or capability, you need to track the one thing that you’ll never get back: time.

In order to improve effectiveness and efficiency, you must understand how your time is being used. With all of the technological advances over the past two decades, we’re continually forced to do things “better, faster, cheaper.” In other words, all of these advances have taught us how to be more efficient.

But – have any of these advances (spreadsheets, email, cell phones, IM, etc.) made us more effective?

The difference between the two?…

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