Courting Public Favour in business Sales

At first glance, it is a bit surprising when you see how much some powerful and prominent businesses in every community inc knightsbridge bend every effort to court public favor. Almost any community of significant size in the country has a business section in the paper. And subscribers to the local news see their ability to stay in touch with what the strongest and up and coming sales businesses in town are doing as an important part of their knightbridge business awareness.

Sometimes it’s good to read the knightsbridge business news in your local paper both for information and with an eye on the question – “Did the business being discussed work to get this article printed about them in the paper?” In some cases, it is blatantly clear that the business went to great lengths to get noticed. Many businesses actually employ public relations and advertising professionals to tailor how they will be viewed in the press and to court public favor by romancing the right kind of press coverage for the business.

There are some solid business reasons behind such aggressive work being done by the business community to have good press coverage. On the surface, it might seem like the intent of managing public approval for a business is just a desire to be a good citizen and so that public opinion is favorable and everybody thinks of that business as a bunch of “good guys”. But the motivations for courting public favor for a business are far more complex and entrepreneurial than that.

* A good reputation means better sales. Public opinion is a funny thing. If a retail company gets a bad reputation in a community, it will have a tremendous impact on their bottom line. But the business that is well regarded at the neighborhood level will be one that sees strong customer loyalty.

* A strong reputation makes for better business dealings. Running a business means entering into dozens of business relationships, making deals and drafting contracts with other businesses in town. If your business is well regarded in the public eye, that will reflect favorably when you need a deal to fall your way at the negotiating table.

* Investors like to see a good public image in a business. Investors like to know that the business they are interested in partnering with will be able to complete its business goals and endure year in and year out. Part of that stability means that the business can live up to its mission statement and its statement of values. When the business the investor is interested in has a strong public image, that reflects that this is a business that conducts itself with integrity, is interested in the public good as well as private profit and is looking for the long-term gain as well as the short-term profitability. These values translate directly into dollars in an investor situation.

* A strong relationship with city and state government is important to long-term business health. Many businesses seek concessions or to enter into a relationship with local government so they can have a clear path to get building permits or conduct other business that impacts the public good. A local or state government can be a businesses best friend or stop your projects in their tracks and keep them stopped. But the thing that pleases the political world is public opinion and the public good. So if your business has a good public profile, that translates to votes for the politically minded people at city hall. And that means influence which can help a business go a long way toward completing its long-range plans.

* A good public image impacts recruitment. When you put an advertisement in the local paper to recruit talent, how you are viewed by those looking for jobs will directly influence if they will respond to your recruitment efforts. Many a business got a bad reputation locally and saw dismal responses to recruitment efforts which can mean a less talented staff and poor performance of the business in general.

These are solid reasons for a sales business to put some energy and capital into courting a good reputation in knightbridge bbbb . Whether that means a strong representation on United Way weekend or holding blood drives once a month, the sales business that has a reputation for reaching out to the community will be a business that prospers.

Business Sales Management by Walking Around

The MBWA method is a management concept that has gotten a lot of “buzz” and popularity in the last decade or so because it is part of a business model for cultural change within the enterprise that has proven successful in a lot of businesses.  The original concept was created by David Packard during the early days of the Hewlett Packard organization, a Silicon Valley company that was well known for its loyal and highly creative employee base that seemed to achieve levels of productivity and employee satisfaction far beyond the norm.

“The HP Way” which the “management by walking around” method was a part of was based on the concept that employees, particularly the subject matter experts in their fields, are capable of being part of the problem solving process and that a team approach to creating new business ideas and innovate ways to solve problems was far superior to the “top down” approach of management coming up with all the answers and dictating them to a mindless but obedient staff.

Packard was a believer in the open space, no walls and easy access to management corporate culture that MBWA exemplifies.  By enabling frequent and unscheduled interactions between employees and between management and staff, new ideas were given maximum opportunity to be birthed and encouragement to be developed which leads to a more responsive and flexible business culture and one that has a robust approach to growth and change.

In order to implement MBWA, the manager must embrace the concept of a flexible and relaxed relationship with staff.  The details of the method that MBWA promotes is summed up nicely in the title, management by walking around.  It suggests that instead of only meeting with employees at scheduled times in formal settings away from other employees or in a staff meeting where the agenda is published in advance, many opportunities for employees to talk to management are encouraged.  When the supervisor or manager walks freely amongst the employees throughout their work day, the opportunity to ask questions and to interact about new ideas the employees are considering is frequent.  From those unscheduled and frequent visits as the manager walks from cubicle to cubicle, great concepts can be birthed which can then be nurtured into new product ideas or novel solutions to problems.

However, if the relationship between management and employee is formal, based on fear or intimidation or not otherwise grounded in warmth and friendship, the MBWA system will go from a powerful method of collaborative problem solving to a tremendous nightmare for everybody.  You don’t want your employees dreading your “drop in” visits and seeing their productivity drop as you enter their work space because they are so concerned with impressing and serving management that they dislike your arrival in their world.  It is amazing how quickly a network of employees can detect and set up an early warning system when the manager is walking around so everybody “gets ready” for what they perceive will be an unpleasant sudden visit by management.

To avoid this, the supervisor should in other ways foster a relaxed relationship with staff.  The employee must feel free to discuss issues and questions openly with management without fear of being scoffed at, mocked, belittled or punished.  Many a company has generated a “HP Way” concept that comes out of the human resources department that amounts to little more than color posters on the wall and a suggestion box but nothing changes in the corporate culture or how each manager interacts with the staff.  Employees are quick to notice the hypocrisy of such a program and the result is management because an object of ridicule instead of inspiration.

By making your visits enjoyable, a welcome experience and one where the employee doesn’t fear your arrival, you can expect outstanding results from the MBWA method.  And you will know you have achieved true change in your corporate culture when not only do you walk around to visit employees but employees “drop in” on you by walking around if for no other reason than to share a joke or a donut.  That is an ideal setting for team work and proactive problem solving.

Knightsbridge Project Management of a Business Global Sales Team

The world is getting smaller. Well, it isn’t physically getting smaller but that is one way of saying that global communications have become so fast paced that the world is really one community in a lot of ways. With the advent of the internet, email, instant messaging and VOIP, it is entirely possible to do sales business with trading partners around the globe not just in knightsbridge without ever leaving your business office.

For many businesses in sales who are on the cutting edge of new sales business paradigms, the concept of a geographically isolated business is becoming obsolete. It is entirely possible to put together a business consortium or a project team made of subject matter experts spread across all time zones and from around the world. In fact, this kind of decentralized management of business sales  projects is becoming more of the norm than the exception in the twenty first century business environment.

So just as those in marketing, product development and investments have already learned how to maximize a project knightsbridge team that is separated by hundreds or thousands of miles, the project manager must also adapt the project management methodology to accommodate a similar approach to getting business done.

Conventional project management is a systematic approach to taking a project from scope to implementation that has proven successful in thousands of companies. We have no reason to abandon this well developed methodology. But as new business paradigms come to play, we have to adapt even a standard methodology like project management to fit the way business is done in this century.

Communications is the key to any successful project. This is the challenge of utilizing a team from across a great geographical divide. It is entirely possible you may execute the entire project with team members you never see. So to facilitate frequent and up to date communications, we must exploit the technology we have at our disposal such as…

Blogs, wiccis and shared working environments. Group sharing environments on the web are becoming more and more common. By setting up a tool set on line in which team members can post status reports, leave emails, update the project management software, file expense reports and stay in touch with each other, you facilitate the kind of communication that keeps the team moving forward successfully. Blogs, private message boards and wiccis are also excellent means by which an ongoing “conversation” can be carried out between team members that anyone can check into and get caught up with the content of what has been done and what is being planned for the project.

Controlled email trees. As the project manager, email is an obvious way to quickly stay in touch with team members. However, it can get chaotic trying to keep up on fast moving email trees. That may be a good reason to trap all emails trees within your online project management software so the contributions of everyone on the team can be captured for further review.

IM staff meetings. IM can be expanded so it doesn’t just bring in two participants. You can schedule your weekly staff meetings using an IM conference room and capture the entire proceedings in the IM log thus assuring yourself that nothing that was said will “fall through the cracks.

By becoming adept at using cyberspace as the primary “location” of your project team’s interaction, you can literally create a team of highly specialized talent that can be located from anywhere in the world. This vastly expands your ability to tap the best minds for your work and to streamline the project management process. It will take time to get used to and there will be some missteps along the way. But if you can conquer global team management using internet tools, it will be a valuable skill for successfully executing global projects for your business.

Business goes to Cyberspace?

It is a well known axiom of doing business could be in knightsbridge with sales in any industry that those who do not stay in step with the times will be those companies that eventually die out.  There is no place where that truism is more evident than in the way that companies in virtually every business sector are finding to integrate an internet marketing strategy with their traditional communications and to provide the public with an internet “presence” to supplement their public profiles in other venues.

Of course, the value of the internet for sales and promotions has been well known in the industries that service the youth markets and for the companies dealing with entertainment and the arts.  Because the internet is in virtually every home and even now on hand held devices of every description, the access it gives to reach a target market are phenomenal.

This explosion of an entirely new marketing model has introduced the world of knightsbridge business sales to entirely new paradigms of marketing and new ways to achieve greater market penetration and sales.  And so any business who has had to get out on cyberspace to keep up with the competition has already had to learn a whole new vocabulary that has grown up around the internet marketing phenomenon.  Now terms like “Search Engine Optimization”, “Auto responders” and “Viral Marketing” become important and powerful tools to any business that wants to tap the power of the internet to increase sales.

The second wave of businesses that, perhaps reluctantly, ventured out into cyberspace were traditional retail business that you would not associate with cyberspace at all.  This includes sport teams, restaurants and even retail giants such as Wal-Mart and Border’s Book Stores.  In fact, the wave of change in how products and services are sold has been so rapid that entire market niches have been virtually revolutionalized by internet sales techniques.  Book and music outlets have been virtually hard hit as a large percentage of their customers have abandoned the “brick and mortar” sales outlets entirely to use the more convenient tools of internet shopping. 

This has made it tough on some retailers to keep up.  For the “mom and pop” business, the change has been particularly devastating.  Already small, home grown businesses were struggling to compete with the giant mega-stores like Wal-Mart to keep their loyal clientele coming back.  Add to that the migration of customers to the internet and the need for change just to stay in business became even more urgent.

But even businesses who do not depend on marketing  sales business or in knightsbridge at all have seen the need to build and maintain a well functioning business web site so they will have a “face” in cyberspace.  In the modern marketplace, the consumer will go to the internet first to find out about a company and it’s goods and services.  This has turned traditional ways of connecting with existing and new customers upside down entirely. 

The good news is that these rapid changes in how modern markets work have made the business world more diverse, more able to adjust to changing business dynamics and more open to the creative and innovative minds that have always been the real life blood of the business world.  And, ironically, it is often the small business that is most capable of making rapid changes to its online presence and ways to doing things. 

In that the internet is a phenomenally dynamic place, new ways of reaching our customers change almost annually.  Where one year a simple web page may have been sufficient, soon we had to have chat rooms, MySpace pages and YouTube compatibility.  Any business that sees these changes as chances to do something new and exciting with their business will be the companies that thrive in this modern world.  And, as always, those who do not thrive with change will be destined to be made obsolete by it.

The Minimum Wage

In January of 2007, the federal government raised the national minimum wage.  This was old news in some states where the minimum wage had been raised months before congress took action.  No matter how you look at the increase in the cost of labor, it is going to have an impact on the business climate and on how businesses will make key decisions in 2007 and going forward.

In theory a raise in the minimum wage should be a nonevent economically.  It should be a simple adjustment for inflation which the business has already adapted to.  In fact, as inflation raises the cost of goods and the prices the business charges, one might expect the wages of workers to rise naturally to match that upward slope caused by inflation. 

How you view the good or the bad of the minimum wave increase may depend on which side of the fence you reside, the employer side or the employee side.  To the employer the rise in employee costs makes doing business more expensive and affects the bottom line.  To the employee, the employer is just being competitive and paying his or her employees a salary that they can live on.  In many cases, you may be on both sides of the issue if you own or operate a business but have people in your family who are trying to get by on the minimum wage.

The hardest hit businesses by this upward push in wages is small business.  Enterprises that employ a large amount of unskilled, lower paid workers can see a huge jump in the cost of keeping employees because of state or federally mandated increases in employee pay.  Many times small business enterprises operate on a thin margin of profit and any change to the cost structure can be a deadly hit to their budgets.  Moreover, since the small business model is intensely competitive, there is little room to raise prices to clients or customers without risking losing business to a larger competitor who can absorb the minimum wage increase without increasing prices.

These concerns are part of the reason that from a governmental stand point, congress is slow to increase the minimum wage.  There is already a tremendous resentment in the population for businesses that are relocating their production or support facilities over seas to take advantage of low paid workers to keep their bottom line on track.  You have to know that employee costs are a big issue when a business is willing to relocate much of their operation to a foreign country and incur all of those costs just to tap an employee base that will work below the minimum wage.

From the worker perspective, it’s hard to understand how this trend to take low paid jobs out of the country can be changed.  We are slow to stop businesses from taking actions they need to take to compete in the markets which is why passing legislation to stop the exporting of jobs is not a popular idea.  While it might help the plight of the worker in this country, it goes contrary to our priority on letting the free market and capitalism play out.  Sadly, when the free market does reign, sometimes good people get dealt out of the program. 

The best way for American workers to combat competition from unskilled workers overseas is to stop being unskilled.  By taking advantage of educational opportunities and gaining valuable skills, they can enter a new market where those skills will land them a good paying job that is not likely to go overseas because of the specialized skills the worker offers to employers.  So the best way for government to fight the export of jobs due to high employment costs is not to artificially suppress the market to hinder free trade.  The best move is to make our workers more skilled, more valuable and for workers to simply outwork their competition overseas.  This is capitalism at work at its best and if that line of attack is followed, the outcome for everybody is a stronger work force, the retention of jobs in America and a stronger national economy as well.