Why Are You Afraid of Your Customers?

Do you find yourself reluctant to touch base with customers because of fear of what you might find? Do you think that no news is good news? When you think about reaching out, do you ask yourself, “What if something is broken?” or, “What if they ask a question I can’t answer?”
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Coaching for Better Performance

Coaching is one skill that managers should practice on a continual basis, as it has become so much more important in recent times. With fewer staff members and a sustained emphasis on reducing costs, managers are being challenged to coax the best possible performance out of everyone on their team.
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Invention: The Entrepreneurial Curse

Unfortunately, the death knell for many wide-eyed entrepreneurs is that they consider themselves inventors. More specifically, they confuse being inventive with being innovative. And when they do, they run out of cash, time and customers. In other words, they run out of business.
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How the Most Successful Leaders Manage the Brilliant Naysayer

Most every company has a Harold (or Harriet). Typically, he has been with the company for 20-plus years. He knows more about industry norms, the company’s intellectual property, your IT capabilities, what legal will and will NOT go for, interoffice politics, and the CEO’s family than anyone in the building. And unfortunately for you, good old Harold can effortlessly—and with absolutely no malice intended—recite four to six reasons why your idea won’t fly.
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Set a Customer Service Culture with Three Steps to Welcome

What pleases one customer may easily disturb another. But you’ve got to do something. So what should you do? Should your customer service culture be reserved and polite, or outgoing and friendly? Should you be fast and efficient, or personal and attentive? Should you initiate contact and offer immediate help, or wait discreetly until you are asked?
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Manage Your Bottlenecks!

The definition of a bottleneck in your business is one that constricts the flow of work from one area to another in the flow of product or service through your organization. A bottleneck in your organization’s flow can happen, shift, or disappear quickly.
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Looking for the Light Bulb

Coming up with blog topics can be stressful even for experienced writers, and is especially hard for small business owners who are focused on other tasks. Many are afraid to start blogs because they worry they won’t be able to come up with enough topics. Even experts in their industry who have enough knowledge to write a book sometimes share these fears. Three simple methods can help any blog writer find that light bulb idea that helps them create value-added content for their readers.
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Deal Value or Buyer Value?

Focusing on deal value colors our strategies and focus. However subtly, everything becomes “what we get from the deal.” But we get nothing unless the buyer gets superior value from our solution and chooses it. So deal value is meaningless unless we understand buyer value.
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