Tip #297: 7 Tips About Your Corporate Authenticity

According to the 2010 Edelman Trust Barometer (the PR firm's annual survey on trust and credibility), transparency now affects a company's reputation more than the quality of their products or services. Just look at the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and what the lack of transparency has done to BP.

Demand For Corporate Authenticity Is At An All-Time High.

When a client or prospect interacts with your company they are also experiencing your company. Every press release, every phone call, every e-mail, every face-to-face meeting contributes to a prospect's total experience. The less positive those experiences are, the less likely a client or prospect is to engage your business any further. To help your business operate more transparently, we came up with seven tips every leader should know.

7 Tips About Corporate Authenticity Every Business Leader Should Know:

1. Every Client And Prospect Adds Up Their Experience With Your Business - Clients and prospects experience your business from the very first e-mail or phone call they receive to the moment they walk through your door. Every sound, every sight, every smell shapes their opinions of your business' operation. Once every member of your staff understands this, you will be well ahead of your competition.

2. Experiences Can Be Designed For Someone - Do not confuse "designing" an experience with fabricating one. Knowing who your prospects are well enough to tailor an experience to suit their needs, wants and tastes will only strengthen their interest in your business. Look at what Disney does at its parks around the world.

3. A "Designed" Experience Does Not Mean Performed - Prospects do not want their experience with your company to feel like a performance. If a company delivers the illusion of reality how is it possibly authentic? It is important for leaders to understand the difference between designing an experience (tailoring it to suit the tastes of its clients and prospects) and fabricating one. People are smarter than ever and can quickly see through a corporate veil.

4. Consider Your Employees' Experience Too - Your employees deserve the same experience as your clients and prospects. Keep that in mind when you look at the environment people work in, how they are trained, your corporate culture and their balance with family life.

5. Avoid Experience Gaps At All Costs - In the advertising world, experience gaps are sometimes referred to as "brand gaps" - when the message and the experience do not align. Imagine staying at a 5-star hotel only to discover there is no running water. That is a huge disconnect, - one that compromises what the hotel promises and what they actually deliver. Put simply, talk is cheap. If you say you'll deliver, then deliver.

6. A Bad Experience CAN Be Fixed - Let's face it, businesses are run by people and people are not perfect. Mistakes are bound to happen. That does not mean a business should not strive for perfection. In the meanwhile, when a mistake does happen, be sure to react immediately and do everything in your power to remedy the mistake.

7. No One Has An "Indifferent" Experience - If a client engages your business once but does not return, chances are something went wrong. Learning what went wrong is critical in helping your business become more authentic. So instead of dismissing clients that do not return, survey them about their experience in an effort to improve your operation.

Summary: Recent events and studies have proven the need for corporate authenticity (honesty and transparency) is absolutely essential. To achieve this, businesses leaders need to ensure their operation is welcoming to clients and prospects. For example, avoid rigid scripts when making phone calls and make sure your salespeople talk to prospects like real people, not actors reciting lines in a play. The more you know about your business, the easier you can design an experience that will resonate with new opportunities.

Tip #296: 8 Tips To Help Grow Your Business

Now is perhaps the most interesting time ever to be running a business. On the one hand, there is much more for you to do and worry about. On the other hand, juggling all those responsibilities has been made easier thanks to the rapid development of technology, particularly the Internet.

Despite this, some business owners still tend to fall short when it comes to growing their business. Usually this is because they fail to do anything differently, even though there are scores of new and different ways to get ahead in the business world. With that in mind, we came up with eight tips to help any business grow.

8 Tips To Help Grow Your Business:

1. Don't Focus On The Economy - Obviously you need to keep track of how the economy influences your prospect's buying behavior, but you should otherwise avoid focusing on it too much. So long as what you offer is of value to people, there will always be a number of prospects you can sell to.
2. Offer Something New - When people stop buying something they used to, the knee jerk reaction most businesses have is to cut prices. However, this devalues what you offer in the eyes of your prospects. Instead, try to add new or more value to an existing product or service by updating them or bring something new to the table altogether.
3. Talk To Prospects - The only way to give your prospects and clients what they want is to learn what they want, and that is best accomplished through surveying. To make this happen, use an e-mail hosting tool that gives you the option to e-mail a survey. Keep it simple and flexible.

Click here to get a list of possible customer and employee survey questions.

4. Keep Up With The Times - Technology continues to grow at an incredible rate, especially communication technology. That means newer, easier ways to stay in contact with your prospects. So instead of shying away from new technology, embrace it.
5. Build Up Your Databases - Building a strong database of prospects and referral sources has been a building block to business success since the beginning of time. Now it is just easier to do. Still, far too many businesses fall short in this department when it is one thing they should be constantly working on.
6. Emphasize Your Value - In this day and age there is no patience to be had for a pushy salesperson. Nobody wants to arbitrarily pay for more. Instead, a salesperson needs to be a problem solver who shows a prospect how their product or service is of value to their business.
7. Stay On Top Of Marketing - Marketing continues to be the most underleveraged area of many businesses. It also tends to be the first thing to go when budgets are tightened. Of course, this is a big mistake. The only way to keep your business on your prospect's minds is to market it.
8. Don't Go It Alone - Everyone is good at something, but nobody is good at everything, so don't try to be. Fortunately for you, the Internet makes it easier than ever to avoid running a solo operation. If you are unable to hire employees, use virtual assistants to take some of the load off your shoulders.

Summary: Sure, growing your business is hard work. But anything worth obtaining usually is. Remember that there are numerous tools available to you to help grow your business. But they won't magically start working for you on their own. At the end of the day, the trick is to get out there and get started. Take advantage of surveys and always approach a prospect from an angle of value and never stop marketing your business smartly.

Tip #295: 6 Ways A Leader Can Improve Their Communication Skills

Communication Doesn't Just Happen, It Requires Effort.

Most people agree there is really no excuse for poor communication or communication lock up. There are so many methods of communication available to us, and almost all of them are used in the workplace - face-to-face, phone, voicemail, e-mail, virtual conferencing to even text messaging. But even with these resources, communication still needs to be consciously executed, and that starts at the top.

6 Ways A Leader Can Improve Their Communication Skills At The Office:

1. Start By Developing A Management-Down Culture - A "management-down" culture is exactly what it sounds like: One in which the highest level executives pass along information and ensure it is driven all the way down to the foundation.

2. Sharing Corporate Strategy And Vision - Larger sized businesses tend to find small cliques forming within the company. When this happens, information that ought to be disseminated throughout the company winds up staying localized. As a leader, you need to be aware if this happens and deal with it sooner versus later in order to ensure a smooth transmission of information.

3. Update Employees Frequently - There should be a set schedule for communicating corporate initiatives, expectations and results. It could be monthly, it could be quarterly - whatever you feel works best for your company. Keeping everyone in the loop generates a sense of appreciation, equal footing and fuels motivation.

4. Synchronize Goals - Depending on the size of your business, certain divisions or departments may operate autonomously. When this is the case, leaders must ensure division and department goals align with the corporate goals. Leaving a department unattended may result in their goals becoming incongruent to the company's.

5. Be Transparent About Financials - Whether the news is good or bad, financial information (sales data, customer data, capital equipment purchases, public information, etc.) needs to be shared with everyone. If financial news is broken outside of formal channels employees tend to grow disillusioned. Even if the news is good, it might seem like executives are intentionally withholding information, which breeds distrust.

6. Always Celebrate Internal And External Successes - Success comes in all shapes and sizes, and every instance of success ought to be celebrated. Maintaining a positive attitude throughout the company not only provides everyone a nice pick-me-up, but it also helps combat external forces that employees have no control over, like the economy.

Click here to read inc.com's list of tips to increase communication

Summary: Effective communication doesn't just happen for most leaders; it takes planning and a conscious effort. And like any skill, it requires practice through regular use. In most businesses, higher-ups need to lead by example. Once you start passing information down the ladder, others will follow suit. Do this, and you will find that it creates a work environment founded in honesty - honesty that is appreciated by everyone.

Tip # 294: 5 Team Building Exercises For Your Business

Employee Morale Directly Affects A Company's Success.

Businesses are run by people, not machines. When businesses think solely in terms of "productivity," "efficiency" and "time management" they lose focus on what really generates their sales - the people. With that in mind, we did some research and found 5 team-building activities designed to strengthen employee camaraderie and improve morale.

5 Team Building Games Designed To
Re-energize Your Team:

1. Policies & Procedures Scavenger Hunt - Face it, employee manuals tend to be a boring read, so try thinking outside the box when teaching your policies and procedures. Design a scavenger hunt in which employees solve the answers to questions about your company's policies and procedures by exploring the entire workplace (e.g., take out a page from the manual and ask them to find the page and highlight key sections of a particular policy).

2. The Employee P.I. - In many mid to large sized businesses, employees may know of someone but do not necessarily know them. To change this, have employees take a stab at playing private investigator. Gather your employees, pair them up, then have each employee ask their partner 5 - 10 questions. When everyone has been interviewed, have each person give a 45-second overview on what they learned about the other person to the rest of the group.

3. The Connection Web - Have your employees meet and instruct them to form a circle. Take a ball of string or yarn and tell them something you did to help a customer or improve a process/procedure. Then, holding on to one end of the string, toss the rest of it across the circle to another employee and have them repeat what you did. By the end you will have created a huge web that shows how every employee shares something in common.

4. The Business Board Game - Flex some creativity by building a board game out of poster board and base it around your business. Design question cards that will test your employees' knowledge about the company's history and product/service line. Then turn it over to employees to play in small groups. This game makes for a more interesting way to explore and learn a company's dynamics.

5. Respect A Mentor - Everyone has had a mentor in their life, whether it is someone they worked for, their mother, father or an outside business leader. Have employees share who their mentors have been so everyone can learn a bit about one another's values and interests. Team unity strengthens when employees look at each other and see more than a job role.

The Key Is To Follow-Up A Team Building Event.

Keep in mind that if a team building event that doesn't have a follow-up plan in place, your staff will become jaded and regard it as waste of time and energy. Due to recent downsizing and cost cutting by most businesses, people feel as if they are already doing more with fewer resources. So when you plan your team building events, keep in mind what the purpose or objective will be. Quite simply, it is to open communication and let people know your organization is stronger when everyone is working toward a common goal.

Summary: Although there are many successful companies in today's business world, they all share one common element: A High level of employee happiness. So take a page from some of these companies and shake things up a bit to find ways to make the mundane more fun. Not only will your employees appreciate it, but so will you.