Tag Archives: Corporate Business Solution

5 Great Ways to Save Money

Posted on by

While there isn’t a perfect formula for starting a business. different approaches work for different people. Having said that, there’s a great deal of value in cash flowing a business and avoiding the burden of debt on the front end. In order to effectively fund your own business, you have to master your savings habits and attain a strong grasp of your financial situation.

Corporate Business Solutions experts recommend the following tips to saving money in a small business setting. Considering using these today to better improve your cash flow.

Eliminate Your Debt

Sure, nobody wants to discuss the dreaded topic of debt. While we all seem to have it, very few of us ever directly confront it until it becomes too much to handle.

Just imagine what you could do if your debts were gone. All of a sudden, you’ll feel like you got a raise. Suddenly all of that money that was going towards repaying a debt can be put towards something else, such as starting a business.

Reduce Your Discretionary Spending

One of the best ways to pay down debt on a limited income is to slash your discretionary spending and put that money towards your debts.

Between eating out and online shopping, you should be able to save a few hundred dollars per month. Over the course of a year, this can add up to a significant amount of money.

Automate Savings

It’s easy to get so caught up in spending that you don’t even think about savings. Over time, this can have some pretty traumatic effects. And while there are plenty of ways you can deal with this issue, automating the savings process is one of the smartest options.

Ask Yourself THE Question

When you find yourself in a store and before placing something in your shopping cart, ask yourself this important question: “Do I really need this?”

Most of the time, the honest answer is generally “no.” While you might not like the answer, it’s what you need to hear in order to avoid spending money on things you don’t need.

Reinvest Profits

While this may seem simple, it’s often very challenging. Sure, your natural inclination is to start spending the money you make from your new business. However, it’s a much more logical practice to reinvest your profits. This will allow you to continue growing without needing to take on debt.

7 Great Tips For Your Email Newsletter

Posted on by

Establishing and building your brand is a key component of any small business. Accordingly, an email newsletter is a great tool to use to help you get there. Corporate Business Solutions experts recommend the following eight tips for optimizing your email newsletter.

Inform Subscribers About What They’ll Get    

You want to make sure that everyone knows what to expect right when they sign up. Tell them the type of content they’ll get and when they should expect newsletters to arrive in their inboxes. This transparency establishes a good tone and helps to build a strong relationship.

Make It Mobile-Friendly

As you know, it’s important to keep in mind how important mobile is to get your target market to read your newsletter. Reading on a smaller screen is always different than the desktop, and you’ll need to make the changes to optimize your newsletter for the iPhone and other smartphones.

Buttons should be large enough so they are easy to click and the content must be short and sweet. It’s important to keep in mind that people are reading from their smartphones on the go.

Create Engaging Subject Lines

By creating excellent subject lines, you’ll drastically improve your open rate. For example, letting them know they’ll be getting 10 useful tips on a relevant subject is a great start.

Nonetheless, keep your subject lines short and simple.

Add VERY Interesting Content

You likely already know what interests your target market the most. Thus, you should capitalize on that and include interesting content in your newsletter that doesn’t include a lot of hard sell ad copy.

In other words, you should include 90% educational content and 10% sales copy to maximize your opportunities.

Include That Personal Touch

Chances are very high that the people receiving your newsletter delete more emails than they open.  Thus, adding the first name at the beginning of your newsletter can and will make a significant difference when it comes to optimizing your open rates.

Offer Cool Stuff

Special offers are one of the biggest draws to improve your open rates. Offers can include coupons or even discounts that are only available to your email subscribers.

The special offers that you offer will go further if you only include them with a subscription to your email newsletter.

Consistency is Key

As routine-oriented organisms, people like consistency. This type of routine includes your email newsletter. Thus, it’s important to make sure that you send out your newsletter on the same day at roughly the same time.

To learn more, visit CBS-CBS.com.

4 Critical Steps to Growing Your Small Business

Posted on by

Expanding your small business is no easy feat. To be honest, it is one of the hardest challenges that people face when they are looking to abandon the 9-5 grind.

Ultimately, the success of your small business depends on your ability to increase profits using a variety of methods. From employee training to marketing, every component of your business needs the proper attention.

Sure, overnight success almost never happens. However, there is a myriad of steps you should take in order to keep your business moving forward. While it takes time and effort, you’ll soon start to reap the rewards.

Corporate Business Solutions experts recommend the following four tips for helping your business grow.

Know Your Customers

The best way to develop successful products and services is to know what your customers want. You can achieve this through surveys and various forms of research. For example, asking them to provide honest feedback is critical. Analyzing reviews is one of the best ways to get inside the minds of your customers. As a result, you’ll be able to develop the right products and services that accurately reflect the demands of the market. Additionally, you’ll gain a better understanding as to how your company can improve.

Enhance Customer Service

Regardless of whether or not you have a superior product or service, you won’t fully satisfy your customers without a strong customer service program. Ultimately, this facet of a company is all about you taking that extra step to make your customers feel important and valued. You’ll want to address their problems immediately and also take time to answer their questions. Consider tying social media into your customer service strategy.

Exploit Social Media

There is absolutely no doubt that social media is an extremely powerful tool. Not only can it reach thousands of people at once, it keeps people engaged. Ultimately, this helps you stay relevant. Listening to your customer’s comments will help you understand how to better satisfy your audience.

Focus on Professional Development

 

It will probably come as no surprise that the success of your business largely lies in the hands of the people that you employ.

The success of your business also depends on the quality of employees that you hire. Building a successful team is the key to ensuring that your company thrives. You should always give your employees a purpose and make sure they buy into your common goal.

To learn more, visit CBS-CBS.com.

4 Ways to Get the Most Out of Your Website

Posted on by

In today’s day and age, there is no doubt that your company’s website is basically your company’s own little slice of digital real estate. Right?

What you do with that precious real estate is your prerogative. You can either master a digital marketing presence or squander the opportunity.

While no business is intentionally fulfilling the latter, many small business owners are failing to use their digital presence to their advantage in the most effective ways possible. There is a myriad of ways to make your website stronger, but only a few really effective ones.

Corporate Business Solutions experts recommend that every small business’s website follow the following four tasks to achieving online success.

Tell a Compelling Story

Sure, there are numerous places where your brand can digitally interact with your target audience – social media, industry blogs, ad space, press releases, and even YouTube. However, the main difference between your website and the aforementioned platforms is that you own your website. You control what goes up on your website and you can tell the story.

Your story can either address your history or talk about the future of your company. Regardless of your decision, there is no one-size-fits-all solution – your story should accurately reflect your company.

List Contact Information

You probably won’t be surprised to learn that one of the main reasons people visit a website is to obtain contact information. At the very least, make sure your website includes the following:

  • Business address (if applicable)
  • Store or business hours
  • A phone number and email address
  • An About page

While there are many different ways to provide this information, make sure it’s accessible and easy to find.

Collect Leads

While you’ll want to close sales through your website, that’s not the sole objective. In many cases, it may take multiple visits for a prospect to convert. In the meantime, collect as much lead information as possible. This will benefit you down the road and you’ll also learn more about the types of people that are visiting your website.

Overcome Friction

You’ll want your website to be as streamlined and user-friendly as possible. According to studies, poor navigation is the number one reason people leave websites. Thus, it’s a good idea to master user-friendly navigation. Ultimately, you want to offer a pleasant experience for prospective customers.

—

As you to continue to grow your business and website, consider using the aforementioned tips to achieving digital success.

To learn more, visit CBS-CBS.com.

Five Critical Tips to Hiring

Posted on by

We know. Hiring new employees can be a very time-consuming and resource-draining process for any business. However, it can be particularly challenging for small businesses with limited means. For a small company, each new hiree has a significant impact on the business, whether it be negative and positive. As a result, it’s critical for small business owners to have the right approach to hiring in order to avoid mistakes.

If you are looking to take the right steps when hiring, consider the following pointers from our Corporate Business Solutions experts.

Be Very Candid

The first step to ensuring that potential hires are truly ready to take on the duties is to be as clear as possible. You’ll want to inform them of the day-to-day tasks and share the company’s goals as well. Furthermore, it’s important to include details regarding salary and benefits. In addition, be candid about any challenges that he/she might face. Being as candid as possible about the position helps you hire the right people who will last a long time.

Use Connections

You might be able to find great candidates by contacting people you already know in your field. For example, calling or emailing business colleagues and/or creating LinkedIn posts is an effective way to let people know you’re hiring.

Establish Your Company Culture

As mentioned, each employee has a significant impact on the culture of a small business. Remember, you can teach skills, but not personality or a tireless work ethic. Take time to establish company values and the look for these qualities in your candidates. You’ll want to address your company’s values during the interview and also gear questions related to those values.

Measure Commitment

You’re really going to want to understand whether or not a potential hiree is truly committed to working for you before you put that offer on the table. Focus on little gestures during the interview and try to understand how enthusiastic the candidate really is about the job opportunity.

Implement a Trial Period

It’s important to implement a trial period prior to making a full commitment. You might want to consider having new employees sign a short-term contract or hiring them as freelancers. Ultimately, this will help you determine if he/she is the ideal candidate for the job before you make any long-term commitments. Furthermore, an effective trial period can be a great way to give both new employees and employers the right amount of time in order to make informed decisions.

To learn more, visit CBS-CBS.com.

6 Tips for Bootstrapping a Startup

Posted on by

With any startup company, obtaining proper funding is usually the biggest challenge. Having said that, there is a myriad of routes that small businesses can take outside of venture capital.

For the best approaches to fundraising, Corporate Business Solutions experts recommend the following six tips for bootstrapping a startup. Keeping these tips in mind will put you in great standing.

Find Mentors 

Seeking out mentors that can advise you on your journey is super beneficial. In doing so, be sure not to limit yourself to where you look. A mentor can be anyone from a friend or family member to even a co-worker. Ultimately, you want to find people who have more expertise than you do.

Establish a Business Plan 

You always want to think things through and have a vision. Creating an actionable business plan and following through with it will land you in a great place. Having a business plan will allow you to reach both short and long-term goals.

Track Expenses 

When you first launch your business, you want to be as frugal as possible without cutting necessities. You won’t learn the financial ropes and understand the costs that are associated with running your business. You also want to consider re-investing the money you make to continue to grow the business.

Key In On Operations

 Getting into the nitty-gritty details of your business is essential. You want to be able to lay the groundwork in order to get to where you want to be. Take the time to focus on marketing, accounting, and human resources.

Do It Yourself (What You Can)

 Yes, of course, you’ll want to outsource when you have to. Having said that, during the onset of your startup you’ll want to complete as many tasks as you can on your own. Not only will you save money, but you’ll also learn the indispensable ins and outs of your business so you can properly train people later. Trust us when we tell you that doing things on your own (initially) will benefit you so much later on.

Assemble an All-Star Team 

As a new small business, you’re going to want to surround yourself with great employees who share a similar passion and vision. You want to hire people who buy into your mission and understand the importance of multi-tasking. Ultimately, your team is the component that will take you to the promised land. To learn more, visit CBS-CBS.com

Understanding the Intricacies of Leads

Posted on by

Are you on cloud nine after obtaining leads from your last event? Do you feel really good about yourself and you’re ready to take the sales world by storm? Fantastic! But don’t get ahead of yourself. The most critical aspect of attaining a lead is ensuring it becomes an opportunity. So the question becomes, how can you enhance the quality of leads?

That’s right – do your research.

Corporate Business Solutions experts understand how using marketing automation solution and a CRM can help you understand your leads and grow your business. Ultimately, you’ll want to discern the ins and outs of your leads in order to make effective business decisions. Here are three reasons as to why knowing your leads can really help.

Understand Your Customer

When you know your leads, such as where they’re located and what they’re interested in, you can ensure that leads passed down to you fit your ideal profile.

Tip: consider CRM integration.

With the right CRM, your marketing department can efficiently create newsletters, ebooks, and white papers to keep up with the demands of business. Strong marketing efforts will create a high volume of leads, where prospects can fill out forms in order to access content.

You might also want to utilize Pardot, a marketing automation solution that helps you see your leads as they progress through the prospect journey.

Grab Hold of the Right Leads

Have you ever heard of “lead grading”. If not, now’s the time.

Lead grading lets you literally “grade” your lead on a scale of A to F so you can determine who the most qualified candidates are based on the attributes of a lead’s profile. These characteristics include job title, company size, or industry.

Ultimately, you want quality leads. Lead grading allows you to access that.

Track and Nurture Your Leads

Similar to many small sales teams who wear marketing hats, it’s important to manually nurture leads. You should do this even if you’re not sure whether or not it will turn into an opportunity.

With a concrete process within your marketing automation solution, you’ll be able to nurture in an impactful way to help your sales counterpart.

It’s not necessary to play a guessing game with your leads. With the correct data and procedures, you’ll be able to understand the intricacies of your leads in no time. This will help you secure more sales and grow your business.

To learn more, visit CBS-CBS.com.

Google’s Approach to Establishing a Strong Team

Posted on by

 

Surprise, surprise. Google loves data.

Isn’t this something we knew? Maybe, maybe not.

What you likely didn’t know, however, is that Google often puts a great deal of effort into helping YOUR business operate at an optimal level. In doing so, Google has assembled some pertinent information on behalf of what is essentially their HR team. They sought to address the question of what makes a Google team successful.

Let’s dive a little bit deeper into this.

The Research

In seeking to understand why certain teams excelled and others did not Google examined more than 180 teams. They also conducted interviews and compared a myriad of characteristics/attributes between the high-rising teams and the ones that were falling short.

Conclusively, Google determined that the individual make-up of each team mattered much less than the person-to-person interaction and the composition of their work.

Ultimately, they determined that there are four critical components that separate the good teams from the great ones:

  • Psychological Safety
  • Dependability
  • Structure and Clarity
  • Meaning

While all of the elements are important, Google found that psychological safety played the largest role.

Psychological Safety

Essentially, this comes to down to one critical question: as a team, can you take risks that won’t lead to insecurity or embarrassment?

While risk-taking may seem routine on the surface, it actually carries with it a tremendous amount of emotional weight. When employees don’t feel secure about asking a question or contributing to an idea, they are less likely to partake in creativity and innovation. This is due to the simple, albeit IMPORTANT, fact that they do not want to be perceived in a negative light.

Employees that feel safe are much more likely to embody a sense of empowerment and subsequently will take risks and innovate. This leads to better collaboration and greater effectiveness. To learn more, visit CBS-CBS.com.

Dependability

As we know, nobody likes to work with an unreliable employee. This can lead to a myriad of issues. Thus, it’s critical that all members of the team submit their work on time and up to standard. Take the time to address the importance of dependability with your team.

Structure and Clarity

It’s essential for employees to understand exactly what their role is within the team at-large. If this is missing, people have a hard time pinpointing responsibility within the tasks. Consult with a Corporate Business Solutions expert to learn more.

Meaning of Work

As a team, you want to do your best to foster a sense of personal connection to the business and/or work that is being done. When this is the case, employees are more likely to deliver high-quality work.

Small Businesses will be Affected by Facebook’s Newsfeed Change. Here’s What to Do About It.

Posted on by

Mark Zuckerberg announced last week that Facebook would be making some significant changes to how content is viewed on the platform’s Newsfeed. In a Facebook post on January 11, Zuckerberg specifically pointed to “public content,” which are posts from brands, businesses, and media, as “crowding out” personal posts. Facebook is making a major shift to mainly show posts from friends on the Newsfeed, as opposed to promotional material.

Small businesses can expect this change to hit them the hardest. Smaller brands are the most likely to promote Facebook posts. This year, this strategy will require drastic changes. Here are several tips suggested by CBS Corporate Business Solutions consultants on how small businesses can get around the Newsfeed change:

Produce High-Quality Content—Facebook users are mostly annoyed by spam posts that are blatantly pitch products. To keep your posts on Facebook, start producing better quality content. Meaning content that is highly relevant, timely, and interesting to the target audience. Avoid clickbait and misleading headlines. Invest in articles or video that the target audience would genuinely be interested in.

Consider Paying for Facebook Ads—If Facebook is essential for marketing to your company’s target audience, then seriously consider paying for Facebook ads. The ads will be strategically displayed alongside the Newsfeed so the new change doesn’t affect ads.

Create Content based on Engagement Metrics—The content that is most likely to be successful on Facebook is the type of content with the highest engagement rating. If the videos your company is posting on Facebook is generating high engagement numbers, then it’s safe to continue producing the same type of content. Facebook issues an “engagement rate” for each post your business profile submits. Use this rate to measure which content is becoming popular on the platform, and the continue to make more of it.

Ask Users to Allow Posts—Facebook has a feature called “see it first” that allows users to prioritize content seen on Newsfeeds. Users can click on the “see it first” button for your brand’s profile so that the content you produce won’t be filtered out with the rest of the public content. So conduct a campaign to get Facebook followers to make this change.

There are also alternatives to Facebook marketing your small business can try. Consult with a Corporate Business Solutions expert to find out more.

 

Everything Small Businesses Know about Hard Work is Wrong

Posted on by

Working hard is an idea that’s drilled into us from a young age. As the belief goes, if one works hard, they will be rewarded for their effort. The latest business research and insight is seriously challenging this notion of working hard. That is to say, does a business need hard-working employees? According to some companies, no.

Perhaps the most well-known company to challenge the notion of hard work was Netflix. Yes, the popular online streaming service made some serious changes to its internal culture after years of stumbling sales. Some of the reforms the company introduced include unlimited vacation times and flexible working hours. Netflix also let go of a good majority of its workforce. The intriguing part is exactly who was let go.

During the layoff period, Netflix didn’t keep its hardest working employees around while laying off the rest. Instead, the company separated employees into two groups: who was crucial to the business and who was not. It didn’t matter if the employees showed up to work on time and worked 10-hour days. If the employee was not considered essential to the business, they were let go.

Such an approach does not seem fair, or particularly smart. However, Netflix managed to turn its dismal finances around to become the premiere streaming service in the world. Why did the Netflix approach work? Read below for explanations from Corporate Business Solutions consultants:

It’s a Results-Based Approach – The Netflix method works because it’s a solely results-based method for running a business. Instead of evaluating employees by how long they spend at the office, the approach isolates employees who bring in results and have the most potential to contribute to the company. It works because those remaining can deliver when it comes to the company’s goals.

Reduce Stress for Necessary Employees – Removing employees who are not needed does reduce stress for employees who contribute to the core business. They don’t have to work with people who are unnecessary to the team.

Focus on Innovation – Ultimately, staffing the workforce is essential to employees who deliver results, allowing companies to innovate. Netflix succeeded because the brand returned as an innovative leader within the industry, not because it had the most hard-working employees.

It all comes down not to working hard, but to working smart. Small businesses that want to succeed must focus on increasing efficiency and productivity at the workplace. Invest in employees who drive innovation in a manner that makes the business more competitive. Avoiding the traditional corporate work environment and driving efficiency and innovation is the way to succeed in 2018. To learn more, visit CBS-CBS.com.