Better Business Blog

How To Close Big Business Deals

You don't climb the biggest hill in your neighborhood the same way you would tackle Mount Everest. Changes in scale require a big shift in tactics.

Let's start with the seven things that make your big sale different than your average size sale:

1. Size: Obvious, sure, but worth the mention. Adding a couple of zeros to the deal can change more than just the sweatiness of your palms.
2. Complexity: The bigger the deal, the more moving parts. Moving from 100 loaves to 100,000 loaves may not change the recipe–but it increases the logistical complexity of getting the bread to the market.

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Ever gone through PayPal reports hell? You will love SlowPal

 

PayPal claims over 100 million active user accounts, but a lot of people hate the company, for a variety of reasons. Love or despise it, it has become hard to ignore and avoid the e-payments juggernaut whether you are an online seller or buyer.

Enter Shoply, which aims to democratize online retailing of goods and services for small businesses worldwide. They hate PayPal too, but they realize that it’s become too big and powerful for them to sidestep the online payments giant.

One particular frustration of the Shoply team with PayPal is its slow and tedious transaction reports system. If you’ve ever used PayPal to peruse though and search for transactions in your account history, you will know that it is prone to crash and is often as slow as molasses in January.

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There's No Need To Hire A Lawyer When These Sites Let You Do It Yourself

Four years ago, Michele Ellson created an online community newspaper,The Island, in Alameda, Calif., under a limited partnership. But she didn't hire an attorney to form the LLC or file the paperwork.

Instead, Ellson turned to LegalZoom, where she spent $552 to gain access to the forms and have attorneys review the paperwork and file it with the state. "I was looking for something easy to use and one where I knew what to pay up front," Ellson says.

Ellson is one of an increasing number of consumers trying their hands at being do-it-yourself lawyers. Last year, Google Ventures poured $18.5 million into Rocket Lawyer, which boasted 70,000 users a day and doubled its revenue for four years running, according to a Forbes report. And LegalZoom, according to its website, has served more than a million customers.

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12 Essential Tools for the Content Marketer

 

One of the questions marketers get asked most often starts like this. “I think I get content marketing, but what kind of content works best?” The short answer is that there are at least twelve types of content you can utilize as part of any content marketing plan.

In this case, the focus is on content that can extend your brand’s reach, beyond your website or blog. There’s no single type that works best for all companies. In fact, diversification and having a portfolio of content you can pull from is key. Here are the twelve types of content to focus on, and how they can be used.

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5 Ways to Build a Solid Email Marketing List

Email marketing is a powerful tool that can extend your reach beyond your website and create new salesopportunities. If you simply sell to customers when they happen to visit your site, you have an all-or-nothing chance of making a sale. Should they leave without making a purchase, there's no guarantee they'll return later.

But when you build an email list of current and potential customers, you can reach out repeatedly to your prospects with targeted messages.

Here are five ways to integrate email marketing into your website and stay in touch with your best prospects:

1. Build an opt-in form on your home page.
Perhaps the easiest and most common way to create a list is to integrate an email opt-in form into your home page. To get attention, place your form "above the fold," so visitors can see it immediately and don't have to scroll down.

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A Company With No Hierarchy Makes More Money Per Employee Than Google, Amazon Or Microsoft

Seattle-based game company Valve was the topic of much discussion on BoingBoing yesterday.  

The 16-year old company has no corporate hierarchy whatsoever, and yet - according to its employee manual - their profitability per employee is "higher than that of Google or Amazon or Microsoft". 

The company's team page proclaims at the top "We've been boss-free since 1996", and then proceeds to list every single employee (a bit over 100) in alphabetical order.  About the founder, Gabe Newell, the manual says, "Of all the people at this company who aren't your boss, Gabe is the MOST not your boss, if you get what we're saying."

How does this madness work?  Leaving alone the claim of incredible profitability, how do they manage to get anything done at all?  Is this not a recipe for corporate disaster? 

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How To End Up Richer Than Your Parents--Even In This Economy

There are financial pitfalls aplenty for career-building millennials--be it shoddy planning, outrageous debt, or credit card quandaries. At only 23, Zac Bissonnette has staked his young authoring career on untying his generation’s financial tangles: His second book, How To Be Richer, Smarter, and Better-Looking Than Your Parents, is out now (you can check out an excerpt here). Fast Company talked with the precocious author about financial freedom, Benjamin Franklin, and making good decisions automatic.

ZAC BISSONNETTE: I would say richer, yeah; smarter, no; better looking, maybe. You have to handicap it because my parents are 63. I would say we're even. That title I took from, there's an old Yiddish proverb, that with money in your pocket, you're handsome and wise, and you sing well too. The idea behind that is that if you have the money, if you're on top of the money thing, your life--everything else--is better. So that's really what that title's from, not so much a narcissistic comment.

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Inside Harvard B-school's Startup Boot Camp

With $3,000 of seed capital from Harvard Business School, around 150 MBA teams were tasked with developing their very own micro-businesses in short order. Here's what they came up with.

By John A. Byrne

(Poets&Quants) -- The idea initially came as something of a joke.

Earlier this year, a team of six Harvard Business School MBA students was brainstorming ideas for a new startup business. They came up with a peculiar takeoff on all the online dating sites: a Facebook application for Jewish mothers to set their children up with potential marriage material.

When the team shared the idea with fellow students, they heard nothing but skepticism. "They said there were a lot of barriers to entry," recalls Jyll Saskin, 24, one of the team members. "Others said they didn't think the market would be that big for it."

The feedback led to some serious rethinking. "We said, 'What if we expanded the idea to leverage the power of friend networks?' adds Saskin. "Friends could serve as yentas to recommend dates for their friends."

With $3,000 of seed capital from Harvard Business School, Yenta was launched last week along with as many as 150 other new startups in what might well be the largest single experiment in entrepreneurship ever undertaken. The so-called "micro-businesses" range from a company called Kinsey that sells "premium undergarments" for men to another called 4n Friend that is creating an online network that matches language tutors with students all over the world.

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10 Video Tips for Businesses on Pinterest

Grant Crowell is a multimedia writer and marketing analyst who’s been covering the online video space since 2006. Connect with him on LinkedIn or follow him at @grantcrowell.

Since Pinterest was founded in 2008, it’s proven one thing: People love their visuals. And it looks like the site is becoming a hot space for online video marketing opportunities as well, with its recent integration of the Vimeo platform.

The video platform addition makes sense, given how video continues to grow on the network. For example, despite Pinterest’s “no-follow” links rule to third-party sites, videos on the site are being indexed by Google at a rapid rate. In late March, Google had indexed 1,170 Pinterest videos. By mid-April, that figure jumped to 5,870 video results — an increase of more than 500% in just three weeks.

What that should tell brands and marketers is that now is the time to start looking at Pinterest as a video marketing vertical. Here are ten tips on how to get the most out of using video on this site.

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Before Naming Your Startup, Read This

This guide is divided into three, independent sections: Why Bad Names Hurt You, Coming Up With Names, and Examples of Strong and Weak Names.

Why Bad Names Hurt You

If you don’t need to be convinced that a good name is important, skip to the next section. That’s where the juicy stuff begins.

Almost every bad naming decision can be traced back to one or more of the following attitudes. You must learn to recognize them:

• Mobile: “It’s a mobile app. Who cares what the name is. If people recognize the icon on their dashboard, then that’s all the brand recognition we need. It’s the mobile Web, baby! Get ready for the revolution.”
• Settling: “There’s a shortage of good names. Consequently, consumers are getting used to silly ‘Web 2.0 names. They only care about the product.”
• Politics: “I won’t spend more than the cost of a domain’s registration fees. Domain squatters are pirates, and I would never pay their inflated prices with my hard-earned money.”
• Tired: “To be completely honest, I’m just short on ideas. I think I’ll stick with the one I like best so far and just prefix ‘get’ or ‘try’ to my domain name. Later, when we’re big, we’ll buy the official domain.” (On the surface, this is one of the better excuses, but we’ll deconstruct this approach at the end of this section.)
• Short-Sighted: “What are you talking about? Our name is loaded with meaning. It has a very rich and personal history amongst the team. It represents us.”
• Deprioritizing: “I’m building a business with many more important tasks that need my attention. I refuse to spend more than two meetings talking about our naming options.”

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A Quick Practical Business Guide to Google Plus

Is this you? Do you take Google+ as another network you need to manage? Someplace else to post and watch for business social media? As Guy Kawasaki says himself, in the early pages of the book I’m reviewing here:

“I need another social media service like I need more email or my dog to throw up on the carpet.”

Amen to that. I like Twitter best. I’m sort of the introvert version of social media — I like conversations at 140 characters a pop. And online. And via the keyboard. But of course, I’ve been watching Google+, trying to keep up there, because it’s Google, a lot of people I like are there, and I’m in social media for business. Plus already has more than 100 million users, and some business press is predicting more than 400,000 by the end of this year.

Which is why I like and recommend What the Plus, a short, practical to-the-point book on Google Plus by Guy Kawasaki. It’s all about tips, shortcuts, and step by step to taking more advantage of Plus, and doing it better. Don’t judge it by my presence on Plus, because I’m writing this fresh after reading the book, before implementing.

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A Clever Way to Spy on Your Competitors

Get to know what your rivals are up to online. Don't worry--it's legal.

Knowledge, as they say, is gold—particularly when it comes to knowing what your competitors are up to.

So I'm going to share a little golden tip on how to use the Web to spy on your competitors. Don't worry, it's perfectly legal.

One way to dig up details on a rival is to mine its link-building strategy. You want to look at inbound links, which are links coming to that website directly from outside sources.

What is the value of these links?

Here's what the Google Webmaster Central Blog has to say about inbound links: "Inbound links can bring new users to your site, and when the links are merit-based and freely-volunteered as an editorial choice, they're also one of the positive signals to Google about your site's importance."

Those "positive signals" result in a higher ranking in search results for keywords relating to the website. There are a number of ways businesses acquire inbound links: getting press coverage, creating content that is picked up by other sites–in other words, by getting attention.

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How Much Should You Pay Yourself?

As raises go, this was a doozy. Andy Meadows, founder and CEO of custom software company Live Oak 360 in Austin, Texas, decided to increase his salary in the summer of 2010. He didn't bump it up by 5 percent, or 10 percent, or even 25 percent. Instead, he doubled it -- to what he calculated an outsider would charge to do his job. It was a stretch for his then eight-year-old company, but Meadows is now convinced it was the right thing to do.

"Raising my salary to a market level forced me to look at my company from an investor's perspective," Meadows says. "It helped me better understand the value of my own time."

As he began looking at the hours he was devoting to different tasks, he explains, he began asking if they were really tasks he should be doing, based on what the company was paying him, or if they were better suited to one of his employees. Often, the latter was the case, and he learned to cede those tasks to others. "It allowed me to turn myself loose from a lot of digging and hunting for information, and spend more time finding new and better business," he says now.

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Women: Are You Making Any Of These 5 Sales Sabotage Errors?

The topic of women in the workplace is one that typically stirs up impassioned debate and conversation. Primarily because, after all these years, we’ve yet to achieve full equality, whether in reality or perception (or both!). In fact, I recently read an article on Forbes titled, “Why Most Women Will Never Become CEO,” and it got me thinking – what are we doing wrong? So many times, women and society as a whole like to point the finger at external influencers for holding women back in the workplace. Those are surely at play. But is it possible that we are at fault, too?

I decided to take a closer look, focusing on a traditionally male-dominated area of business: sales. The interesting thing about sales is that while women are actually seen to be more successful in that profession, it is still seen as a predominantly male profession. But there are a burgeoning group of female sales professionals who are looking to empower women to take charge of their sales careers: Jill Konrath, Kim Duke and Kristine Scotto.

After speaking with them, I uncovered specific actions and behaviors that many women display that can unintentionally sabotage their success. The top five are listed below.

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58 Ways to Create Persuasive Content Your Audience Will Love

Would you like to become a better writer?

Would you like to create content that people will remember, tweet, and plus?

How about content that inspires your audience to click, subscribe or buy? That’s the Holy Grail, right?

It may sound difficult, but it really isn’t.

You’re about to become a writer that’s incredibly persuasive and completely unforgettable.

Ready?

Let’s start with structuring your content so your message becomes irresistible.

How to streamline your content creation

Are you forever chopping at and changing your text?

Use the following tips to structure your writing up front, so your message isn’t buried deep in your post:

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Top 10 Reasons Businesses Don't Grow - Boiled Down to 2

I enjoy reading Jay Goltz’ musings on business. Though his posts focus primarily on small businesses, I often think his insights are useful for businesses of any size – and for individuals’ careers, as well.  Just read this recent post in the NYT where he opines about the 10 top  internal reasons small businesses fail to grow, and I think they really boil down to 2. (It seems I have a propensity for looking at things and reducing them to core elements.)

One of his 10 reasons stands alone in my mind: he calls it “the customer attitude,” and proposes that any small business where employees don’t respect the customers and don’t care about making them happy is doomed.  It may limp along, but it certainly won’t grow. I completely agree:  I’ve written before about good and bad customer service – and I don’t think a negative attitude toward customers is “hide-able.”  If employees think customers are generally difficult, crazy, dumb or irritating…it’s pretty obvious, and really off-putting.

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How to Make Money with Content Marketing

There’s been a lot of buzz this year around content marketing but no one is really talking about how to directly make money from a campaign.

If you want to generate revenue, it’s important to understand how information spreads on the internet. StumbleUpon and BuzzFeed recently teamed up to figure this out.

They found their most viral stories since 2007 were so popular because of cluster sharing. This means that the biggest hits were all shared lots of time among small clusters of friends instead of a few people broadcasting it to a large network.o figure this out.

Where is the best place to take advantage of cluster sharing? Studies confirm that email is still the most widely used medium for sharing information between small groups.

So how do you make more money with it?

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Why You Should Do Business in Mexico

Elizabeth Helsley fell in love with Mexico while on a yearlong college study abroad trip to Mexico City. After graduating in 2001, she went back home and worked in San Diego until a U.S.-based company relocated her back to Mexico City. She was thrilled with the opportunity, so much so that in 2010 she left the company and started her international consulting business Global Luxe in Guadalajara.

“I get up and am excited to go to work every day,” she beams.

Entrepreneurs like Helsley with a touch of wanderlust are looking to Mexico as a viable business location, and for smart reasons.

First: while the rest of the world reels from financial meltdown, Mexico’s economy is going strong.

“After the crisis of 2008, Mexico proved to be very stable,” says Mauricio Monroy, president of the U.S.-Mexico Chamber of Commerce California Regional Chapter. “We had a similar situation in the late '90s and since then, our banks have gotten healthy and diversified, so we are nicely insulated from what the rest of the world is going through.”

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April 13, 2012

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OPEN Forum Message

Business Taxes Decoded

It's that time of year again. Do you know what you need to do for your business taxes?

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Elizabeth Helsley fell in love with Mexico while on a yearlong college study abroad trip to Mexico City. After graduating in 2001, she went back home and worked in San Diego until a U.S.-based company relocated her back to Mexico City. She was thrilled with the opportunity, so much so that in 2010 she left the company and started her international consulting business Global Luxe in Guadalajara.

“I get up and am excited to go to work every day,” she beams.

Entrepreneurs like Helsley with a touch of wanderlust are looking to Mexico as a viable business location, and for smart reasons.

First: while the rest of the world reels from financial meltdown, Mexico’s economy is going strong.

“After the crisis of 2008, Mexico proved to be very stable,” says Mauricio Monroy, president of the U.S.-Mexico Chamber of Commerce California Regional Chapter. “We had a similar situation in the late '90s and since then, our banks have gotten healthy and diversified, so we are nicely insulated from what the rest of the world is going through.”

How to Attract Crowdfunding Investors Without Breaking the Law

As the potential returns from crowdfunding go beyond free T-Shirts and movie passes, the rules were bound to get more complex.

Last week, President Barack Obama signed into law the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act, or JOBS Act. Though the law contains many parts that could free up funds for startups, the most anticipated measure among the entrepreneurial set is the crowdfunding provision that legalizes investing in startups by non-accredited investors.

Formerly, only accredited investors -- typically wealthy individuals who can afford to make riskier bets -- could invest in pre-IPO companies.

Though the prospect of being able to raise money from a bigger pool of investors is giving many entrepreneurs reason to salivate these days, the law stands to add a new level of complexity in the way companies market themselves to investors using crowdfunding.

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How to Tell if You Have a Great Idea

 

There's plenty of money out there for great ideas. How to tell if you've got one.

There’s plenty of funding if you have a good idea.

Somehow, a bunch of entrepreneurs got it into their heads that good ideas go unfunded. It’s just not true. Because part of what makes something a good idea is the fact that the founder can convey that it’s a good idea. And in the world of funding, there are rules about how one conveys a good idea. You need an addressable market. You need to solve a problem for that market. There needs to be a way to make money. A lot of it. And there needs to be a barrier to entry.

I’m blown away by how many founders think they can get away with not having one of these things. You could have a weakness, sure. But you have to have the essential components of a good company, or you don’t have a good company.

There are plenty of people who will give you feedback on your idea. It takes very little knowledge of the startup world to recognize a crappy idea, because most ideas are so crappy in so many ways and you only need to be able to see one of them.

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Online Ads: 7 Dos & Don’ts

You don't need an agency to manage your digital advertising. But if you're going to go it alone, you need to understand a few ground rules.

While many businesses these days want to improve their online visibility, many don't know how to approach it other than to build a website and maybe do some search engine marketing.

Yet 14 years after the launch of the first self-serve advertising platform, GoTo.com, I'm still surprised how little many businesses still know about do-it-yourself online advertising opportunities available to them.

After all: Even though Google's DIY pay-per-click search, contextual and display ad networks create an 800-pound gorilla, and yet there are plenty of other places to try self-serve online advertising.

Why, you might ask, as an owner of a digital ad agency, would I want to tell you about self-serve advertising platforms? There are several reasons:

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How to Boost Your Chances of Getting a Small Business Loan

Are you seeking financing for your small business? A report from the SBA’s Office of Advocacy has some interesting insights that might help improve your chances of success.

Even though the economy was picking up overall, and total business lending was slowly trending upward, the SBA reports that borrowing money was still challenging for small businesses in the fourth quarter of last year. Overall, though, there’s promising news. Small business loans totaled $597.8 billion in the fourth quarter, and the value of small business commercial and industrial (C&I) loans increased for the first time in seven quarters. Bankers saw increased demand for these loans—the highest since early 2005—and they also eased their terms a bit.

Here’s what’s interesting to me: The SBA reports that micro C&I loans (those for less than $100,000) accounted for most of the growth in small business lending. With smaller loans easier to get, how can you cut your costs to shrink your loan amount and improve your chances of getting financing?

Here are some ideas:

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Small Business Taxes: How Business Structure Impacts Allowable Deductions

Whether they’re looking to avoid that ‘double taxation’ conundrum or reduce self-employment and payroll taxes, business owners wonder which legal structure is right for their business, financial situation, and taxes.

The issue of double taxation and the S Corporation and LLC’s pass-through tax treatment is a key factor when analyzing business structures. But there are other tax implications involved when picking a business structure. Read on to learn how business deductions and employee benefits are affected by your legal structure:

Health Care Deductions

It’s no secret that health care costs are a major expenditure for businesses and individuals alike. A C Corporation is able to deduct 100% of the health insurance it pays for its employees, including those employees who are shareholders. A corporation can also fully deduct the costs of any medical reimbursement plan. And employees of a C Corporation are not taxed on the health benefits they receive.

It’s a different story for the S Corporation or LLC that has elected pass-through tax treatment. In these structures, 2% or greater shareholders are not considered employees. What’s a 2% or greater shareholder? It’s someone who directly or indirectly owns more than 2% of the corporation’s stock or owns stock with more than 2% of the voting power, at any time during the year.

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The Seven Habits of Spectacularly Unsuccessful CEOs Hall of Shame

Dartmouth Professor Sydney Finkelstein first wrote about the Seven Habits of Spectacularly Unsuccessful Executives 8 years ago in “Why Smart Executives Fail.”

When I wrote about the habits last month, I had no idea that the post would strike such a nerve with readers generating over 2 million page views and counting.

The number one question readers asked me after reading that post was: who are some more modern-day examples of CEOs and executives who suffer from these different habits? And how can we identify CEOs with these habits today – in order to avoid investing in them?

I’m familiar with the habits as I studied and consulted with Syd on them for a number of years.  I instinctively keep them in mind as an investor when considering taking a position in a company.

Read More: The Seven Habits of Spectacularly Unsuccessful CEOs Hall of Shame

6 Emotions That Make Customers Buy

Customers make purchasing decisions because they have carefully considered a set of good information, right?

Wrong.

Buying decisions are always the result of a change in the customer's emotional state. While information may help change that emotional state, it's the emotion that's important, not the information.

All buying decisions stem from the interplay of the following six emotions:

1. Greed. "If I make a decision now, I will be rewarded."

2. Fear. "If I don't make a decision now, I'm toast."

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