As entrepreneurs it is unavoidable that we must make several business proposals or presentations to different kinds of people. It can be some guys from lending institutions, venture capital firms, angel investors, suppliers, and your regular customers. Not to mention the annual presentation you have to give to your employees regarding the state of your business.

More importantly, you must learn to tailor fit your presentations to each group you are dealing with. In fact, Instigator Blog cites that poor formatting and packaging is one of top ten reasons why proposals fail.

In case you are having a hard time fine tuning your presentations, just follow these rules from the experts:

A veteran of hearing numerous elevator pitches and business presentations, he is advocating that each presentation must have only 10 slides presented in 20 minutes with font size of at least 30.

The Art of Unexpectedness

Presentation Zen says make your presentation stickier by using unexpectedness as your tool.

You can get people’s interest by violating their expectations. Surprise people. Surprise will get their interest. But to sustain their interest you have to stimulate their curiosity. The best way to do that is to pose questions or open up holes in people’s knowledge and then fill those holes, say the authors. Make the audience aware that they have a gap in their knowledge and then fill that gap with the answers to the puzzle (or guide them to the answers).

It’s funny how easy we are easily carried away by one seemingly good business idea. There are moments when we lose our objectivity because we are so passionate about this concept playing in our mind.

Admittedly, some breakthrough innovations were powered by passion combined with courage to venture in unknown territories. However, we need to wake up from our dreams and start facing reality.

Is my business idea viable?

These are the angles you must consider:

Product Benefits

Identify all the benefits your product can give to your intended customers. Once you have a list, compare it with existing brands in the market and start eliminating similar benefits. This will reveal if your product has some strong advantages or simply a me-too product.

Market Dynamics

If you are familiar with the industry this will not be much of your concern. In case you are new in this playing field you must thoroughly research current business practices and future directions of the market.

It also involves identifying direct and indirect competitors in your chosen category or industry. Typewriter is a classic example of business failure due to poor reaction to market dynamics and indirect competition from computers.

For a time, Kodak’s slow reaction to shift to new digital technology nearly ruined the business.

A formal and more rigid approach of this process is called SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) Analysis. A comprehensive post about this tool can be viewed at Internet Marketing for SMEs.

A new survey from online compensation company, Salary.com, brings bad news to all business owners. According this group, employees waste 20 percent of their working day, or about 2 hours per day. The culprit is boredom and not having enough to do.

Instead of doing their jobs, these employees surf the net, gossip with friends, and conduct personal businesses.

For sure even you face this kind of problem with some of your employees. Below are some things you can do to enhance productivity and minimize gossips in your company.

Daily Feedback

Do not wait for quarterly or annual performance evaluation to pinpoint mistakes of your employees. If you see them doing something good or even bad, call their attention immediately and commend or reprimand their action.

No Middle Ground

Sometimes we are reluctant to fire people for different reasons. To be more productive, however, you must let your employees know that there is no such thing as middle ground. If they perform, reward them through incentives or promotion. If not, fire them. This might be harsh to some entrepreneurs but this is something you must do for the good of your business.

Make sure you gather all relevant information first before doing this big decision.

Embrace Technology

Provide and train your people with new technologies that will increase productivity. For instance, using email instead of calling meetings saves time and resources. This is not to say that you will rely solely on technology. You still need to mingle with your colleagues from time to time.

Via Entrepreneur Daily

When starting a business, we rarely think about failure or exit strategy. Maybe because of our overflowing self-confidence and passion to succeed, we completely forgot about this. We are often too busy raising capital, spying on the competition, and improving operations.

PowerHomeBiz asks 3 basic questions when starting a business. We must be fully prepared to answer the 3rd question:

If the business fails, how will it affect me and my family? As a family man with 3 kids, he always looks at the risks involved and the odds of his success. While he doesn’t believe in playing it safe, he also does not want to go blindly into something and lose everything his family has.

But why do small businesses fail?

Among hundreds of reasons, there are are two common ones: Lack of research and poor financial control.

Lack of Research

Without thorough understanding of the market and comprehensive competitor analysis, you can never compete competently and will miss important market trends. This will provoke you to take actions without thinking.

Poor Financial Control

Eager to gain more customers, we tend to overspend on our marketing and sampling initiatives. Eventually, it will lead to insufficient working capital and business closure.

Entrepreneurship is all about survival. We face growing responsibilities every single day that are sometimes beyond our knowledge and experience. Yet, we struggle to make ends meet and deliver what we promise to our customers.

Young Entrepreneur shares some practical pointers about survival:

This will mean sacrifices. Maybe you have to take a part time job until you have enough money to support yourself. You also might need to take on clients who might not seem “ideal” at first. You can always fire them later on when you have a more solid base of support but money is money and you will need anything you can get your hands on when you are first starting a business.

Here are additional survival tips that you can apply to your business:

• Ask questions. You have so many things to learn only if you just ask the right questions to the right people. This can be other small business owners who faced similar problems you’re now encountering or reliable small business forums.
• Be flexible. Always keep an open mind whenever you’re observing your current process or strategies. If it’s not working, change it right away. In most cases it just requires some minor tweaking but be ready for a major turnaround if needed. Sometimes, you must go beyond your current business practice to differentiate your business against competition.

In essence, we are all negotiators using diverse strategies and tactics to get what we want and need. From ordinary tasks like buying a brand new car to conflict resolutions in Iraq, the need to master the art of negotiating has become a crucial skill for success. For this reason, renowned negotiator, Chester Karrass, titled his bestseller book as “In Life You Don’t Get What You Deserved, You Get What You Negotiate”.

Entrepreneurs active in daily operations are exposed to a multitude of manipulations and negotiating tactics. It can be discussions to lower supply prices, hire or terminate people, acquire resources, and get longer payment terms. In order to fight back and help the business survive, you must learn how to play the negotiating game!

While it is a complex game, there are popular tactics employed by many people. It may take the following forms:

The Sound of Silence
Humans like to interpret responses may it be verbal or non-verbal. If the opposite party offers something on the table, they expect you to react immediately. But if you stay silent, the common tendency of the other party is to offer another concession or explain further. At the end of the day, you can gauge their strategies and negotiating parameters without revealing yours.

Low-Balling
These negotiators are experts in hidden costs. Basically, this tactic starts by offering products or services at very low prices relative to competition. Once you agree with the price, these low-ballers will immediately present the hidden costs, saying those are not part of the deals.

There are more negotiating strategies and tactics available for entrepreneurs. Even anger can be a very effective negotiating tool but not encouraged for inexperienced negotiators. In Fast Cash Loan, the top 10 negotiating tactics are explained fully. Michael Scott shares his top 5 negotiation tips in Thoughts About Law, Business, Online Marketing, & Life.

The word “anger” already has a negative connotation to many people. However, a new study is set to alter our perspective. Psychologists from University of California at Santa Barbara conducted a study to test the effect of anger in business decisions. It found out that anger helped people focus on important matters and discard irrelevant information during decision-making.

Despite its reputation as an impetus to rash behavior, anger actually seems to help people make better choices—even aiding those who are usually very poor at thinking rationally. This could be because angry people base their decisions on the cues that “really matter” rather than things that can be called irrelevant or a distraction.

Still, we all need to harness this emotion to maximize its benefits. Controlled anger can be one of the very important business skills, particularly during negotiations and marketing. Dr. George Anderson of Notes From the World of Anger Management shares some details on anger management and the importance of controlling it.

Via Entrepreneur Daily

Contrary to the popular brainstorming sessions done in the corporate board rooms, a survey by American Express Small Business Monitor finds that idea generation among entrepreneurs is strongly connected to gender orientation, regular exercises, and crafted during down times or period of not working.

Female business owners are five times more likely than males to come up with their best ideas while exercising (10% vs. 2%), an indication of the gender differences in creativity and brain-storming.

More than one-third of entrepreneurs (35%) report coming up with their best ideas during “down-time”. Male business owners are more than twice as likely as female business owners to come up with their best ideas on the way to work (18% vs. 7%). Women are also more likely than men to wake up in the middle of the night with ideas for their business (70% vs. 56%).

These findings will help you maximize your schedule and tweak it to increase your idea generation initiatives. More significantly, it highlights the importance of down time in improving the way you do business. Make use of these down times to fortify your strategic thinking skills.

Via Small Business Trends

The majority of people that become entrepreneurs either start right out of school when there’s no pressure yet about holding a regular job, or they fall into a lump of startup capital. Right. Which leaves the other most common process of becoming an entrepreneur: easing into it while holding down a part- or full-time job, or being a stay-at-home parent.

It’s by no means an easy process, but it can be done. Michelle Anton at Weekend Entrepreneur offers twelve very useful tips to both make efficient use of your time and to stay under the radar. The latter is important so that co-workers don’t get jealous and that you don’t jeopardize your job. It doesn’t matter that your side business may not be earning anything yet. There may be just one small-minded coworker unable to pursue their own dreams, but they are enough to give you grief, even get you fired.

Annoyed by a lousy customer service agent early this morning, I’m more than motivated to share some thoughts on this subject. After all, I firmly believe customer service is one of best weapons available for small business owners.

An attention-grabbing article from Harvard’s Working Knowledge discusses about dominance trap, a condition wherein large companies are more inclined to neglect their customers. If you happen to be a small business owner like me, this is indeed an opportune situation to develop excellent customer service as your competitive advantage.

According to that article, there are 3 “Ds” essential in bringing “superior customer experience”:

1. Design the right offers and experiences for the right customers.
2. Deliver these propositions by focusing the entire company on them with an emphasis on cross-functional collaboration.
3. Develop their capabilities to please customers again and again—by such means as revamping the planning process, training people in how to create new customer propositions, and establishing direct accountability for the customer experience.

If you’re looking for some inspiration to augment your customer service, you can take a lesson from JetBlue’s founder David Neeleman and his role playing as flight attendant to gather consumer insights. Maybe adding the so-called HEARD (Hear, Empathize, Ask, Respond, and Deliver) technique might work for you as well.

But wait there’s more…watch and listen to the video below about the a cab driver’s passion to deliver customer satisfaction and how he turned misery to magic!