Guest Author

Greg Fry

I thought I’d share my favourite business tools I have used this year. I am amazed at how many amazing products for business are very inexpensive or often completely free. The only challenge is to find them in the first place.
Here are my top 5 business tools of 2009:
1. Animoto – Allows you to make really impressive videos. You can add text, photos, short video clips and music to the site. Within minutes a jumbled mess will be produced into a highly impressive video. Animoto is free for 30 second videos and as little as $30 a year for full length videos. Here is an example of an Animoto video I made this year.

2. Eyejot – Video email. I have found this a really useful tool to follow up with prospective clients I have met. It enables them to see me again and to hear how I may be able to help them.
This visual email is a powerful follow up after a busy night’s networking. Eyejot is easy to personalise with your own branding. Eyejot is free to use without branding. With branding it is as little as $29.99 per year. Here is an example of a video email.

3. Screenjelly – Allow you to record your computer screen and your voice. I have used this service to comment on cvs and tell them how and where their cv should be strengthened. Once you record your message just send it via email or twitter. Cost – Free

4. Tungle – A great application for the busy entrepreneur. Tungle makes scheduling meetings effortless and synchronises with both Outlook and Google. It makes it easy for staff and clients to see when you are available and set a meeting with you. Tungle is free to use.

5. WiseStamp is  a really nifty and free product that enables you to personalise your email signature. It works on Firefox. It seems to work with most email providers (Gmail ,Yahoo Mail ,AOL, Hotmail, Google Apps…) It is easy to customise. You can add social media buttons to your signature and even your photo.
Here is a sample of a signature or two on Wise Stamp looks:

Signature Template:

John Smith Your City, Country Mobile: +983-23832842 Email: John@wisestamp.com

Chat: Google Talk: John Skype: John MSN:

Greg Fry Careers Coach - fast track your career to success Tel. +353 872039855 Email. greg.fry@careerscoach.eu Web. www.careerscoach.ie Blog. http://wwwcareerscoacheu.blog.com

So what top tools have you used in 2009?

Which ones would you recommend and why?

Greg Fry has over 10 years Recruitment experience in the Irish and US markets. He holds a Diploma in Business and Life Coaching and a Marketing degree. He runs a company called Careers Coach and assists people with their career transition. In these challenging times Greg believes that in order to excel in life and business we need to think and act smarter than before. Today’s job seeker can find employment if they take a proactive approach. Areas that Greg specialises in include: Career Coaching, Career Guidance , Group Coaching courses (including - Finding Employment in challenging times) , Marketing yourself, Interview preparation and techniques, Self Improvement, CVs, Using Social media as a business tool, How to start your own business, Leadership skills.

Guest Author

Jackie Prendergast

This morning at a Networking Event which I had organised in aid of Childline one of the presenters, Shane Twomey, a fellow HR consultant, threw out a question that really made me think! ” How do you reward poor performers“.  Initially he was met with stunned silence.  You could almost hear people thinking…”what on earth is he talking about…who would reward poor performance?”.  But then the penny dropped.

I must admit that despite being a seasoned HR professional I had never really thought about the issue of under performance in quite this way.  Of course I have expereinced it.  And had to deal with it.  And even had to deal with managers who didn’t deal with it.  But I had never thought about it in terms of “reward“.  But of couse we do.  How?  Well let’s look at what typically happens to poor performers in an organisation:

• You / their manager ignores them
• They are given less work
• Less is expected of them so they have lower targets / performance standards
• They are paid the same or similar pay to average and even high performers
• They are promoted (so they can become someone else’s problem)
• They get a salary increase (well they haven’t been told there is a problem with performance so they have to get it)
• More time is spent on them, dealing with issues and correcting problems
  
• Others are asked to help them complete their work
• They are given overtime to allow them to complete tasks
• They are not asked to do any additional work
• They are regularly sent on training courses (well they aren’t doing much else)

Of couse at the same time you are punishing your high performers.  Typically they will:

• Be expected to work harder and faster
• Get the same or similar salary to poor performers
• Get less training because they are too valuable to release
• Get less of the managers time and therefore less coaching and mentoring
• Be given all additional work
• Have higher targets and standards

The list goes on!  And what does that poor performer think about his higher performing colleagues?  Well he probably thinks they are fools and secretly laughs about them.  And what do they think about themselves.  Eventually they will begin to see themselves as fools too.  They will get tired of always having more work, always having to pick up the slack because their co-workers aren’t up to standard and never seeing any reward.  And honestly, even if they are being rewarded they will eventually become demotivated when they look at their poor perfoming colleagues who can just do as they please, never have a heavy workload and can just amble along, stress-free.

So are you guilty of rewarding your poor performers? If so, it is time you took action – NOW!

Jackie Prendergast is a dynamic and focused HR and business professional with over 15 years experience in both public and private sector environments. She is a firm believer in the concept of delivering excellence through, and with people and strongly supports an ethos of continuous learning and development in the achievement of goals. Jackie established her own HR & Management Consulting practice - Consulting Excellence - in 2007

Guest Author

Lewis Evans

When times are hard and money is tight, I hear this often. The belt-tightening process seems to automatically result in ditching the creative. It’s ironic, because when anyone starts a new business, it surely springs from a creative inspiration. So, why is it that the very thing that inspired the whole thing is seen as expendable?

I think it all stems from one simple fact that we really need to change if we are to move forward, pull ourselves out of recession and achieve a stable and abundant state: it’s simply that we are taught what to think, not how to think.

Consider any belief that you have, and you can usually trace it back to someone you trust telling you that this is a fact. It starts with our parents, and we continue this way of learning, often throughout our lives. Very little of the information we have is information we have originated ourselves. Politics, religion and education reinforce this way of learning to the point where we exclude creative notions as a matter of course – unless, by a process of repeated exposure and our own evidence-building processes (we want to believe certain things, so we find evidence that they are true for us), we start to believe them ourselves. Once we start buying into a belief, we tend to guard it, argue on its behalf and blank out counter beliefs. After all, we may have taken some convincing, and our self-esteem would be damaged if we think afterwards that we have taken on a wrong belief. You can see this happening in all areas of life, from the personal to the international.

We are not taught to be creative. A cynic might say that this is intentional, as it helps maintain control and order if common beliefs are developed that serve the purposes of those dishing them out…
Common beliefs are convenient, and they help things run smoothly. This is true in business, as well, of course. This is what corporate culture, corporate image and identity, advertising and PR are all about, and it can help a company become successful.

So it is to be expected, then, that we often have an uneasy relationship with creativity. Faced with a creative person, business executives sometimes don’t know how to deal with this uneasiness and may criticize or put down creative ideas without appreciating their potential or seriously considering them at all. I call this Fear Undermining Creative Knowledge syndrome, the acronym of which accurately expresses the frustration that is so often felt when a businessman and a creative person try to work together. Two ships passing in a pea-souper at night, foghorns blasting to ensure a safe distance, but each desperately wanting to appreciate the existence of the other. Left brain meets right brain in a tortured dance to find an acceptable middle ground.

Or not. I was listening to Michael O’Leary (Ryanair) on the radio, saying with some pride that he doesn’t use creative consultants, and anyone with a pony tail won’t even get through his door. He has young staff, and they produce all the advertising ideas themselves in-house, so he has created a mix of control and creativity that works for him. Not many companies have that much confidence and such a charismatic leader to make that work well. Often, a weakness of an owner manager is that he or she cannot determine when it is best to seek creative expertise. Many have an ego that serves them well in the good times but can be disastrous in bad times or when the company needs to take a significant step up in order to continue to grow.

All this means that whether the creative process is carried out internally or externally, it often gets a bad rap, and it’s easy to convince board members that it isn’t important for survival. But they are missing one important point in thinking like this. They need creativity in order to move forward, and it’s rarely the creative input that creates the kind of disasters we have seen in recent times, that all combined to create the financial crisis. As we know, it was primarily dodgy financial practices that caused the problems, fuelled by collective unthinking and a lack of creativity to create the tools and mechanisms to avoid it. Once we pull ourselves through the mess, will anything in the financial world change? There are already signs of a repeat performance.

What, then, is the message we are not hearing? Maybe we all have some fresh learning to do about creativity and what it contributes to our lives. Maybe, as Sir Ken Robinson so eloquently urged in his TED talk that has been admired by over 4 million viewers, we need to radically re-think our educational system.

I was told once that in the west, when we see an abstract work of art we assess it, judge it and criticize it. In other cultures in the East, they observe it, and see what they gain from it. To me, that rather sounds as if our culture blocks it out and maintains a distance from something we inherently don’t understand, and the other lets it in, and learns to appreciate what ever it is offering. Which way is the way of progress?

Lewis Evans is an artist, entrepreneur, inventor and marketing communications consultant. Fuelled by creativity and driven by a passion to provide innovation, impact and influence, his career has taken in a large variety of disciplines, skills and experience across many areas of industry and the public sector.

Guest Author

Ronan Gavin

Amongst senior sales professionals, the word “procurement” typically brings an emotive response, usually in the negative. There are two reasons for this;

1. Sales professionals do not understand the role of procurement within their organisation and the internal challenges that procurement face with their own business stakeholders.

2. There is a great variance in the professional capability of procurement professionals in the Irish market in particular and a lack of awareness amongst senior sales professionals how to recognise the role procurement managers play within the target organisation. This is a contentious point but a very valid one.

On the first point, it is important to understand that procurement grapple with an ongoing challenge to prove their personal value to the business. From experience I advocate engaging with Procurement at the outset as a very useful strategy. This is because capable procurement managers will always look for new innovative ways from suppliers to bring enhanced value to the business (and budget holders). They are primarily compensated on cost savings but delivering increased value and lower cost on a sustained basis is what maintains and increases their value to the business.

On the second point, bear in mind that procurement managers are not all the same. Some procurement managers are only brought in at the end of the sales cycle as a matter of policy to extract lower pricing from you and it is important to recognise these tactical practices. As a general rule the level of sophistication of procurement usually drives how early the business get them involved. By engaging early in the sales cycle with procurement or even when there is no sales cycle in place, this enables you to decide on the most appropriate sales strategy to adopt with Procurement.

There are different approaches and strategies I have adopted over time to ensure the most successful outcome, but the main advice I would give is to clearly understand the role procurement play within their organisation as early as possible in the sales cycle. You may be surprised to know that procurement can be of assistance in some organisations to position new solutions to the business.

Ronan Gavin is Business Development Manager with Supplierforce. With over 16 years experience in the technology and financial services industries, Ronan has a unique combination of solution selling and procurement knowledge. With a career which has spanned sales, marketing, consultancy and corporate banking, Ronan has extensive experience in new business development and global account management roles across multiple industries internationally.

I had a rather interesting conversation with a rather interesting gent (he knows who he is) as to the effect of businesses engaging with blogging and social media generally.

Business is bad for blogging

My friend’s point was this that blogging for business has had an almost corrupting influence on the thing that made blogging so popular in the first instance. In many respects, my friend is entirely right – the objective of business is to make profit and whether it is through blogging or otherwise – this remains as true as ever.

Blogging is good for business

What’s lost however as part of this conversation is what about the net effect that blogging and other social media may inadvertently have on business – or more particularly on how business does business. This is in my opinion an important point and has social consequences – having to engage through blogs and other social media will have a longer-term net positive effect.

Controlling the message

So what if businesses that are engaging are still highly motivated by a need to control the message. The enter into the arena with a set agenda, they may continue to stick to their guns for a period but gradually the smarter businesses are realising that engaging rather than controlling is where it is at.

No more lip

Of course we can argue the toss as to motive but to effectively blog, you must engage with the reader. That’s a blogging bottom line. This applies to business as much as it does to anyone else. Therefore, the act of blogging effectively means that business will need engage with it’s customers in a new way. For too long many businesses paid lip service to the idea of serving their customers, perhaps now they are beginning to not have a choice.

Just because you have a blog

Not all businesses engage through their blog I hear you say, and of course you are right, they don’t. Ok, so what, just because you have a blog surely doesn’t automatically mean that you can blog.

Surely effective blogging or indeed effective use of any social media is not about the technology – it’s about the people or the organisations behind them. Yes, businesses are slow to get it and in many respects they are merely involved in a desperate act of catching up but think about it – Who is really the one in control?

Guest Author

Elli St.George Godfrey

Imagine you are at a networking meeting and you hear two men talking about their monumental amount of work, the lack of support from their staff, and they feel powerless to speak up and change the system.

Now, what would you think if you knew these two men were actually the owners of the very businesses they are complaining about?

In a 2009 study (The Leadership Gap) conducted by the Center for Creative Leadership, one of the top ten skills needed to be an effective leader is managing change. Many established small business owners keep their vision limited and avoid challenging their status quo.

Frankly, it is easy to get into a rut. The day-to-day operations command our attention. Did all of the invoices go out? Are we collecting money owed to us? Have I paid the bills? Oh, and do I have to check my email right now?  What meetings are on today?  Should I really hire an administrative assistant? When are taxes due? And there is that project deadline. When running a lean organization, it is easy to feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of tasks.

But ruts set the stage for complacency. Complacency becomes the death spiral for what used to be your dream. No one starts a business to get stuck on the mundane stuff. When we spend all of our time focused on operations, we lose sight of the business vision. The energy and enthusiasm we need to innovate internally and externally is sucked away.

How do you support yourself as a change agent for your small business?

Get out of your comfort zone. Do something you don’t normally do, even if it is unrelated to your business. Learn a language, explore a musical instrument, attend an unfamiliar networking group, hire a coach, join a mastermind group, or take a class or seminar. Looking at the world through a different lens refreshes your perspective and provides relief from stress.

Check your assumptions. It is easy to be in the mindset of “should-ing” on yourself. One of my clients found this to be a source of paralysis for her. She really thought that telling herself that she should be doing one thing or another for business development would motivate her. However, she was really accomplishing very little. After removing “should” from her vocabulary, she found her ideal customers and expanded her business. What beliefs are stopping you?

Change is a constant. How do you keep refreshed and engaged?

Elli St.George Godfrey has always been passionate about supporting people to find a way to be their best. Combining a background in psychology and her work with entrepreneurs, she has developed a 3 Keys model that utilizes her clients’ abilities which build on success to propel business and personal growth. By utilizing short-term coaching cycles, Elli and her clients focus on how and who runs the business by integrating the coaching with a process that measures results that can be seen in the bottom line and in each person. Her clients feel confident in identifying and developing strategies to be more effective leaders, plan more creatively, innovate, and overcome the fears and obstacles that interfere with building their businesses according to their vision.

Btb Guest Author

Una Coleman

Changes are a coming…

You don’t have to be a marketing expert anymore to put an ezine together or blast your prospects with an e-marketing campaign or a cool survey.  They are all great ways to engage with your customers and Web 2.0 has given us fantastic, easy to use tools.  However, there is a downside to having access to this functionality at the click of our fingertips: Mail Overload.  We all get them – newsletters with nothing to say (or, too much to say), service offerings that have no relevance to our businesses, no personalisation, or the one that for me guarantees a send to blocked emails, “Dear Coleman”.  The sender hasn’t bothered to check my name: so much for customer care.  That’s why I say you don’t have to be a marketing expert…  Need I say more!

Outbound – email marketing

Unfortunately, the down-side is that our email is rapidly becoming our most protected piece of personal data.  We tweet intimate (and inane) details of our personal lives, we post personal and family pictures on Facebook, we upload embarrassing videos on YouTube, all for the world to see.  But, we hold control of our emails sacrosanct: we are becoming ever more intolerant of interruption based or outbound marketing.

This desire to be in control and decide with whom we wish to correspond is driving inbound and permission based marketing.  Equally, it is driving ever more stringent data-protection rules.  Warning: DON’T FALL FOUL OF DATA PROTECTION LEGISATION

Outbound – tele and direct marketing

And it’s not just email marketing: regulation also applies to direct marketing and telemarketing.  New EU regulation is coming into place the end of this year.  You need to ensure you are familiar with the local legislation in each of the countries you operate.

From October 2009, an amendment to the Dutch Telecommunications Act has come into force establishing new rules for business to business email marketing. Primarily, prior consent must be obtained from the receiver if his/her email address is to be used for future commercial purposes.  If you have an existing newsletter with Dutch email addresses you MUST obtain their consent before sending another newsletter.  You may send an email under separate cover instructing them to “opt in” to continuing to receive your newsletter by replying to that email. Without a confirmation to that email, you are prohibited by law to email that person again.  You have until the end of December to ge that consent.  There are nuances to the legislation and of course, where an established relationship exists as a result of the sale of goods and services permission is deemed to exist.

Opt in email marketing legislation

The amended to the Dutch Telecommunications Act is extreme but likely to set the standard for the future.

In addition to B2B email marketing, there are new and severe restrictions on outbound telemarketing activity.

All telemarketers MUST offer a do not call to prospects and register that number, as part of the call script.

Fines and penalties

In the case of the Netherlands, OPTA (www2.opta.nl/asp/en)  is the supervisory authority. The can impose stiff  fines up to € 450.000 in the case of telemarketing offences, or can go as far as temporarily closing down an organisation involved in outbound  telemarketing

UK email rules are currently based on 2003 legislation.  It is similar but not as restrictive as the Netherlands.  Permission is required for “cold” emailing. You can continue to email exiting clients, without requesting permission, as long as the products and services you are offering are similar.  If you are offering something new, then you need permission: http://www.ico.gov.uk/for_organisations/topic_specific_guides/marketing.aspx

This ever more restrictive legislation requires us to be more active and creative with our inbound, permission based marketing.  Websites must radically change from static brochureware to engaging information gateways that help build your brand and draw your prospects back.

What are your thoughts?  Will this make our task more difficult or will it make us more creative.  I’d love to hear your comments.

Una Coleman is an International Strategy and Marketing Consultant with over 20 years experience in marketing and strategy and international operations both in the US and Europe. Broad functional experience in: Marketing and Communications Strategic and Financial analytics including Business Case Development Consulting and Operational management Client Relationship Management Deep financial services sector knowledge. Worked in organisations ranging from technology start-ups, fast-paced direct marketing agency to large corporates. Member of Enterprise Ireland Mentor Panel Member of IIA (Irish Internet Association) International Strategy Working Group