Red Dragon

Remember Chux? The disposable diaper that took the market by storm in 1932? Of course you don’t. Chux saw its product as a luxury item, and happily kept its little throwaway business to itself for almost forty years. Then Pampers came along in the 1960s, supported by a huge, mass-consumer vision with persistence to match, and blew Chux out of the market-transforming baby rearing forever. And everyone knows the legend of the two Steves-Jobs and Wozniak-who invented the personal computer in someone’s garage. Only they didn’t. The Altair MITS came to market long before in 1975. It’s just that Steve Jobs had the mammoth vision of a computer on every desk; and Apple II became the first PC hit. I just finished reading a brilliant book titled Will and Vision-How Latecomers Grow to Dominate Markets, by Grard J. Tellis and Peter N. Golder. This book takes the concept of vision and makes it concrete, demonstrating sixty-six cases where a huge vision of value for a market combined with persistence and indomitable will, made the ingredients for blockbuster success. Along the way the authors bury the concept of first mover advantage. They offer numerous examples of companies that arrived second, third or later, and went on to dominate their markets. So what does Will and Vision say are the key elements of success? The authors-academics grounded in research-not than starry-eyed growth consultants like yours truly-carefully reviewed the historical record: vision was the number one element. That’s right. Big fat vision backed by persistence, will, and relentless innovation. Today’s world offers many choices. People who lack vision are apt to drift to the next appealing project as soon as things don’t go the way they planned. They lack persistence to achieve anything important. Will and Vision offers us a different kind of world. (Of course I’m biased. I’ve been shouting about vision and commitment for years.) We aren’t talking about a “vision” that’s sloganized and prettified and pasted on a plaque. We mean the kind of vision that highlights the importance and value of a product or service to many people and ultimately points the way to a new future. And, of course, requires a 100% commitment to bring into reality. More mass-value vision examples, from high tech and low: Dell computers, not IBM or IMSAI; Sony video recorders, not Ampex-who gave up a ten year lead; Microsoft Internet Explorer-not Netscape, or its predecessor, Links; McDonalds’ Ray Kroc-not the McDonald Brothers; Gillette-not Wilkenson Sword. Mass market + high utility = big vision. Seeing what no one else can see. Having a new world view. Leaders in each of these companies owned a view that extended further than any of their predecessors. And that expansive vision enabled these people to gain access and leverage the resources (Key #4), maintain the persistence to bring the vision into reality (Key #2), and sustain relentless creativity and innovations (Key #3), over a period of years. Here are a few points about a successful vision taken from the research: * The vision must be unique. Not uniqueness of product per se, but unique in the way your product serves the world;* The vision must be simple and easy to grasp;* Seeds of the vision typically exist in some form in other products or services; (Thank goodness we don’t all have to be inventors or originals-only visionaries!) The new vision may be of a thing for which there no market-yet. (This last bit is illuminating for any of us stuck in market research.) And some important points regarding will: * Reaching your vision may take a long time. Vision without will won’t get you there. Only great commitment can;* A misplaced belief in luck or other unseen forces hinders our ability to persist. We will find evidence that no such luck exists, and use that as an excuse to quit.* And this great insight: persistence can manifest as a series of minor solutions, and contrarily, complacency in small successes can be a barrier to innovation that farsighted vision requires. Some additional tips for long-term success: * Maintain a continuous feedback loop and solicit others’ opinions regarding your execution;* Keep a sharp eye for market changes, and be willing to respond quickly; * And as Andrew Grove suggests, paranoia drives innovation. A healthy fear of competitors sneaking up on you can keep your product or service fresh;So how big is YOUR vision? Is your vision big enough to drive the kind of success you seek? Is your vision large enough to sustain you? Is it important enough to mobilize the resources necessary for its realization? Is it sufficiently inspiring to partners and employees and customers and investors-and all the other people you need to be successful? If you don’t think it’s big enough, it may be time to get your vision checked.

Article Source: www.iSnare.com

We’ve all seen those tempting work at home ads at one time or another. And probably have even been tempted to call them. You know the ones.?Make $2000 a week stuffing envelopes in your home??Earn thousands of dollars per month - from home - processing Medical Billing Claims. No experience required.?Yet as tempting as they sounded, we tend to not call as something in the ad just doesn’t seem right. Unfortunately, every day many people do call these ads and join the programs - much to their financial detriment. While a small number of ?work at home? positions are legitimate, the vast majority are designed to make money for the person running the ad, not the person who is calling the ad. Those dreams of a good income earned at home quickly become a nightmare of charges, fees, supply costs and more. And after all that, no work that you can get paid for ever materializes.While there are scams covering the entire range of possibilities, the most common of them fall into 3 broad categories.Medical Billing - The idea here is that you become an outsource avenue for handling medical billing, chasing accounts receivable, handling electronic insurance claims and more. And the company tells you that they have trained sales staff available to get you accounts. This business requires an investment of anywhere from $2,000 to $5,000. For this, the company will train you and provide you with materials that you need to handle the processing. The pro at the other end of the phone makes it sound really good as they explain how huge the problem is and how much you can earn even with just a few small account. The reality in this opportunity though is anything but rosy. Usually the promised sales help never appears and you are left with getting clients on your own. And those few who even try to give the business a go when they discover this fact usually quit very quickly when they find out how much competition there is for business and how much is locked into large and well established firms. Envelope Stuffing - The pitch here is that they will tell you how to earn money stuffing envelopes. A fee must be paid for the knowledge. The catch is that while they make the pitch, they make it sound like they are selling you training materials for an already lined up job. The reality is that they are generally selling you a blueprint to go out and run the same sorts of ads so that you can sell the same materials to others. In other words, you get your own customers and then you sell them the same info - run ads and sell the course. Assembly/Craft Work - This type of activity sounds real good for the handy person. The pitch is pretty simple. You buy the equipment and raw materials from the company, you assemble the product and send it back assembled and the company will pay you your costs plus a certain profit per item produced. The only catch, and it is made to sound reasonable, is that the finished goods must meet their quality standards for you to be paid.As a conscientious crafter, you figure this is no big deal because you do good quality work. The reality is that the company will never find any of your items of good enough quality for you to buy and you are left to market the goods on your own if you want to recoup your investment. In other words, once they sold you the machines and raw materials, they wipe their hands of you.Does this mean that all work at home jobs are scams? Not at all. There are many legitimate work at home opportunities in the above categories and in many others. But there are also many scams out there and you need to protect yourself. And to do that, you need to ask lots of questions and check out their references before moving forward with any work at home opportunity.Questions you might ask include:What are the specific tasks that you will perform?Will you be paid on salary or a commission or per piece?Who will actually be paying you?When will you get your first paycheck?What is the total cost to participate in the work at home program? And what specifically do you get for you investment?Do they have references that you can check out (i.e. other work at home people you can call)?Listen to the answers they give you and do some additional checking - even if all the answers seem on the up and up. Be sure to check with the Better Business Bureau, your state Attorney General and any local consumer protection agency. If you are up to a bit more snooping, enter their phone number in the Google search engine and see what results you get. Also you can go to the FTC website () to research the company to see if they have any complaints against them.If, after doing all your due diligence, you feel the opportunity is legitimate and is something you wish to participate in, go for it. There are many good opportunities out there and many folks earning very comfortable livings from their spare bedroom. But if an opportunity just doesn’t seem quite right for you, pass on it. There are many more out there for you to explore.

Article Source: www.iSnare.com

Web Design, as design in general, is subject to changes and trend influences. Words like ?fresh, modern, innovative? seem to conquer the world of design while artists strive to discover new directions. Websites are different: objectives, resources and users are the factors shaping the profitability of a site. For a site to be successful, designers need to go ahead of the rules. Breaking the rules is not a problem. Not being able to find something on a website is. The truth is that web design is not easy. There are several factors shaping the web layout and the architecture of a site, some see them as rules, others believe there are no rules at all. Yet, as far as business websites are concerned, there are some guidelines. About Us and Contact UsThe role of a business website is to represent a company and its products on the web, describing the company?s objectives and providing enough information for the users. Users want to know who they are dealing with. The ?about us? area should enclose general information about the management team, company history and company philosophy. This is also the right place to display photos of the team and the managers for a simple reason: pictures enhance credibility, as people believe that you are not trying to hide. Some websites show within the ?about us? category maps and addresses for the company, while others use a ?contact us? area where they display contact forms, phone and fax numbers or department emails. For some users there is nothing more annoying than being forced to fill in long contact formularies or registrations. Try to avoid such practices. Let your users decide if they want to fill in all the details or if they?d rather save some time and fill in a short form. Provide options, be flexible. Products and ServicesDepending on what a company has to offer the ?products? and ?services? areas describe goods or services that are either sold on the website or advertised there in order to be sold somewhere else. The categories should be clearly structured, the descriptions simple and relevant, if necessary illustrated by related pictures or graphics. Too many images though distract users from the content. Use them carefully. News This is quite simple: what?s new about your company or products and services? Do you have any recent awards or events worth a web presentation? Write a text and publish it in this category. Keep it simple and try to use as many business related keywords as possible. More: distribute your news and press releases on relevant web outlets and drive traffic to your site. Try to get testimonials from your clients and display them online. Sometimes even a critique shown online can bring you positive reactions. People will appreciate your honesty, and will trust you more than they trust companies which praise their own success too much. Be realistic, careful and show concern for the users, not for yourself. Disclaimer or Privacy PolicyThis is not a rule: it?s a must! Companies deal with clients; people who wish their privacy to be protected and sometimes other sites can provide illegal or harmful information. Wikipedia defines a disclaimer as follows: ?A disclaimer is a legal statement which generally states that the person/group authoring the disclaimer is not responsible for any mishap in the event of using whatever object or information the disclaimer is attached to.? The privacy policy is, according to the same source, a disclaimer as well: ?A privacy policy is a disclaimer placed on a website informing users about how the website deals with a user’s personal information.? Put simply, maintaining audience expectations and delivering usable content are the main factors influencing the success of a business website. But the website architecture has to be followed by a cutting edge design and reliable ways to increase users? loyalty.Newsletters Sites with fresh content that changes often offer users the option to sign up for eNewsletters. These should not be sent too often: studies show that too many reminders become an annoyance for many clients. Due to the fact that they feel more personal than websites, email newsletters will generate different emotional reactions for the users. The subscribe and unsubscribe options allow companies to measure success: how many users are interested in receiving periodic information and how many lose their interest? The key to successful eNewsletter campaigns is simple: DO NOT SPAM! Let people go if they choose to unsubscribe. If your messages become annoying the negative feelings from one client will easily go to another. ?Verba Volant!? As with website design, the newsletter design should be uncomplicated and user friendly. People should be able to find what they are looking for fast. Even the subscribe and unsubscribe processes should be fast: the longer the time needed to subscribe or unsubscribe, the higher the lost of customer satisfaction.So keep the newsletters simple, useful and easy to deal with. Do not overload clients with information. Just tell them the basics and, if they are interested, they will certainly come to you, email or call, requesting more information. To succeed, write good subject lines that will help users distinguish the newsletter from spam. Each headline has to make sense and preferably be followed by a short abstract of the general content. Plain language is the best approach. People don?t need to get the feeling they are teased or led on. For reference visit Pamil Visions and get the ?Writing Newsletters? *.pdf document you can find in the downloads area.Other IssuesBranding your business doesn?t refer only to stationery and printed brochures. The website is an ideal mean to promote your business visual standards. Include your logo at the top left of all pages and respect your corporate colour scheme. Have a consistent look and feel in all your pages. Again, I encourage you to visit Pamil Visions for advice in this matter, or other branding and public relations related sites. Consistency is a powerful tool. When things are the same users know what to expect. They will not feel intimidated by new approaches or exasperated by unnecessary artifices. For example Flash collected the bronze medal for annoyance. Let it out. Why should you open your site with an intro most of the users will skip anyways? The same goes for pop-ups! Make the site easy to read. That means you need choose the fonts and their colours carefully: not too big or too light. The most legible fonts are standard serif and sans-serif (Times, Arial; Verdana). The pictures and graphics should have small file sizes to avoid slow loading pages. Optimise your pictures for the web.Content you write for the web should be short, scannable and to the point. Some business sites are afraid that users will copy their valuable texts and use them somewhere else, getting commercial advantages. For this reasons they ask the designers to display texts as a picture. Wrong: have you ever heard of print screen? If someone wants to copy your work that will happen anyway no matter if we talk about text or graphics.

Article Source: www.iSnare.com

It’s the oldest sales tactic in the world… And one of the worst… Price cutting. Before you make your next price cut in the face of sales resistance, the question you have to ask yourself is not, “Does it work?,” but rather, “Can you live with the bargain?” Here’s a pop quiz: you - in your role as salesperson - go for the close. You ask the prospect to make a commitment and they don’t. What’s your first response? Well, if you are like most people in a selling situation - whether you are the hired sales guy or the CEO-your first response to people not buying-for whatever the reason-is to say, “Would you buy if… ?,” and the “if” is always some variant of, “…if the price was lower?” And you ask it almost before you ask them WHY they won’t buy. And it’s not only when they tell you they won’t buy. Many people in sales mentally calculate the discount into their profit calculations, and start discounting even before they try to close the deal. In almost every sales job that I’ve worked in, people faced with an end-of-quarter crunch to “make the numbers” start playing the discount game. In many industries, it’s become common practice to give away all the profits, and many customers are trained to expect it. Trouble is, people are not usually ‘not buying’ because your price is too high. If you’ve taken the trouble to establish the real of your product or service, you - and your prospect - already know that the value far exceeds the price you are asking. (If not, you better go back and rethink the math.) So if they are saying “no,” or simply not saying “yes,” it either means they are experienced buyers waiting for you to spontaneously cut your price, or it means they just do not see a sufficiently compelling value…yet. Cutting your prices will almost never lead to new sales if they didn’t plan on buying in the first place, and the effect on your profits can be devastating. Follow these numbers: Let’s say you sell a product for $100. Your cost is $70. That means it carries a thirty percent margin-your profit is $30. Now, to make a sale, you are “forced” to cut your price by twenty percent. Your new selling price is $80. All things being equal, your profit is now $10-instead of $30. That means a 20% price reduction cost you 66% of your profits. TWO-THIRDS OF YOUR PROFITS for a 20% price reduction! Cut your price much more and your profit quickly goes to zero. Or lower. And that’s not even the worst of it. Once you lower prices, they tend to stay low. That $100 widget you just sold for $80… Well, sorry to say, but it’s now an $80 widget. Even more damaging, your like-minded competitors will almost definitely lower their prices, and you, my friend, are in a price war. To win in this scenario, you need deep pockets to sustain a losing position for the duration. So for these three reasons-depressed profit margins, permanently lowered prices, and the devastation of a price war-it’s a bad idea to lower your prices to buy business-regardless of the economic climate. What can you do instead? The two main strategies are clarifying and quantifying the value, and packaging products or services to maintain higher prices. Here’s an interesting example. One of my clients-a software company-had a hot prospect who didn’t want to buy the typical contract for software maintenance. They felt that 18% per year was just too expensive, and wanted to pay ad hoc instead. My client knew this was a bad idea. Customers without maintenance contracts typically become your worst. Why? Because they know it’s going to cost them each time they pick up the phone for support, so they try not to. Thus, they don’t get the right level of service, they don’t know how to use the product and they don’t get the results they paid for in the first place. And even though it’s their fault for skimping, they point the finger at you and badmouth your company. On my advice, my client offered the prospect a four year non-cancelable maintenance contract, and gave them the first year for free. And although it was a 25 percent reduction in total purchase price, it never lowered the per year pricing, and it actually guaranteed more than the prospect’s original commitment. Plus, my client locked in that customer for four full years, during which time they rightly expect to sell them additional products and services. Price cutting is the “lazy man’s” response when it’s hard to make sales. Unfortunately, it may not boost total revenues, and results in drastically lowered profits on the sales that do get made. Often the outcome includes permanently reduced prices and margins, and even a price war, which has disastrous consequences for all players, except very deep-pocketed ones. Sell the value instead. Spend the time to discover what your prospect is trying to accomplish, and make sure your product or service helps them do that. Then establish the quantifiable financial impact, and sell them that. Or package, bundle or go for the long-term, multi-year commitment. There are other approaches that not only maintain price levels, but even support higher ones. To get an overview of those approaches, visit http://www.lemberg.com/tipsandtools.html and download “5 tactics to avoid price cutting.” –PL

Article Source: www.iSnare.com

Welcome to Actualblog.net. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!