How important do you think your attitude is to the sale? And I’m not just talking about a positive attitude alone. I’m talking about a presence that’s fired up with enthusiasm and passion for what you do. It’s having the physical and mental energy to keep on going after many people would give up and go home. It’s how you move, how you approach another person, it’s in your handshake and how you stand and face the person. Your energy can make or break the sales call.

When you call on a customer with energy and enthusiasm, it means that you believe in your product or service, and are excited about what you have to offer your customer. This isn’t bravado; a sincere belief in yourself and your product can’t be faked. You don’t have to take my word for it; these are comments from real customers:

• “A sales person needs to stimulate me into buying his products. He needs some energy, some enthusiasm, some pizzazz.”
   
• “My favorite rep is incredibly energetic and enthusiastic. She does her job really well and she makes me feel good at the same time.”

Here are some key points to keep in mind about the correlation between energy and your overall success:

• Energy = motivation: William Clements, the former governor of Texas, told me, “Energy is the secret to everything.

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There are more benefits to keeping your marketing copy short and sweet than saving ad space. Clear and concise messages stand a better chance of being read or heard in their entirety vs. long-winded messages weighed down with filler words and extraneous information consumers don’t care about.

Fortunately, there is a tool you can use to make sure your marketing copy is succinct, and consumers actually receive your most important messages–the messages that will lead them to action. I call it the “red pen rule.”

The Red Pen Rule
Once you have written final marketing copy that you feel is tight and compelling for your ad, brochure, website or any marketing initiative, take out a red pen (like the ones your teachers used to use to grade your essays), and delete at least 30 percent of it. Your copy will be better off without those extra words.

Once you apply the red pen rule to your copy, your most important messages will jump off the page. Consumers will be more intrigued, and more of them will actually make it through your marketing piece and reach your call to action. That 30 percent you deleted would have slowed your audience down.

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Situation 1: Jeff and Maria are co-workers at a company that lets employees set their own hours. Jeff usually saunters into the office about 10 a.m., while Maria is there promptly at 9 a.m. She often has to take care of Jeff’s customers due to his lateness. He rationalizes that all is OK because he stays until 6 p.m. to “make up his time.” However, his clients usually stop calling at 5 p.m. Maria is angry with Jeff and becomes irritable and frustrated with him. She takes it out on him in daily interactions and sometimes even in staff meetings. Clearly, their conflict is an issue.

Situation 2: Allen and Leo are both managers. In almost every staff meeting, they bicker. They try to cut each other off, they criticize each other’s comments, and they waste time that could be devoted to essential business matters.

In both of these situations, conflict results in a waste of time, energy and productivity. Are business situations like these rare? Or is this kind of conflict exclusive to large companies?

Hardly.

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After working in Mexico City as a manufacturer’s representative for two years, Elizabeth Helsley thought about returning to her hometown of San Diego to start her own company. Then she ran the numbers and discovered that bootstrapping her business in Mexico would drastically reduce her overhead. She decided to stay.

“The cost of living here is so much cheaper,” says Helsley, who launched Global Luxe, a firm that helps manufacturers enter the Mexican market, this spring. “I just moved into a really nice place with three bedrooms, and I’m paying less than $800. In San Diego, the same place would be $2,000 a month.”

But she’s not just saving on room and board. Her operating costs are also significantly lower.

“Here, I can hire an accountant for $20 a month,” Helsley says. Also cheaper: legal services, printing costs, trade show fees and, most significantly, corporate taxes. (According to KPMG’s latest ”Competitive Alternatives” report, Mexico’s business taxes are 40 percent lower than those in the United States.)

For Helsley, the financial boon wasn’t the only detail that tipped the scale in Mexico’s favor. S

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By Julie Sartain

Apple’s iPhone has more than 200,000 applications in its library, and the list is growing. But with so many options, how do you decide which apps are relevant to your work? Obviously, no one has the time or money to download and review them all.

Nor does anyone plan to start working full-time on a cell phone, but these apps can provide adequate functionality, when necessary, and save the day in a pinch by helping you complete work on an iPhone.

1. ProOnGo Expense: Free (optional ProOnGo Receipt Reader has subscription fees based on number of scanned receipts)

Even if your company already has an online expense program, this free application could make your employees’ lives much easier, not to mention fewer errors for accountants to deal with. You and your employees can organize and track personal or business expenses, mileage, and time.

Users can manage their expenses on the iPhone using the app’s options and features, or export the data to QuickBooks, an Excel spreadsheet, a CSV file, or in XML format. S

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How do your customers use the web? It’s a simple question, but a question many small-business owners forget to discuss when working on their website. Frequently, small businesses get focused on their own technology and not the tools of their customers. From iPads and smartphones to oversized monitors and laptops, how do you deliver your message to your customer online today?

Review the Metrics
If you have a website, you should have some type of metrics or analytic application on your website. This is a way of measuring traffic to your website, and a feature offered by some applications is the ability to review browser information. This means reviewing what web browsers and operating systems your customers use and what screen resolution they have set on their monitors. These analytics can help you decide if it’s time to deliver content in different ways.

Mobile Style
When your website is accessed through a mobile device, how does it look? Here are two things to keep in mind when thinking about your website. The first is that image-heavy sites take longer to download on cell phones. The second is that Flash animation can’t be seen on all phones.

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This is a blog about retirement plans. So why, you might ask, am I reviewing a book about health care? I’m certainly not an expert on this complicated topic. But I am an expert on paying for it as a business owner, as a health care consumer, and an expert on watching client business owners and their employees also deal with it. And as costs and premiums continue to escalate, seeing these same employers and employees shift dollars more into health care at the expense of retirement savings.

So what’s the solution? In the view of many experts, it’s not legislation that will fix health care system in the form of the recently passed Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). Indeed, one expert, Paul Kasriel who is Senior Vice President and Director of Economic Research at The Northern Trust, says the PPACA “primarily represents a redistribution of income from the young and healthy to the under-65 less healthy.”

Others more cynical point to the new 10 percent tax on all indoor tanning sessions starting July 1 as part of PPACA.

Jim Champy and Harry Greenspun, M.D. provide a different approach in their new book, REENGINEERING HEALTH CARE: A Manifesto for Radically Rethinking Health Care Delivery. You may r

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Online banking is a double-edged sword for small businesses: It’s easy and convenient, and yet it makes them vulnerable targets for cybercriminals. There are a lot of small businesses out there, and they don’t all have the big budgets for IT resources or a large staff.

Another potential downside is that as a small business, protection laws work differently. Small businesses may have more difficulty recovering any online account losses because business accounts typically do not have the same level of legal protection provided to consumers.

Like safecrackers of a different era, cybercriminals have many tools at their disposal to break into online accounts. Typically, businesses get tricked into giving out sensitive information through phishing attacks.  A phishing attack is when seemingly legitimate e-mails lead to websites where they are asked to enter sensitive information (such as user names, passwords, credit card data, etc). Both the e-mails and the websites are professionally designed and appear to come from legitimate, trustworthy sources.  Once cybercriminals have secured the information, they can either target the account to transfer funds out of the accounts or sell the login details to other cybercriminals–User information for online banking accounts is usually sold priced as a percentage of the available balance on the account. T

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Every day, hundreds of thousands of people choose to do business with a particular person or business because there’s an assurance they’ll get what they expect, when they expect it, the way they expect it.

And yet thousands of businesses lose at least one customer every day because they did not live up to the reasonable expectations of their clientele in terms of reliability, responsibility or dependability.

The sad truth is, many businesses (and people) have made a habit of being:

Careless
Maybe they forgot, maybe they get a better offer or opportunity, maybe they just can’t get their act together–the bottom line is, whatever you wanted didn’t get done.

Spineless
People will tell you they’ll have something completed by a certain time or date even though they know they know they can’t deliver. That’s because they believe (often with good reason) that you’ll take your business elsewhere if they tell you the truth. Somehow telling you “yes” now and facing the music later feels more comfortable.

Fearful
Often, people are embarrassed to admit they don’t understand what you want because they’re afraid they’ll look stupid.

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