Business Information

I read a really useful post by Brad Sugars on Entrepreneur.com the other day and it reminded me of what Tim Berry and John Jantsch often have to say.  The post was about marketing planning and listed five things to avoid when putting your plan together. These words particularly caught my eye:

A good marketing plan is like a battle plan or a game plan; it should serve as a guide and a blueprint for the actions you need to take to grow your business. It should also have some flexibility because as you start testing and measuring tactics, you’ll need to shift strategies from time to time, to capture or gain share in a particular market. That said, a good plan doesn’t need to be complicated.

This post resonated with me because planning is what we ‘preach’, but it also resonated with me because it is so true. John Jantsch, marketing guru, always has tips on how to effectively market your business, and Tim Berry, business planning expert, always has tips on how to effectively plan and create a business or marketing plan. So much of what Brad had to say seemed to align perfectly with what John and Tim regularly blog about and teach.

As you enter into 2009 and think about how to keep your company charging forward, think about your marketing plan. Have you truly thought about and narrowed down your ideal customer? Do you have a marketing budget or know how much your marketing initatives cost? Do you have a handle on how to acquire new leads and customers? Are you tracking your progress? Make sure you have some sort of plan in place – but be flexible and know it is not set in stone. It is simply a guide to help you get to where you want to go and see your business succeed.

Happy planning in the New Year!

Kristen Langham
Manager of Business Development
Palo Alto Software, Inc.

Tags: Marketing, marketing planning
Posted on December 30th, 2008 | No Comments »

Fortune on cnn.money.com today released its list of the 21 Dumbest Moments in Business in 2008.

Read through the list and see if you agree. I suspect you’ll find a couple you weren’t aware of, and, likely, you’ll know of others which you think belong on the list as well. As Fortune says, “…even in moments of crisis, stupidity lives on.”

Steve Lange
Senior Editor
Palo Alto Software

Tags: , business faux pas, dumb business
Posted on December 29th, 2008 | No Comments »

Business pitches are growing in popularity here in the UK as well as in the US. However, as this article, The Business Pitch by Alan Gleeson illustrates, business pitches are no substitute for the real thing – a thorough business plan!

This short article describes the concept of pitching in detail, and argues why pitches are not substitutes for business plans, before recommending some tips to ensure that your pitch hits all the right spots. Finally for some further information on what an elevator pitch is, visit Tim Berry’s article series on the Elevator Pitch at BPlans.com.

Alan Gleeson

Palo Alto Software UK

Tags: business pitch, business plan, elevator pitch, pitch
Posted on December 10th, 2008 | No Comments »

As an extension of my earlier blog on fuel efficiency comparisons, I continued my research and put together a fuel efficiency article that I’ve posted on our business-planning resource site,  Bplans.com. This article, Dealing with rising gas costs, includes tips on gas mileage, alternative fuels, how to be more fuel efficient when traveling on business, and how to choose a more fuel-efficient vehicle.

For example, did you know that “…each 5 mph you drive over 60 mph is like paying an additional $0.24 per gallon for gas,” or that the time of day you travel can affect your fuel efficiency?

If your business is looking for fuel-saving tips, check this article out.

Take a look at all our Global Entrepreneurship Week Bplans Back to the Fundamentals contributions.

Tags: , "Back to the Fundamentals", alternative fuels, backtofundamentals, fuel efficiency, gas
Posted on November 21st, 2008 | No Comments »

There are so many details to managing a good Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign that many people outsource the task to those who know the systems very well. Others try to manage their website’s keyword lists, advertising copy and landing page on their own – Some do it well, others do not.

It’s important to go back to the basics of a PPC campaign (keywords, advertising text and landing pages). Google is constantly changing the aspects of how advertisements are ranked for certain keywords (it’s not just about the bid), that having the core fundamentals in place is important and needs constant review.

I’m going to be presenting this subject in three parts, starting with keywords:

Your keywords are how people find your website, your products and your services. The terms that potential customers type in when searching can be everything from your website name to a very obscure misspelling of your top product.

Doing research on which terms people are using to find you is critical. You want to be in front of those potential customers. Google AdWords has a good keyword tool that lets you enter a term, such as one of your product names, and it will give you the average search volume for the past month as well as other related search terms. This tool is one of many that give you the power to find out what your potential customers are typing into the search engines to find your business.

For those who already have a keyword list, it is still beneficial to get back to the basics and see what others are searching for. Trends change, language changes and seasons change. Many different external factors could have an impact on user behavior.

Once you have finished researching your terms or refining your keyword list, review your list of terms. Ensure that these are the terms you still want to bid on. Perhaps your business goals have changed and you no longer want to promote Red Widgets because you have found that Blue and Green Widgets are what potential customers really want.

Change is good – as long as it follows a plan.

Bonus Tip: Use the Search Query Report. Among the reports in Google AdWords is a search query report that aggregates the actual searches that people used to find your ad and site. This is a great place to get additional keywords (straight from the user!) and also to find negative keywords. Negative keywords are important to help qualify your customer before they see your ad (and before you get the impressions and clicks that you know will not convert).

Nicole Poole
Online Marketing Manager
Palo Alto Software

Tags: , fundamentals, ppc
Posted on November 19th, 2008 | 1 Comment »

For those of you who attended Monday’s Back to the Fundamentals webinar, you heard a lot of references to some websites, books and blogs.

For the reference of those people looking for more information and for those of you who weren’t able to make it to the webinar, I’m going to put a reference list here.

If there are any that I fail to include here, please leave a comment and I’ll track it down and get it for you.

Tim Berry

Blogs : Planning, Startups, Stories, Up and Running,  Tim’s posts at HuffingtonPost, Tim at Anita Campbell’s Small Business Trends, Planning Demystified at AllBusiness.com

Books:  The Plan-As-You-Go Business Plan book and website, Three Weeks to Start-up

Slides: Download the slides from Monday’s webinar as well as other presentations Tim has given over the years.

The webinar itself will be available for download starting today at our video site   eta: This link is fixed now, sorry about that!

Resources: Palo Alto Software products,  Business and Marketing calculators, more planning video’s.

I hope that was helpful, again, if I’ve missed anything or you’re wondering about a particular resource or website, just comment!

‘Chelle Parmele
Social Media Marketing Manager
Palo Alto Software

Tags: backtofundamentals, business planning, global entrepreneurship week, resources, smart planning, Tim Berry, webinar
Posted on November 18th, 2008 | No Comments »

Anita Campbell of the Small Business Trends website and blog is having a birthday this week, and to celebrate, she’s giving away amazing gifts all week long.

Today’s give away is a chance to incorporate your business for free. Yes, that’s right…Free.

If you have been thinking of turning your sole proprietorship into a corporation, today you can do it for free, saving $150.

Go to MyCorporation.com. When you sign up to incorporate, use the code FREE149. The code is good through today, November 11, 2008.

Keep checking the smallbusinesstrends website for more great give aways during the week and don’t forget to wish Anita a happy birthday!

‘Chelle Parmele
Social Media Marketing Manager
Palo Alto Software

photo and cake by Pat Parmele

Tags: anita campbell, giveaway, small business trends
Posted on November 11th, 2008 | No Comments »

Every time I think about blogging, I question what I should write about, whether or not I have the time, if people will read my posts, etc. But when I actually think about what blogging can do for our business, it’s really a no-brainer. Blogging is pretty much free marketing (and can actually be kind of fun!). So how can you go wrong with that?

I recently read an article stating that in times of economic crises (like many feel we are experiencing today), you should continue or expand your marketing budget. The logic was that if others are cutting their budgets, you have a “greater window of opportunity to get your message across to your market.” While I do understand this logic, it is always prudent, recession or no recession, to be smart about how, where and why you are spending your marketing and advertising dollars.

Traditional advertising often doesn’t provide the results businesses are looking for, so even if they have a robust marketing budget, organizations often look for creative (and low-cost) ways to market and advertise. Blogging is one such way, and it can be an extremely effective marketing tool. Not only are you putting content out there for others to read, but when people comment and link back to their blogs, it can start a cycle of exposure.

Aside from creating and writing your own blog, there are other ways to get noticed in the world of blogging. Just like others can comment on your blog, you should explore and find a blog you like, post comments and link back to your company’s blog. There are an abundance of bloggers out there, so you are sure to find at least one that provides interesting and useful content for you to read and comment on.  And since there are so many bloggers out there, another way to draw attention to your company is to act as a guest blogger for someone else in your sphere.

Both Wordpress.com and Blogger.com provide free accounts, so take advantage of a free account and add blogging to your marketing mix.

Kristen Langham
Manager of Business Development
Palo Alto Software

Tags: blogging, blogs, creative marketing, Marketing
Posted on October 30th, 2008 | No Comments »

(Ed note: I’m taking the liberty of reposting this here, from where it originally appeared on entrepreneur.com, for the convenience of our BIG blog readers, since I wrote it. Tim.)

I’m a baby boomer, born in 1948. I’ve seen recessions before. I was job hunting during the recession of 1971. My wife and I were deeply in debt and trying to buy a house during the recession of 1982. We sold a house in California and moved to Oregon during the recession of 1992. We had to lay people off–five of 35–during the recession of 2001. And this recession seems like the worst I’ve seen.

So it’s time to go back to fundamentals. That doesn’t necessarily mean cutting costs, dropping products or selling off inventory. And it definitely doesn’t have to mean cutting people.

1. Planning

The first fundamental is your planning, which essentially means watching things more closely. Track your progress on cash, sales, expenses, new projects, customer satisfaction, internet traffic, ad spending–all of it. And track it more closely.

Look for built-in indicators. It’s your business; you know what they are. Think about what drives your sales–or expenses–and how you can get early warning about changes that might affect you. For some, it’s as simple as street traffic or floor traffic. For others it’s internet traffic or e-mail response rates or deal flow or lead generation. Don’t wait for the results to play all the way through your system–look for them early.

One of the first things to do when things get tough is tighten the planning and shorten the planning cycle. Review your progress more often than usual. Think of it as zooming in on the detail–look at things by week instead of by month or by month instead of by quarter.

If ever there were a time for careful planning, it’s now. It brings me back to one of my favorite quotes from Dwight D. Eisenhower: “The plan is useless; but planning is essential.”

2. Watch Cash Flow Drivers

The second fundamental is watching the drivers of cash flow. Keep a very close eye on burn rate vs. revenues. Burn rate, in this context, is a lot like fixed costs, but more. Fixed costs are what you’d pay even if your business closed down. Burn rate is what you pay regularly every month to keep your business running, but without the variable costs of sales or direct costs. That includes probably all of your salaries (unless you have some assembly labor or part-time labor that goes up when sales go up and down when sales go down), your rent, your ongoing marketing expenses, your office expenses and all the rest. If your revenue goes down, you can maintain your burn rate for a while, sacrificing profits; but you can’t let revenues stay under the burn rate for very long without losing capital and, if the problem continues, going under.

I know you know that, but I put it here because the vocabulary helps. Revenue vs. burn rate: keep the revenue higher than the burn. And don’t forget that if you’ve got business-to-business sales, business customers are likely to take longer than usual to pay. That involves factoring in collection days–the measure of how fast customers pay what they owe you. If the collection days increase, cash decreases.

3. People

The third fundamental is people. Don’t make the mistake of laying people off too soon. No matter how carefully you follow your plan, layoffs might be necessary. But don’t be too quick because the recession will end. Good employees are hard to find–especially trained people who know your business.

The science behind email behavior is extensive, I’m sure, and not something that I purport to know much about, from a factual standpoint. Most of the email-based thoughts and assumptions I make throughout my day are driven by a fair bit of intuitiveness — with a dash and a half of instinct and a peppering of intelligence gathering.

I would hazard a guess that most people fall into my category — that is, if they think at all about email as anything more thhan simply a communication medium.

But not Kaitlin “Ducky” Sherwood. You can click on her name to read her full bio, but I’ll give you enough information to establish context. She’s written two books on overcoming email overload, was the first Webmaster at the University of Illinois (during the Mosaic creation days) and just recently earned an MS in Computer Science.

I got to spend an hour on the phone with her, aggressively asking for her opinion on email and cautiously tip-toeing into her thoughts on Email Center Pro.

Sherwood speaks with confident conviction about all manner of topics, but, for my purposes, focused most of her energy on email. Much of what was said centered around the idea that, as yet, the perfect email system doesn’t exist. And the reason for that is that no provider is meeting all of Sherwood’s standards — many of which have to do with efficiently and effectiveely moving through email in a reasonably organized way.

She chuckles at the notion of “Inbox Zero,” the popular concept that basically mystifies people into thinking they’ve properly dealt with all of their messages just by clearning their inbox. But, have they? Have they adequately addressed that communication channel, or have they simply shifted it from one place to another so as to better manage the guilt associated with 100 unread messages?

Sherwood argues for the latter, asserting that the psychology of seeing “0″ as an Inbox tally is ggiven disproportionate weight in relationship to proper management of email as a communication vehicle — creating a false sense of security, if you will.

Much of that, Sherwood continues, is driven by the passionate pursuit of perfect filtering. Users constantly seeking to compartmentalize the various buckets of information flowing into their Inboxes chew up time that can’t possibly be recovered through the convenience associated with “more easily” scanning through those folders.

In essence, filters/folders/etc. are not effective means of organizing data — given the existence of an uber-powerful search function. Wiith the reality of virtually limitless data storage, it no longer makes efficient sense to try to organize things the way we needed to when filing cabinets held all of our pertinent paper work. Without proper paper management, I might lose a week looking for a single document. Now, I type “2006 tax returns” into the search bar and PRESTO!

In light of that, it’s comforting to know that an advanced search functionality provides the infrastructure for version 2 of Email Center Pro, which is scheduled for release in the next couple of weeks.

So, do the psychological aspects of email resonate with you? Do you struggle against the rising tide of email overload? What is your method for managing your inbox?

Jason Gallic
Product Marketing Manager
jason@paloalto.com

Tags: , e-mail, email, Email Center Pro, organization
Posted on September 25th, 2008 | No Comments »