When trying to source clients in your business, first impressions count. You need to make every effort to ensure your company stands out from the competition, so how you present yourself and your service matters.

Here are several ways you can make a good first impression when meeting new clients.

Do your homework

When meeting a prospective client, you need to do your homework. Visit their website and find out as much about them as you can, knowing their company’s history and mission statement. In much the same way you would for a job interview, knowing you have done some research will make the client look favorably towards you.

Be on time

When traveling to the meeting, make sure you are punctual and arrive early if possible. Get to know the route you will be taking so you don’t get lost on the way, and take into account traffic and parking spots limited by car park markings. You need time to prepare yourself when you arrive, such as heading to the restroom to make sure you look presentable, and to gain composure. Arriving late and disheveled is not the way to guarantee a good first impression.

Focus on your presentation

You need to look presentable, so wear something that befits the meeting. A designer suit is preferable for a formal business meeting, but you don’t want to overdress for something informal. You need to feel comfortable in whatever you wear, but you don’t want to stand out for the wrong reasons with an inappropriate outfit.

As you meet your clients, a firm handshake will show you have confidence. However, you don’t want to grip too tightly, as your lasting impression shouldn’t be bruising on your client’s fingers. When you shake hands, smile and give eye contact. On your first meeting, you are trying to convey a positive image, so everything from your face to your body language will improve your first impression. You can even exchange business cards to get each other’s contact information. Just make sure that your card is presentable. That can easily be achieved with the assistance of services like printing services dublin.

Active listening

You may be pitching an idea, but it is important to engage with what your client is saying. Again, focus on your body language to show you are attentive. Don’t interrupt your client, but wait for appropriate times to speak and ask questions. If you try to hurry them or finish off their sentences, they won’t feel valued by you. Similarly, asking a question to something they have already given the answer to will show you haven’t listened properly.

A lasting impression

When meeting a client, you don’t want them to forget you in favor of your competition. Leave them with a professionally made business card from a company such as these compelling

z card printing designs. Say goodbye with another firm handshake, and thank your client for their valuable time.

Don’t hurry to contact your client again, but give them time to think about the meeting you had. However, you don’t want to lose their potential custom, so a quick phone call or an email after a couple of days to remind them you are still interested in their business will suffice.

A lot of people start out from home when they launch their own business. For some, they are perfectly content here, while for others, they want to grow their company as quickly as they can so they are able to move onto bigger things. If you are in the second category, then this article is for you. Though it is often not easy to expand your home-based business, there are a few things that you can do to improve your chances significantly. Here are just a few of them.

Focus on One Product or Service to Begin With

A common mistake that a lot of people make is that they try to spread themselves too thin by focusing on too many things all at once. Instead, you should concentrate on a single product or service and find new ways to market and sell it. The best way of achieving a goal is by concentrating 100 percent of your focus on it. Only then should you be thinking about diversifying and moving into different areas.

Increase Sales to Existing Customers

Increasing sales to the customers you have already is an enormous amount cheaper than constantly looking for new ones. Your best way of doing this is by encouraging their loyalty. Once you have their contact information, you can present them with exclusive deals via email marketing. You can also encourage them to follow you on social media and make sure you are active on your accounts. Another option is to set up a loyalty scheme which gives them a discount or special offer.

Outsource to Help You Out

If you are trying to do everything with limited resources, this means that your business is not operating to its full potential. One option to get around this problem is to outsource certain areas of your business. Many businesses choose to hire in a professional to help out with their accounting needs or you could otherwise look into IT Consulting for businesses as technology is an extremely important area of every company these days. Ultimately, outsourcing helps to free up your time so you can concentrate on other areas of your business.

Focus on Digital Marketing

Most home businesses tend to focus their efforts online as this is the best way that you can reach out to people. It is all well and good having a fantastic business idea and great website to back it up, but if no one can find you, it won’t do you much good. So, you should look at ways that you can get the word out there including social media, email marketing, SEO and digital advertising. A coherent digital strategy is vital for any growing business.

Learn as Much as You Can

If you are new to the world of business, you should try to learn as much as you can by reading widely, going to training sessions and attending networking events. Continual development is something that all entrepreneurs should be striving to achieve whenever possible.

Software is a term that many business owners don’t completely understand. The distinction between hardware and software is a simple one and most people understand the differences. However, what they don’t quite understand is how they both work together in order to grow a business’s technological prowess. As a result, companies usually hire expensive software developers in an attempt to grow their business, but the mistake they make is relying on said software developers to formulate a plan for them.

This is the wrong way to go about things. Software developers, while creative people, possess the skills to make almost anything happen from a technological standpoint. However, they often make fairly poor advisors due to their lack of knowledge of how businesses work and they need guidance from more experienced members of staff. As a result, people often have misled expectations when hiring a software developer and deem it as a waste of money.

So in order to help you grow your business, here are a couple of tips on how to correctly utilize a talented software developer.

Understand what software can do

First, learn what software can actually do for your business as well as the benefits of .NET framework. For instance, if you need to strategically assess your business needs, define the project requirements, plan the functionality, reporting, and dashboards, and structure an overall project plan, then you may consider netsuite support or NetSuite SuiteCommerce services. Moreover, a couple of good examples include setting up a web-based eCommerce portal to sell products online, and another use could be to use a mobile app to increase exposure for your business. There are many different ways to use software to grow your business, but it’s important that you understand the limitations involved and how you can get around them.

Have a plan for the developer

When you hire a developer from soda software developments, ensure that you’re going to be using them for a long period of time. Once the program is created, you’ll likely need the developer to stay on board to fix potential issues, update the software or even create newer versions in the future. It goes without saying that you can’t just hire a developer for a single project—they need to be involved in the future as well. You may also need to hire specialised developers for different aspects of your business, or to work together as a team.

Support the developer’s needs

Software developers are expensive not just because of their salary, but because they’ll need specialised tools in order to do their job correctly. For instance, this article titled Application Dependency Mapping & Performance explains how programmers use dependencies in order to expand what their software can do. In order to manage all of these extensions, they require the use of sophisticated programs and hardware in order to get the most of their code. This demands some money, so don’t be surprised if your software developer asks you to spend even more cash to meet your expectations.

You may also recommend them this react tutorial to expand their expertise.

Follow up with customer support

Lastly, make sure your software has a lot of support behind it. If you create a mobile app, your users will eventually run into some issues that have to be fixed and you need to give them support for when they encounter problems. This means you’ll also need a few specialists that are able to answer customer queries, be it on the phone or over email.

A few decades ago, setting up your own business would be the far off dream of a few, fortunate people. It would involve hiring property, huge bank loans and the necessary financial backing of business savvy investors who would expect a substantial cut of your profits in return. But in this day and age, things have changed. If you have a bright business plan, you can set up your company from the comfort of your own home. So if you’re sick of pandering to a boss and making other people’s dreams a reality, it may well be time to start laying the foundations of your own business venture. Here’s everything you need to know to get you going.

Creating a Sound Business Concept

Always do your research before setting up any business. Set up costs may well be relatively cheap, but you still don’t want to waste any of your money in building a business that might fall at the first hurdle. Not to mention the time that is going to go into this. So make sure that you have a solid business concept before getting started. You can test out selling your products on small sites like eBay, Depop, and Etsy to begin. If people show interest and sales start coming in, then you can look to expand and progress. You can also test out the market for your products at local sales. Another good idea is to conduct market research. Find individuals from your target audience and ask them about their likelihood of purchasing certain products. Questionnaires and interviews can also help you to decide on product prices and beneficial advertising techniques.

Bring in the Pros

Chances are, you’re currently in full-time employment, tiding yourself over until your own business is up and going. A day job, alongside family and social commitments, means that you probably don’t have all that much time to spare when it comes to creating your own startup. But not to worry. This is where the professionals can chip in and help to take a little bit of the weight and pressure off your shoulders. Company formation firms know the ins and outs of the formation process and will be able to do most of the hard work on your behalf. With endless startups to their name, they will know every aspect of the process that needs to be addressed, while ensuring that everything remains personal and branded to your taste. You can read more about the services available to you here.

Get Branding

If you’ve decided to go ahead with creating your business, it’s time to start branding. This allows you to build a name for yourself in the world of commerce. You will need a brand name, logo, and design for your site (this can include coming up with an effective color scheme and typeface). If things are going well, you could look into buying the rights to your designs. Trademarking will prevent copycat scammers from stealing your hard work and selling it for their own profit. You can have trademarks with the help of a professional and experienced trademark law attorney.

Long gone are the days when opening up a small business meant simply renting a store and selling your wares to people who happened to come inside. Nowadays, e-commerce is one of the most rapidly expanding areas of the market. It’s not surprising. There are endless benefits to selling your stock online. Firstly, it allows your products to reach a large audience. When you sell online, your goods become available to a worldwide market. International shipping is at an all time high, as people are showing higher interest in goods that can only be attained abroad. With this, you need to invest in high-quality shipping boxes so that you’ll be assured that your goods will arrive to your customers in good condition. You may also hop over to these guys to rent a commercial storage space for your supplies. Secondly, people can access your business twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. This means there are more hours in the day for people to buy from you. This results in increasing impulse buys, which would otherwise have been cast aside by the time you’d usually open up shop in the morning. So, if this all sounds good to you and you’ve decided it’s high time that you set up an online store, here are some top tips to getting things moving in the right direction.

Choose a Platform

There are plenty of casual sites out there that have sales options that can be added. However, these are better for individuals selling personal items through their blogs. When it comes to business, Web Hosting is the most effective and professional looking option for your sales. You gain the option of purchasing and using a domain name, allowing people to find your business more easily. You also have the option of creating a business email, which gives a much better impression to buyers than contacting you on a personal email address will. This also allows you to effectively separate your work and home life.

Choose a Design

When you set your site up, it is probably best to bring in a professional web designer. You may have already collaborated with a graphic designer in the past to create a logo and brand name font. Ask this individual to send you the original files of the designs, for you to transfer to a web designer who will be able to incorporate them into the layout of your web page. You will be able to work with the web designer to ensure that the final product is everything you wished it to be. From color palettes to font and pop-up windows. You will be able to have everything exactly as you’d imagined.

Choose Payment Methods

When people pay online, they will want to ensure that they are using secure payment methods. Paypal is a great option and one of the most commonly used online payment methods.

You could use this in conjunction with accepting payments from all big card names, such as Visa, Delta, and American Express. The more options that you offer your customer base, the more profit you will make, if you will like to set an instant payment option, check out this personal injury attorney PPC management. If you don’t take a customer’s preferred payment method, they may be tempted to purchase the product elsewhere from one of your competitors and this could also result in future lost sales.

As a business owner you should be doing everything you can to keep your business safe from any sort of turmoil. But, today, one of the biggest turmoils you should seek to safeguard your business from are those that are technologically induced. There are a host of ways in which your business can be compromised and attacked when it comes to technology. But there are also a host of ways to keep your business safe from such compromised positions and such attacks. Read on to find out just how.

Invest in Anti Spam Software

The best way to keep your business safe from technological turmoil is to invest in anti spam software. This is the single most effective way to protect against the plights that are trojans and viruses. And these are plights that are very common and very easy to subject your business to, which is why this kind of protective software is imperative. Your business can be easily subjected to these plights because of the fact that they can be hidden in emails. In fact, emails are the most common carriers of all the bad things that can infect the devices your business uses. They are the most common gateways through which your devices, and your business, can be subjected to techno turmoil. They are common because they are used so frequently, and cyber criminals know this. They also know that emails can be made to look as if they don’t pose any danger at all, when in actual fact they do. So, enlist the help of anti spam software in order to protect yourself fully, but choose wisely when it comes to this enlisting. You must choose a software that not only offers anti-spam solutions, but one that can differentiate between genuine emails and bogus, trojan and virus carrying ones. One such software can be found if you visit ATB Technologies for services and information on the services they offer. By choosing them, or another service that offers similarly clever modes of protection, you will be doing all you can to protect your business from the techno turmoil that are trojans and viruses.

Provide your employees with security awareness training

Providing your employees with security awareness training is a must in the business world of today. This is because of the simple fact that they probably come into a lot of contact with a online technology. And because they are in such frequent contact with it, they make themselves susceptible to being inflicted with turmoil induced by it. On this type of training they would be able to learn all about spyware; just how it can contact them and the damage it can do to them and your business. It would teach them how to deal with unwanted emails when they surface in their inboxes. It would teach them how to spot any suspicious and dangerous emails if they do manage to slip by the anti spam software you do in fact choose to use. And it would teach them how to manage their inboxes in the correct fashion.

But you shouldn’t just seek to teach your employees how to spot any dangers that come their way. No, you should also ensure that they aren’t bringing any potential technological dangers to work with them. In the business world of today the enemy could lie within when it comes to techno turmoil. The enemy could lie within because of the fact that each of your employees will have their own mobile phone which connects to the Internet. Therefore, whenever they step foot in your business’s premises they open up an online gateway to it. And potential dangers can use this open gateway at their will. This is because each phone connects to your business’s network. This then means that any apps that your employees have on their phone may be able to also access this network. For example, when Pokemon Go was the go-to mobile game for most in the summer of 2016, the app’s creators Ninantic were being granted access to the users Gmail accounts. And if an employee of yours was using this game during working hours at the office, they could have been granting this company access to your business data. This doesn’t mean that Niantic themselves posed a danger, but if they were to ever be hacked themselves then the hackers would then have access to your business too. So, it’s imperative that your employees are not accessing any third party apps when they are in the vicinity of your business’s technological network. And it’s down to you to inform them of this.

Seek the services of an uptime operator

But even when you have a strong anti spam software. And even when your employees are fully aware of everything they need to be doing when it comes to their usage of your business’s online network. You still need to ensure your business’s use of online technology is always up and running. When, say, your business’s website is down, this most certainly constitutes as techno turmoil. It does so because you are going to lose potential customer if a potential customer cannot access your site. This is because they will become impatient with your site if it is down and then proceed to take their custom elsewhere. Therefore, you should enlist the help of an uptime operating service such as UptimeRobot. This kind of service would monitor your site at all times — come rain or shine, at both night and day. It would then alert you via email or SMS to the fact that it is down, if it does in fact go down. It would then be your job to get your site back up and running again; but knowing that it is down as soon as possible helps you to do this quicker. And finding a quick solution to such a turmoil is pivotal. Monitoring your business is pivotal if you want it to be a success. But monitoring your website at all times personally is just not a feasible or realistic venture for you, or any other human, to take. Therefore, you should always seek the services of an uptime operator.

Technological turmoil can strike any business, which is why you need to both plan for it and protect against it. By taking heed of the advice above, you would be going a long way to doing just that.

It’s never easy being a business owner. For one thing, you’re under a great deal of pressure from just about everyone. Not only that but you’re expected to be able to handle just about every problem that comes up. The other main thing that many business owners struggle with is the feeling that they need to be everywhere at once. It can often feel as though because you have something of a bird’s eye view of your business, you should be aware of absolutely everything all at once. It hardly takes a genius to realize that this is a massive overstatement of what a business owner is actually capable of. After all, you’re only human and have all of the same limitations as anyone else. However, there are things that always need your attention, not to mention things that can make it a whole lot easier to manage those things.

Your IT

IT is something that has been slowly becoming more and more important for just about every business over the last two decades. It’s now reached the point that, if your business doesn’t have some kind of digital component then it’s probably incredibly outdated and doomed to fail. Of course, when something is as important and multifaceted as it, it can be very hard to make sense of and manage. A dedicated piece of IT asset management software can make the entire process a whole lot easier. Rather than having to deal with everything personally, having a piece of software handle it can free up your time to cover other, equally important things.

Your Employees

If there’s one mistake that a lot of business owners make over just about any other, it’s the fact that they don’t pay close enough attention to their employees. They assume that just because they get a steady paycheck at the end of the month, that that’s enough to keep them happy and motivated. However, this simply isn’t the case. You should be paying more attention to the condition of your employees as well as their levels of motivation and engagement with their work. Not only that but you should be willing to adjust elements of your business in order to help them feel more closely connected to both you and the business as a whole.

Your Bottom Line

Let’s face it when it comes to business, money matters. In fact, there’s an argument to be made that it’s the most important aspect of any business no matter what. Whether or not this is true is somewhat irrelevant. The important thing is that you never fail to pay close attention to your bottom line and to make sure that your business is actually making the kind of money that you want it to. If you have the means to do it, you may even hire an accountant to take care of some of that stuff for you, allowing you to focus your energy on parts of the company where you may have more interest and experience overall.

The sales pitch is enough to strike fear into the heart of many professionals, but it it does play an essential role in the sales cycle, and therefore it simply cannot be avoided.

If you have been tasked with presenting a sales pitch in the near future, and you want it to be one of the best yet, you need to pitch them an offer they can’t refuse, and here’s how you do that:

Don’t Make It Too Sale-speaky

Making it really obvious that you’re trying to sell someone something, even when they know that’s why you’re there really, is a big no-no. Sales talk is a bigger turnoff than showing up to a first date wearing nothing but a lime green Mankini – it just doesn’t work – which is why you should avoid being pushy or overselling the product. Just make a brief introduction and let the client lead with the questions. That way, any information you give will be welcome, and you won’t look like a bullying double-glazing salesman.

Drop a Killer Hook

Every sales pitch should lead with a killer hook, whether you’re pitching in person, on social media or via email. This should be one sentence that sums up the benefits of the product or service you’re selling, using language that fires the client up and leaves them wanting more. It has to be an attention grabber, or they’ll be bored and uninterested before you ever really get started.

Bling Up Your Presentation

PowerPoint presentations are undeniably useful in getting information across quickly, but they’re often very dull. So, if you must use one, you should consider paying for professional presentation design, which will make your PowerPoint show look good, which in turn will keep the client’s attention and make a great first impression. It might not be fair, but boring pitches, no matter how solid the product they’re selling are rejected much more than interesting ones, even when the products are comparable.

Offer a Solution

If there’s one thing that will make clients sit up and pay attention, it’s offering them a solution to a problem they’ve been struggling with. That’s why it’s never a bad idea to focus your pitch on what the product can to help a company on a daily basis. This adds value and therefore is a better bet than something which may or may not make a difference.

Have the Figures to Hand

If dragon’s Den has taught us anything, it’s that you need to be able to back up your claims with figures, particularly when you’re pitching for B2B sales. If a client isn’t absolutely sure that what you’re telling them has some basis in fact, they’re not going to buy, no matter how good the rest of your pitch was. They need reliability, and they won’t get that from you if you come empty-handed.

Follow Up

Finally, you should always follow up with your client after making a pitch. Business men and women are busy, so even if they’re interested in something, they might not get around to signing a deal for some time. If you don’t get back in touch, they could forget about you completely, and all your work would be for naught! Give them a call or send an email and you may be pleasantly surprised.