5 Ways to Attract and Retain Talent in Your Business

Keeping your best talent was easy when few companies were hiring and employees felt stuck at their jobs. But now, retaining the cream of the employee crop is a struggle again for many managers. When layoffs are frequent and retirement pensions are pretty much nonexistent, workers feel less loyal to their companies than they did in previous decades, and are willing to jump ship if they find better pay or better prospects elsewhere.

Where does that leave you? To build more loyalty and stave off an exodus, you may have to change your workplace culture.

Read on for five tips on how to hold onto your current employees, and how to hook new employees and reel them in for the long term.

How to Conduct a Sales Call Without Sounding Like a Desperate Jerk

Have you ever felt the dread of picking up the phone to conduct a sales call? Do you ever feel like a sleazy car salesman when you’re delivering the same sales pitch over and over? If so, you’re not alone. Unfortunately, sales is hands down the most important part of starting, growing, and sustaining a business.

The good news is, sales calls don’t have to be painful or demeaning. If they are, then you’re doing it wrong. Use the following five hacks to get over your telephobia and conduct a sales call without sounding like a desperate jerk.

1. Set the right expectation for the call

Never, ever, trick a potential customer or client into getting on a call. A few months ago I got a LinkedIn message from an old colleague who said he wanted to schedule a call with me because he wanted to talk about how we could collaborate on his new business.

Customer Focus and Consistency: Keys to Strong Brand Building

Eager to get their businesses off the ground, many young startups make branding mistakes because they don’t understand the right marketing messages.

Have you defined your marketing message? You may adjust your marketing messages periodically, or you may have different messages for different audiences, but focus on something from the start and be consistent. Here are some guidelines that will serve you well:

Be concise

Don’t include everything there is to know about your business in your marketing materials. What

Your Brand’s Tone of Voice: Why It Matters and How to Craft It

Crafting and identifying your brand’s tone of voice is essential to engaging your customers in a meaningful way. In fact, it’s the foundation for all of your marketing communications.

Branding is essentially about building a relationship with your customers. Your tone of voice establishes who you are and why a customer should buy your product or service.

The more engaging your tone of voice is, the more customers will feel compelled to learn about your company. The more consistent your tone of voice is, the more customers will trust that you’ll continue to offer valuable products or services.

Let’s take a look at what a brand’s tone of voice actually is, why it matters, and how to craft it.

4 Reasons to Brand Your Business

Branding will make your business stand out

Think a brand is just for big businesses? Think again. Branding is critical for businesses of all shapes and sizes.

Your brand is what the outside world thinks of you. That’s it. Although you can influence your brand through well-designed logos, hilarious ad campaigns, carefully crafted press releases, or super-friendly service, ultimately, your brand is what the outside world says it is.

Why bother? Because strong brands are the key to customer loyalty and higher sales. The Economist recently reported, “Brands are the most valuable assets many companies possess. But no one agrees on how much they are worth or why.” Strong brands inspire loyalty, and we can’t always put our finger on exactly how they do it.

Branding can be a daunting task for small businesses and it’s easy to think brands are reserved for the Nikes and Coca-Colas of the world. But branding is even more important if you’re a small business.

The Definitive Guide to Building a Brand

Building a brand that’s authentic, consistent, and rooted in a distinct personality separates you from the competition and allows your customers to connect with you on a more meaningful level.

Building a brand can feel daunting. In fact many small businesses feel like it’s something that only the “big guys” can afford. But branding is something that every company can do if you follow a few basic rules.

Step 1: Remember that a brand is more than a logo.

A brand is a whole ecosystem of how you communicate with the outside world. In a nutshell, your brand is a promise to people about the way you will do business. This promise affects how you build your website, how you create your business card, even how you answer the phone—because the style, colors, and words you choose should reflect the emotions your customers will have when they use your product.

11 Tips for Focused, Effective (and Inexpensive) Startup Marketing

Palo Alto Software founder Tim Berry equates startup marketing to throwing darts at a dartboard. While existing companies can get away with throwing their “marketing darts” a little aimlessly, a startup has to be more careful and precise.

The established company just has to worry about hitting the dartboard; the startup needs to hit the bullseye.

If precision and focus are the name of the marketing game for startup companies, what is the best strategy for marketing your startup? I asked the members of the Young Entrepreneur Council for their advice on how to market startup companies most effectively.

All these entrepreneurs advocated for employing focus, consistency, and using a variety of unexpected sources, many of which are low cost—always a plus for a new startup.

1. Determine your marketing goal first

Jeff Chambers of Big Machine Parts recommends asking yourself the following question: “Are you trying to drive sales, build awareness, or build technical credibility?”

Determining what the goal of your marketing is will be an important first step, and will help you focus your marketing efforts. He goes on to suggest that “once you’ve ‘segmented’ your desired outcome by answering that simple question, build a detailed schedule by platform (e.g. Twitter) that includes the message and campaign duration. This prevents the ‘see what sticks’ method and provides a roadmap on what and when to measure.”

12 Tips for a Wildly Productive Home Office

Maybe you’re working from home doing freelance work, or you started your own business and don’t have an office space. Perhaps you’ve been working remotely for a company, so you spend a lot of time in your living room. In any case, no matter how hard you attempt to keep a productive home office, it can be hard to stay focused at home with the distraction of your comfortable bed, TV and Netflix, and various gadgets so easily accessible.

Use these tips and tools to stay productive at home in the face of adversity (like that mid-morning nap that keeps calling your name):

Organization tips for a productive home office space:

Create a space for work—and only work

Don’t mix your work space with your personal space. Similar to advice that suggests that you only use your bed for sleeping, you should have an area in your house that you only use for working.

Whether it be a closed-off room or a desk in the corner of your small studio, when you go there, your mind will build an association between that space and your work. Just sitting at your work-only desk will begin to trigger your working mindset, so getting in the zone will be easier.