business growth | BizSieve.com

How Employee Training Can Benefit Your Company in the Long Run

Employee training is an essential part of a company’s growth and development. There are many different benefits to investing time and money into this area. There are plenty of studies that show employees who are trained well tend to be happier and more effective for a company. Here are several ways that employee training can benefit a company and how it can be implemented.

Worker Productivity

One of the biggest ways that employee training can increase the bottom line of a company is through increased worker productivity. Workers who are trained well in their position can get the job done in less time with fewer resources.

In the information economy, workers are one of the most valuable assets to a business. It only makes sense to increase this productivity in any way possible. Increased employee training is usually a small investment up front that pays off over the long term. Any company wanting to increase worker productivity should consider investing more time and resources into this area of their business.

Higher Morale

Workers who know how to get their job done effectively have higher morale than those who do not. This is a great selling point for any company in increasing its employee training.

The culture of a company starts with the employees and how they feel at work. Anyone who works in a company with happy employees knows how much of a difference this can make over time.

Investing in employee training will increase employee morale and benefit the company overall.

Better Job Candidates

The best workers want to work at a company that invests in the employees’ growth and development. There are many ways in which this can be accomplished, but one of the best ways is through better employee training.

With all of the free online training material today, it is vital that workers feel as though they are being developed. The best job candidates want to work at a company that has a culture of pouring in to their employees. By investing in the employee training program, this can show future employees how much the company truly cares about their growth and development.

Financials

Increased employee training is not something that is free. There are training materials to purchase and man hours to spend on the project. However, it is vital to invest in this area for many reasons. The pay off on employee training can be felt for years down the line. Anytime employees can perform a job more efficiently, this is time that can be reinvested in other projects that benefit the business.

There is a huge financial payoff for any company that invests time and money in employee training. Not only will employee training help the workers, but the business will increase its financial position as well.

Tips on Improving Your Business Sales

No matter what industry you find yourself in, there are probably multiple ways that you can improve on what you’re doing. Many companies have a hard time figuring out how to improve sales numbers without spending a ton of extra money to get the job done. If you are interested in improving your business sales, here are a few tips to keep in mind.

sales promotion girl — Image by nSeika / Flickr

1. Motivate the Sales Staff

If you want to be able to improve your sales, one of the best things that you can do is make sure your sales staff is motivated. When your staff is motivated, they’ll be much more likely to produce numbers. One of the best ways to motivate sales staff is to make sure that they are fairly compensated for the sale that they bring in. Come up with a compensation plan that rewards sales and extra effort. If your sales staff doesn’t think that your compensation plan is fair, they won’t be willing to go out of their way to get sales. Besides offering a better compensation plan, you should also consider offering some other incentives along the way. For example, recognizing your top performers were giving them some type of a prize for making the most sales can go a long way toward motivating them.

2. Get Your Marketing Efforts in Line

One of the biggest mistakes that many businesses make is that they allocate too much money to the wrong types of marketing avenues. You will probably need to spend a big chunk of your money on advertising, but you need to make sure that you’re putting your money into the right channels. For example, if you are throwing money away on a television advertising campaign that doesn’t work, it might be in your best interest to try to advertise online with pay-per-click ads or banner ads. Track your marketing efforts to make sure that you are getting the most bang for your buck regardless of which channel you choose.

3. Get Pricing and Promotion Right

As part of the marketing mix, every business has to focus on pricing and promotion. If you have your products at the right price point, this will go a long way toward helping you increase your sales. In some cases, you may have your product overpriced just slightly, which can drive business to one of your competitors. In addition to making sure that you have the right price, you also need to offer the right promotions. For example, you may want to offer a coupon discount or advertise a sale periodically.

Once you implement some of these strategies, you should be able to improve your company’s sales over time. Tweak the different variables involved until you have a strategy that works.

About the Author: This guest post is contributed by Debra Johnson, blogger and editor of Liveinnanny.com. She welcomes your comments at her email Id: – jdebra84 @ gmail.com.

Achieving Cost-Effective Growth through Sponsorship

If you’re looking for a way to differentiate your business from the other firms in your niche and increase its visibility across your trade area, sponsorship may be your answer. There are many ways to use sponsorship to drive your sales, but its most effective uses are often its most obvious. Regardless of your company’s size and sales goals, you can use the following primer on corporate sponsorship to take your business to the next level.

Consider Your Audience

As a small business owner, your trade area may be fairly circumscribed. While you’d no doubt prefer to expand your business beyond its current narrow confines, you can use sponsorship opportunities to your advantage while you’re still small. Look for manageable, community-focused organizations and events that need sponsors, like youth athletic tournaments, high school plays and county fairs and parades. You’ll generate tremendous goodwill by sponsoring such events, which don’t usually register on the radar of major corporations. Regardless, state athletic tournaments, minor-league sports clubs, and civic construction projects are all worthy investments.

Budget Considerations

Generally speaking, the size of your advertising budget will be proportional to your annual revenues but the reality is more complicated than that. When choosing between sponsorship opportunities, first determine whether you’ll be an exclusive sponsor. You should avoid buying into the lowest rungs of tiered sponsorship opportunities: There are so many businesses down there that it’ll be difficult for yours to gain separation from the pack.

Just as importantly, you’ll want to confer with the sponsored event’s organizers beforehand to work out a hard-and-fast budget. Draw up some type of contract outlining your duties and expectations as a sponsor, with exact fees laid out to the extent possible. You don’t want to publicly air dirty laundry and squander the goodwill that your sponsorship has generated.

Marketing Strategy

You’re sadly mistaken if you think you can just pay for a sponsorship and then sit back and watch the sales roll in. Successful sponsorships require aggressive legwork before, during and after the sponsorship’s active period. Common sponsorship support activities include:

Merchandising: If you’re sponsoring an athletic tournament or other such discrete event, consider releasing a line of clothing or kitchenware that tastefully promotes both the event and your business.
Invitations: Again, you don’t want to be seen as crass, but inviting your most reliable clients and suppliers to the sponsored event will go a long way towards growing your business. Be sure to highlight other your other community-building activities when you do.
Coordination: If you’re not the event or organization’s exclusive sponsor, pay careful attention to your co-sponsors and try to coordinate with them as much as practicable. If you especially like the way any specific co-sponsors do business, approach them after the fact to gauge their interest in future partnerships, even if your businesses have little in common. Good companies make everyone with whom they interact look attractive by association.

Securing favorable sponsorships for your business can be more difficult than it would appear, especially if you’re a local concern with a limited advertising budget. By sponsoring realistic events and organizations, using your sponsorships as a promotional platform to grow your sales, and working closely with fellow sponsors on future partnerships, sponsoring a local soccer team or civic organization may turn out to be the best business decision you’ve ever made.

About the Author: Linda Rhimes is a freelance blogger and occasionally writes for Delivery.com – a site she loves using to find Pizza Delivery Local.

Improve Your Business with an Online Survey

Information is one of the most powerful assets that a business owner has. The more you know about your customers and their needs and wants, the better equipped you are to serve them, and keep them loyal to your company. One of the best ways to gather information is by running regular online surveys.

Persuading your customers to fill out surveys can be difficult. Taking a business survey isn’t exactly the way that most people dream of spending their time, but if you provide a good enough incentive, most people would be willing to spend a couple of minutes providing you with the feedback you need.

To set up a good survey, you will need to work with your web systems development team. Ask them to create a short, easy to use survey, and some form of advertisement that is noticeable, but not intrusive. You want to entice your customers to click on the survey, not drive them away.

Designing Quality Surveys

There’s not much point in making your web systems development team invest time and effort into putting together a survey if the survey does not give you the information that you need. Before you put together a business survey, consider the following points:

What do you want to learn through conducting this survey?
Why are you running this survey?
How will the information you gather be used?

A good survey is one that produces information that can be easily analyzed. Asking people to write paragraphs of information about what they think of your company might make for interesting reading, but it is hard to summarize all of the feedback you get into easily understandable data.

Instead of asking your customers “What do you dislike about our product?”, offer questions that have simple yes or no answers, or answers that fit into simple bullet points – for example, ask your users to rate a list of attributes (price, size, performance, extra features) from most important to least important. This way, you’ll be able to tell at-a-glance what your users think is important.

Keeping People Interested

If your business survey is too long, difficult to read, or slow to load, then you may lose people before they complete the entire survey. Get your web systems development team to test the survey to make sure that it works in all of the main browsers, and that it’s easy to answer questions, move to the next page, and generally interact with the survey. Try to keep the survey short and simple. If you have dozens of questions per page, people may lose interest.

Picking the Right Audience

There are several ways to attract people to take part in your survey. The most valuable feedback will come from your existing customers. Invite them to take part in the survey by including a link in your regular email newsletter, or by promoting the survey on order pages on your website. If you need even more participants, you could promote the survey on your home page, but try to make sure that you don’t annoy people by pushing the survey with pop-ups every time they load a new page. Discrete advertisements are best.

About the Author: This post was written by James Harper on behalf of business survey and web systems development experts Xibis.

5 Ways To Raise Capital For a Business

One of the major challenges before any entrepreneur is to raise capital for his business. This becomes more important for a new entrepreneur as he starts the business without any contacts or experience. No doubt, a business plan, office, workers, contacts and and many more things are involved with a business but raising capital is the primary challenge. There are a number of ways to raise capital for a business and this post covers detailed information regarding those methods.

Loans From Banks

One of the easiest methods to get the required capital for a business is to take loan from a bank. In order to get loans from banks, you will have to submit security worth the loan amount. Even after the easy availability of loans, most of the entrepreneurs avoid bank loans as a medium to raise capital for business. This is bank loans are associated with high interest rates and various other complications.

Venture Capitalists

Another method to obtain necessary funds for starting a business is from venture capitalists. Since venture capitalists are very strict with approval and sanctioning loans, you must have a solid business plan based on an innovative idea. If the venture capitalists are impressed with your plan, you can easily get the required capital. In return, you have to provide them some equity in the business. One of the merits of this method is that you also get the opportunity to benefit from the experience of venture capitalists. As a result, you can modify your plan on their recommendation which can improve the chances of your success.

Private Investors

There are a number of people who are looking to invest in fresh business ideas. Most of these people are business man that want to diversify their income sources and thus are ready to invest in projects of other people. All you need to do is to search few private investors in your locality and then explain you business plan and possible returns to them. If you are able to convince them, you can easily raise the required capital for your business. Again, you should do proper planning before fixing a meeting with private investors. You should be able to justify your budget and business plans. Also, explain the whole plan from the perspective of the investors also so that they feel interested in the project. Once you have made good relations with private investors and showed him your potential, you can expect monetary helps for future projects also.

Family

If you cannot afford to pay the interest rates of banks or individual investors, you can ask your family and friends for help. This is one of the most conventional ways of generating capital for a business. These people simply give you the money for the bond they share with you.

Friends

If you are taking monetary help from a friend, you should offer him some share from the profits. Again, your attitude also plays a vital role in convincing your family and friends for investing.

About the Author: Our friend Sara Muler at www.loansforpeoplewithverybadcredit.net provided this free guest post. Please check out her website when you get a chance.