Alternative Strategies Blog

Better Listening Leads To Better Understanding

By Ashley Green

To create and sustain successful business relationships, we must understand the importance of effective communication and practice it in all of our professional affairs.  

Communication is defined as a process by which information is exchanged between individuals through a common system of symbols, signs, or behavior and is considered an essential aspect of building relationships. 

This applies to all industries and professions as well as personal life.  In PR specifically, both clients and account executives should give other undivided attention and put forth their best effort to achieve a common goal. 

Communication is a two-way street and is the responsibility of all parties involved.  It also shows you support and respect each other.  In order to do this, you must have good speaking and listening skills. 

1.Be thorough and detailed

Explain all that you need to get across in detail.  Use examples when possible to demonstrate and get the point across.

Avoid jargon that your listener may not fully understand.

Be sure you are clear with your expectations as well as your wants, needs, likes, dislikes, and more.

Well defined goals are essential in any project – but what is even more important is communicating those goals in a distinct way to your partner.

2. Listen

As many good listeners know, it is impossible to listen and talk at the same time.  A good listener understands the importance of taking turns when exchanging information.  When it’s your turn to listen, you must focus on only that.

A good listener realizes that actions speak louder than words thus it is equally as important to identify what a speaker says as much as what the speaker does not.

Good listeners notice body language, appreciate emotion, recognize nonverbal signs, and critically apply that information to the words that are being spoken. This demands that you stay focused, ignore distractions, and comprehend information.

Practice active listening by evaluating what you hear through words, tones, and facial expressions.  And the most important factor in my opinion; Do not interrupt.

No one likes to be interrupted – especially when this interruption causes the loss of a great idea or train of thought.  Not to mention, it’s just rude.

3. Process information

Write down as much as possible. Documenting the key points of a conversation will assist you in recalling that information at a later date.

Once the speaker is finished, you’ll need to ensure you have everything you need to move forward. If you do not, this requires you to ask questions.

Don’t ever be afraid to ask questions.

Avoid assumptions and don’t pretending to understand when you do not.

Interactive listening suggests that you investigate and absorb what you’ve heard.

If you are patient, relaxed, attentive, and present during the conversation, this phase will be simple.  Make sure you recapitulate the information to the speaker.

Assure them that you have taken in and processed key facts by verbally repeating the information.

Acknowledge that you have focused by writing everything down.  Never trust your memory to recall every last detail. 

Applying these skills to your business meetings as well as in your everyday life will help you because a highly effective communicator.

You’ll be an active participant in a supportive relationship and able to build a stronger rapport while better understanding each other. 

Encouraging Positive Emotions In The Workplace

By Jenny Pincus

Attitudes are contagious, and emotions can travel from person to person in a matter of seconds…there is no better environment to see this than within the workplace.

Employer-employee interactions as well as interactions between co-workers thrive from positive tones and attitudes. In addition, successful relationships and achievements within the workplace rely on individual’s ability to communicate more effectively. 

Obviously, good relationships throughout our daily lives contribute to our psychological health. In turn, good relationships between co-workers will not only improve individual’s psychological health, but also employees work performance.  Naturally, a good attitude at the place you work is surely going to lead to a good attitude when dealing with clients or potential clients.

Therefore it is extremely important to build positive relationships, and develop strong bonds within the work place.

This is sometimes difficult for employers who have to maintain their authority in the office while still trying to show employees that they support and value their opinions.

However, positive relationships between employers and employees are beneficial to ensuring positive attitudes, and increasing work achievements.

There are many ways employers can go about creating a positive vibe throughout the workplace, but it all starts at the top.

It is the boss’s responsibility to set the emotional tone within the office. A good boss needs to be able to regulate his or her emotions, especially if you are prone to anxiety or irritation.

Holding off that urge to grumble, scream and yell will make it easier for your employees to approach you when they need your help or assistance. It will also eliminate the fear and confusion that may come out of fear of “upsetting the boss.”

Another point: Making time for co-workers to be sociable is a great opportunity for employers to create and maintain strong bonds.

This can be anything from celebrating employees’ birthdays, “no special reason” lunch trips, and even a happy hour after work. These all allow co-workers to get to know each other on a more personal level outside of the office.

Language is also a very powerful tool, and maintaining positive vocal tones is essential to maintaining strong relationships with your employees.

The way you express yourself affects the ways in which your message will be received (positive or negative). Especially when dealing with matters of critique, employers should strive to use positive language to project a helpful tone, rather than negative criticisms.

Remember: positive tones always sound helpful and encouraging and highlight the positive consequences that can be expected by the employee.

In order to create and maintain strong bonds within the office, employers must promote open communication with their employees.

This means creating an open door policy with your employees, and encouraging your team members to give you feedback.

Brainstorming sessions are a great way to seek ideas and feedback from your employees. It is important to try to involve, or at least listen to, everyone’s ideas, so that each employee truly feels like a member of the team!

By maintaining an optimistic vibe within your workplace, you’ll have happy employees who will continue to work hard and thrive within the positive environment that you created!

So remember, encourage don’t discourage, and stay positive!

Small Business Success

Times are challenging right now for many small businesses. With unemployment up and real estate sales downto an all-time time low, the rising costs to do business is requiring many owners to tighten their belts to make ends meet. While there are many obvious things to do to lower expenses, the following are some more in-depth strategies you can use to keep your bottom line looking healthy.

Review your inventory levels. It's always important to keep inventory turning. During a time of slowing sales, you need to evaluate your inventory more carefully and reduce the stocking units that are not turning well. Inventory turns are expressed in two ways -- days inventory (the number of days it takes you to sell your inventory) or inventory turns (the number of times you turn your inventory in a year). Do you know what your turn rate should be? Has been historically? Or what the industry average is?

Review/determine your company's break-even point. Understand what level of sales is required to stay profitable.

Analyze your customers. Take a close look at your customer segments, and make sure you understand why they purchase from you. Segmenting can be done in several ways. For instance, you can use volume of sales; type of customer, such as purchase location (retail/wholesale/internet); type of buyer (commercial/government/personal); or by buyer demographics (educated/family status/residence location).

Then you can analyze your various segments to determine what product/service features are important when customers make purchase decisions, which segment provides the best margins and/or greatest volume for your business and other identifying features.

Watch what the big boys are doing. They have big dollars to spend on marketing and monitoring the market place. For instance, consider all of the value meals that have been developed by the restaurant industry, all of which are targeted at budget-conscious consumers. Another strategy the big players in the market are utilizing is to cooperatively market. For instance, if you buy a meal at some restaurants, you get free DVDs, toys or other added values. Consider what you can do to make customers feel they are getting more for their money.

Encourage/promote a "buy locally" strategy in your community. People do not want to travel to make their purchases, so as a local business, you may be able to capitalize on high fuel costs and the convenience you offer. Even though times are tough, now may not be the time to cut back on your advertising/marketing efforts in the local market. Remind people that buying from you saves fuel and postage costs.

Take positive actions and maintain a positive attitude. People want to buy from a winner, so act like a winner! Do a little market research and be ready to identify and capitalize on potential opportunities. A colleague shared recently that he talked to a restaurant owner whose business has actually been increasing due to the fact that he's taking advantage of a competitor/s cutbacks; offering more customer friendly hours (opening two hours earlier by customer request); offering friendly and personalized service (reintroducing big coffee cups and small ups again by customer request); and is actively combating any negative word of mouth in the local marketplace.

Don't be so focused on cutting costs that you forget about trying to increase sales (while keeping costs the same). Consider charging something for products or services that are currently provided at no cost. Increase prices, and try to sell more to existing customers instead of constantly prospecting for new ones.

Look for ways to maximize the power of referral within and to your business.

Make efforts to reduce the amount of time it takes to collect payment from customers. The most important key to getting paid on time is to be clear about the work that was done, how much should be paid and by when.

• Add a bold due date to your invoice.  
• Call to make sure the customer got the invoice.
• Don't wait until the payment is overdue; start collection efforts immediately.
• Make certain all customer service efforts are addressed immediately so that they won't later be used as an excuse for withholding payment.

Contact your Accountant to identify potential tax breaks that may have been forgotten or overlooked. Some may still provide some financial relief:

• You may deduct up to $250,000 for purchases of major equipment, including computers, non-customized computer software, office furniture and machinery.
• If business this year is truly bad and you are going to lose money, you may consider carrying back this loss in order to get a refund of taxes paid in prior years. A net operating loss deduction can generally be carried back to each of the two preceding tax years to offset taxable income in those years.
• Tax law also continues to provide generous incentives for small business owners. Self-employed individuals can generally deduct 100 percent of the cost of their health insurance (up to the amount of their earned income).

Take the opportunity to do some of the things you never seem to have time to do when business is booming. Engage in some strategic planning and/or market analysis to identify your best options for the future. Spruce up the business, or update employee manuals. Do some research on your competition. Build relationships with former and existing customers. Make good use of the time, and you'll be ready to face the future.

Guaranteed Business Success for the New Year

As we enter the early stages of the New Year, it is natural to think about and plan our marketing and business development activities for 2009.

It's also worth keeping in mind that successful business professionals and entrepreneurs market themselves as much as they market their companies. High performers create a personal marketing blueprint to guide their business-building activities on a daily, weekly and monthly basi. That's why we know who they are and what they do.

Whether you are a banker, attorney, independent consultant, real estate broker, accountant, financial planner, insurance agent, corporate executive or entrepreneur, consistent application of the following seven core marketing best practices will enable you to produce the kind of business results you want: 

1. Everything starts with customers. Without them, you would never make a sale. It is critical, then, that you define your customer base as specifically as possible—both the companies and the individuals you covet as customers. Test your description with a few customers and prospects who fit the profile. Do they agree with your assessment of them?

2. Know the "pain" that creates opportunity for you. Think like a business doctor. People buy your services to solve or avoid acute trauma or discomfort. It is unlikely that your customers have you, or your company, at the top of their priority list. They do, however, care very deeply about their problems and desires. Clearly linking your solutions to your customers' problems will allow you to rise in importance in their minds.

3. Define your personal value proposition. Generally, people do not hire firms or institutions—they hire the people who represent these organizations. So, you are the message, and you are the product. This means that you are also the product manager and the sales force. Therefore, it becomes critical that you be able to describe—in a clear, concise and meaningful way—what it is that you do (what pain you solve) and for whom.

4. Turn your clients into your sales force. Your clients should be your best source of referrals and your best source of advertising. Remember, referrals are made based on personal reputations and solid relationships. Once a successful project has been completed for a client, let them know that you appreciate referrals and testimonials. To make the referral process easier, make sure that they know exactly the type of person with whom you would like an introduction.

5. Build high-power allies. Invest time cultivating exceptional relationships with a select team of professional allies, both within and outside your organization. Go to market against a defined target audience in a strategic and cooperative basis with your allies. Build joint marketing plans and determine the roles and responsibilities each party will play. Refer lots of business back and forth, and keep the lines on communication open and honest.

6. Become a celebrated expert. The best business marketers invest their time wisely by developing their personal reputation. They differentiate themselves by publicizing the qualities and experiences that make them unique. Hiring a PR firm to assist you in achieving this goal has proven to achieve the best results.  They also use speaking engagements, writing articles, conducting roundtables and seminars, and joining/working with the right organizations to their advantage. Ask yourself…which two organizations can I take a leadership role in that will not only stimulate my professional growth but also increase my professional visibility and generate business for me? Join those groups today.

7. Build your personal direct marketing engine. The previous six ideas require your personal effort (i.e., you need to develop your own value proposition). Leverage these activities by communicating with your prospects, customers, networks and alliance partners in a consistent manner by using traditional direct marketing methods such as direct mail, personal publicity, email campaigns, social media, and your website and so on.

Why do these practices work? Success is not accidental. The best business developers achieve leverage by developing a systematic, step-by-step marketing process. It is in the process that the gold can be found.

By using this approach in 2009, you will concentrate on the most effective ways to create business for yourself on a consistent basis. You will not have to become a "salesperson" constantly hawking yourself to stay afloat, because business will begin to come to you.

Marketing into 2009

Sometimes it’s hard to believe we are ringing in another New Year. It feels like just yesterday it was all about the Y2Kaos and what would endure subsequent to the aftermath. Well, nothing really changed right then, but the New Millennium has seen ever increasing changes in marketing, which have only been picking up speed since. With the innovations in telecommunications and the evolution of technology, you can communicate to your market with increased authenticity and transparency. With the economic conditions, effective value-driven operational means are a standard. Every day people are now becoming involved with your brand image. Hopefully you have solidified your 2009 marketing plans and, ideally, those plans have touched base on one or several of the following issues to will take you well into the next decade.

1)    Social Media
You can directly communicate to your customers, on an authentic, genuine level and gain their insight, trust and loyalty. They, in turn, can become brand advocates and marketing vehicles via word of mouth (aka “word of mouse”).

Most people equate Social media with Facebook, YouTube, twitter, etc., but as with everything online, there is a plethora of choices to interact with. It is immensely beneficial to get involved in this movement, on some level. I recommend that everyone have a blog, which is the basic building block of social media. It can serve as a hub to interact with other individual social sites, and will be there long after the Facebooks and twitters have faded into the history books. Just like in the early 90’s when everyone was rushing to create a static informational website, now blogs are the standard “dynamic websites” to involve your social media outreach.  Let us create your blog and social media strategy and get you in on the conversations.

2)    Value Driven
With the given state of the economy, everyone is looking for value. And value does not equate the lowest price, but the purchase that is going to give consumers the most bang for their buck. Consumers want to know that the product or service is going deliver on the promise and is around to last. That, in turn, is what your Brand Image should be focused on.  Consumers are willing to pay a premium for your products or services knowing that they will live up to the promise of your branding. Being in business yourself, you should be looking for values to get the most bang for your buck. We offer an unprecedented guaranteed Public Relations Program that guarantees to deliver what we say we can do for you. Now, how can you guarantee to appease your customers and create value around your brand ?

3)    Social Responsibility
Most companies now embrace transparency of their operations. This can tie into the above two mentions, in that Social media now offers a platform to showcase your social good doings. This creates a (moral) value for your consumers. Those consumers want to know that their purchase is doing well for the whole of humanity, not just themselves. By implementing social responsibilities into your manufacturing processes, employee and vendor relations, community outreach and involvement, green strategies etc., your brand will stand out that much more from your competitors. You will find consumer loyalties among those who want to make a difference with the products or services they choose to spend the hard earned money on.

Each of the preceding matters are gaining momentum as marketing trends, and you will greatly benefit to incorporate just a few these practices into your company's marketing strategies for 2009.  We always practice what we preach and can be found working these principles into our own operations and our clients'.

Here’s to a happy, healthy and prosperous New Year. Cheers!