Cool Product: Nitro Pro 7 – Adobe Acrobat Alternative

May 23rd, 2012 by Doug Boswell No comments »

The Adobe Portable Document File (PDF) has become a popular standard for publishing documents online, for sending business documents out for review, etc. Adobe Acrobat Professional is the best known standard application for creating and editing PDFs. However, the Adobe PDF is an open, not a closed standard and you actually do have choice for PDF creation tools. If you want to look beyond the full version of Adobe Acrobat, the first place to start is with Nitro Pro 7 from NitroPDF. It is feature rich, robust, with a price well below what you would pay for a full version of Adobe Acrobat Professional.

Leaving Adobe Acrobat behind doesn’t mean leaving behind features. Nitro Pro 7 brings a lot to the table including:

Compatibility Being able to read files somebody else sends you is always a worry if you diverge from the application standards your coworkers, partners, and clients use. But since PDF is not some closed proprietary standard, you can open, read, and edit PDFs generated from Adobe Acrobat or Microsoft Office 2010 with Nitro Pro 7.

During testing, Nitro Pro 7 did not have issues with, or even come close to choking on PDFs generated in the current version Adobe Acrobat.

Productivity Nitro Pro 7 integrates with Microsoft Office and Windows providing one-button PDF creation from Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint (in 32-bit Microsoft Office only). If you are using a 64-bit version of Microsoft Office, the one-button PDF creation isn’t available but Nitro Creator 2 does show up as a Printer option in the Print menu. NitroPDF promises further 64-bit Microsoft Office support in a future release of Nitro Pro 7.

You can open PDFs in Google Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer. Nitro Pro 7 also has a handy preview features that allows you to preview PDFs. It also displays PDF files in Windows folders as thumbnail document previews not the standard old static PDF icons.

Other productivity features of note include tools for digital signatures, PDF annotation, forms creation, and securing PDFs. You can also create PDFs from scanned documents and even send PDFs to Evernote from within the.

PDF Creation and Conversion Nitro Pro 7 can create PDF and PDF/A documents from the major document and graphic file formats. You can also use it to batch convert files to PDF and you have the tools to convert and combine separate files into a single PDF document.

The bane of anybody who has ever inherited documents is being able to only find the PDF version, the location of the original Microsoft Word document disappeared with the original author. Nitro Pro 7 includes a Convert PDF to Word feature, which lets you convert a PDF to an Office format. While the conversion wasn’t perfect (they never actually are) but you’ll get the information but, as always, will need to work within a Microsoft Word format to clean it up. You can also convert documents into Microsoft Excel (*.xlsx) files but don’t expect any formulas to make it through the conversion.

Final Thoughts Nitro Pro 7 is a solid alternative to purchasing the full version of Adobe Acrobat. You don’t lose file compatibility and Nitro Pro 7 packs some powerful features in a well implemented user experience. It also has a light footprint, which can be appealing to those who might see Adobe’s core apps as becoming more bloated with each new release.

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Posted in best practices, document management, entrepreneur, PDF creator reader, small business technology

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Networking for More New Business

May 11th, 2012 by Doug Boswell No comments »

Definition: Business networking = The process of meeting other people and exchanging resources for mutual gain.

I’m not talking about social media networking; I’m talking about face-to-face networking for business contacts that will help you grow your business. The kind of networking that builds concrete relationships, trust, and inevitably, results.

In the past several years networking as a marketing strategy and business development tool has really come into its own. Many good networking events are available to attend throughout the month. And great Internet sites like Meetup.com can help you easily locate the ones in your area that will best serve your needs.

Small businesses can leverage effective networking practices to win important customers, vendors, investors and partners. Networking forms the basis of many business relationships, and the ability to network well is one factor that may not only differentiate a business, but also ensure its survival.

It is easier than ever to network, especially if you keep the following best practices in mind:

1. Present yourself well. Business networking is often about first impressions, and first impressions are often about presentation. At face-to-face events, dress well, polish how you speak, make eye contact and generally present yourself to impress others with your professionalism and charisma.

2. Don’t overwhelm, but rather, interact. If you approach business networking solely as an opportunity to talk about yourself and your business, you’ll bore people. Make networking more enjoyable by limiting how much (and how repetitively) you talk and by seeking out chances to listen to and interact with the business networking group. Networking is not prospecting, so don’t treat people as prospects. Your goal is to develop at least some degree of relationship with each person you meet.

3. Network with Networkers. Business networking enables you to meet people whom you don’t already know. Many of the people you’ll meet won’t have the inclination to share their networks with you. Don’t try to overcome this attitude. Simply move on because you’re looking for networkers.

4. Any group might just be a business networking group. People define themselves as members of groups such as one’s profession, religion, gender, language, favorite sports team, and others. List the affiliations that matter to you, and then consider them as networking possibilities. Subsequently, you can network through such events as church picnics, support groups, tailgate parties, environmental causes and gender-specific professional organizations.

5. Be selective and diligent. Thousands of official networking events take place every day, and the Internet offers access to millions more; unfortunately, the availability of all of these opportunities leads some business people to take a shotgun approach to networking, which results in the failure to pay sufficient attention to any one opportunity. Identify and act on the highest-value opportunities rather than chasing every possible audience. Narrowing down opportunities will allow you to focus more.

6. Always network. Without turning yourself into someone who is prepared to collar all passersby with your spiel, treat social events; a party, a ball game, a play or any event, as an opportunity to meet new acquaintances who can later become part of a more formal network. Don’t waste time with overly skeptical people. Preach only to the choir. If someone doesn’t get it, don’t try to make them get it. Just talk to somebody else.

7. Help others. While your ultimate goal may be to find clients, customers, investors or to otherwise improve your own business chances and conditions, you are also in a position to help others. Offer whatever resources you can; advice, contacts, support, partnership or investment, in order to increase your value to your business network. This kind of enlightened altruism will eventually rebound to your advantage.

9. Be yourself / Be cool. The best way to network is to be unconscious of the fact that you are networking. Don’t let your mind dwell on the purpose or mechanics of networking. When you spend time with your friends, do you constantly have the purpose of maintaining your friendship in mind? No, you lose yourself in the moment. That’s the kind of approach you should bring to business networking.

Good networking requires you to balance a methodical approach with the ability not to take yourself too seriously. One way to achieve this balance is to keep your methodical self behind the scenes. Plan the events you’ll attend, define your purpose and immerse yourself in your own mini-infomercial. But once you start interacting, maintain a casual and friendly demeanor. You’ll be pleasant to be around and pleasant to listen to, which will differentiate you from the crowd and increase your chances of success. And in business networking, success is defined by becoming known by more and more people. The increase in business you desire will be a natural result. Remember that a key point to networking is that it’s not who you know that counts, it’s who knows you. So get out and network and become known by more and more people.

 

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Posted in best practices, business goals, business networking, entrepreneur, marketing, small business, Uncategorized

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Cool Product: Constant Contact

May 3rd, 2012 by Doug Boswell No comments »

email marketing made easy

I’ve been using Constant Contact to give my emails a professional look for almost a year and a half. I’ve now put out 17 issues of my newsletter, The Small Biz Bulletin (get it free – see the Join Our Email List link to the right —–>), and have noticed that dozens of businesses on my emailing list have adopted this product for their use too. So, it’s high time I did a Cool Product Review on it.

Constant Contact email combines your email campaigns and your social networking efforts into one easy-to-use service. It’s intuitive and easy to use for all skill levels. It breaks down the set-up process into three easy steps: “Create the look, select your audience, then schedule and send.”

Email Campaign Creation

You start by picking one of over 400 templates as the basis of your email, or create your own. The templates come in a variety of layouts, colors and patterns, are easy to customize as well as to insert text, images, documents, blog content, links, surveys, polls, videos and more. There’s a social-share toolbar and buttons for Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn and others to send readers directly to your various social media properties.

Campaign Reporting

You’ll get comprehensive reports on your campaigns, including bounces, spam complaints, opt-outs, click-throughs, forwards and more. And Social Stats reporting tools tell you the number of Facebook shares and likes, tweets from Twitter and more, that your messages receive. You can also see the number of total social shares and page views your email campaign has generated.

Contact Management

You can add customers to your list by typing them in, importing a spreadsheet list or your address book from Gmail or Outlook. Contact fields are customizable so your contact database can hold all the info you need to keep on each contact.

Help & Support

Support includes a searchable knowledge base, tutorials, FAQs, a user manual, a blog, user forums, recorded demos and webinars. And the phone support is the best I’ve ever had for any product I’ve ever needed help on. They will even edit your email directly to fix a problem.

Try Constant Contact for Free!

You can try Constant Contact for free for 60 days to see if it fits your needs. If you do want to try it, click on the link below (or the logo at the top) and you will also receive a $30 credit when the free trial is over. Full disclosure: Yes, they will be kicking me back a $30 credit too, but if a couple hundred of you stick with it, well it could be sweet! Thanks!

Click here to get your 60 day free trial and your $30 credit if you continue beyond the trial period.

 

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Posted in , best practices, bookkeeping, branding, customer relationship management, customer retention, customer service, entrepreneur, marketing, small business, small business technology

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Retaining Your Current Customers

April 26th, 2012 by Doug Boswell No comments »

When focusing on growing your small business, acquiring new customers should probably be at the top of your list. And that would be the best possible approach for a startup company. But I would suggest that the most important thing for any established business is to keep their existing customers.

You have probably heard this before; it is far less expensive to retain old customers than to acquire new ones, but you should also ask yourself what is the point of acquiring more customers if you can’t hold onto your existing ones? Also, what is the cost to your brand of all of those defecting customers? Are you just replacing angry customers with ignorant ones?

In a world of increasing competition and ease of defection to other products and services, building and focusing on keeping your customers longer can be a significant way to grow your business. Realize that:

  • Businesses in many industries may lose up to 50% of their customers over a five year period.
  • Studies have shown it is 5 to 7 times more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to retain a current customer.
  • As little as a 5% increase in customer retention can increase profits by 25 to 95%.

Unaware of these figures, many businesses still focus on acquiring new customers as their primary growth strategy rather than protecting and nurturing those they already have.

Why do customers leave?

 Before we can start keeping customers, we first have to try and understand why customers leave. Studies tell us that the main reasons customers leave, or stop doing business with a specific company are:

  • 1% die
  • 3% move to another area
  • 5% are influenced by friends or contacts to go elsewhere
  • 9% are lured away by your competition
  • 14% don’t stay because they are disappointed with your product or service
  • 68% leave because they perceive an indifferent attitude toward them

Furthermore, research also shows that there is a significant difference between the reasons that companies think customers leave and what their customers actually think. If these findings are true then they have huge implications for business. They suggest that loss of customers is not so much about how good your product or service is, or how competitive your industry is, but rather it’s more about how you are with your customers, and how much they believe you care about them.

The implications of this falls into a few areas that businesses need to focus on:

  • It’s not about you (the business), it’s about them (the customer)
  • Customer service/care involves everyone in your business not just your customer-service people
  • Your relationship with your customers. This may take some time, effort and a lot of trust in your front-line staff because everyone is different and technology and systems are not always the best way to solve a problem. Sometimes it’s about just being a bit more human, taking a bit more time and a longer view of the relationship you have with the customer.

Want to improve your retention of customers? Here are a few steps to help you get started:

Get to know your customers

This is not just about how long they have been a customer or how much money they spend. Get to know them, find out what they like, what they don’t like, ask for their opinion on how you could better serve them.

Segment your customer-base according to their similarities

Segmenting your customers into different groups will make this project easier and allow you to track retention progress in each group. Create a strategy to get to know each group of customers that focuses on their expectations. Since each group is different, it is reasonable to expect they will have different preferences.

Decide which customers are going to work for your business

This is where reality and tough choices kick in. Not all customers are going to be a good fit for your business so choose which customers will work and be very clear about which ones will not. If you can identify the customer that will be disappointed with your customer experience as it does not fit with their needs and you choose not to do business with them (in the nicest possible way), then you will have saved yourself a lot of time and energy and brand equity in the process. They’ll appreciate the honesty. Refer them onto someone who will be able to fill their needs and you’ll create an advocate for your business.

Use Customer Relationship Management software

You’re going to need to have a way of gathering and storing the information about your relationships with your customers. This is where Customer Relationship Management (CRM) technology can lend a hand. Talk to an expert about this but don’t be led by the technology. Let your customers lead.

Measuring your progress and success

Set targets, monitor and measure your progress. It’s the only way that you will know if you are improving. However, realize that this can take time and will depend on the nature of your business and current relationships with your customers.

The results of improving your retention

The process of creating a focus on customer retention is not easy, and it takes time. But when you put it all into place you will be pleased with the results. Listening, learning and paying attention will get a positive response from your customers, and that means more business for you. Once you establish a learning relationship with your customers, you can develop a partner-like relationship. And at that stage, you’ll be able to meet and exceed their expectations by anticipating their needs. The deeper the relationship and more complex their needs, the more they will appreciate your relationship with them and the less likely they will be to move their business elsewhere.

Customer loyalty has a direct impact on the market value of your business

It’s been said that the most valuable asset a company possesses is not its buildings, employees or intellectual property, but its customer list. And that’s certainly a defensible position to take. A true entrepreneur, stripped of his or her entire infrastructure, could conceivably rebuild from scratch with only a list of proven buyers.

Interestingly, anyone who may wish to acquire your business will assess your company’s market value by taking your customer list into account. Should you ever choose to sell your business, it will be easy to point to a well-maintained customer list and express customer loyalty as a considerable value.

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Posted in action plans, best practices, branding, business goals, contact management, CRM, customer relationship management, customer retention, customer service, entrepreneur, small business

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Simplifying the Profit & Loss Statement

March 29th, 2012 by Doug Boswell No comments »

You might not need to be an accountant to be successful in business, but understanding financial reports will help you understand the basics of financial management and feel comfortable using standard financial tools and metrics to monitor and appraise the performance of your business.

How a Profit & Loss Statement helps you manage your business

Financial reports distill the vast amount of daily business data your company produces and arranges it into a usable format, useful in making the best possible business decisions.

Producing regular profit and loss statements, at least quarterly or monthly, will enable you to:

1. Answer the question, “How much money am I making, if any?”

2. Compare your projected performance with actual performance

3. Compare your performance against industry benchmarks

4. Use past performance trends to form reasonable forecasts for the future

5. Show your business growth and financial health over time

6. Detect any problems regarding sales, margins and expenses within a reasonable time so adjustments may be made to recoup losses or decrease expenses

7. Provide proof of income if you need a loan or mortgage

8. Calculate your income and expenses when completing and submitting your tax return.

What is a Profit & Loss Statement?

A profit and loss statement, also know as a P&L or an Income Statement, records sales income, costs and expenses and shows business performance over a specific period of time.  Profit and loss statements:

1. Show business performance over a specific period of time

2. Show income (revenue from sales)

3. Show the costs of the goods you sell (Cost of Goods Sold) such as purchases made from suppliers for goods or raw materials

4. Shows your gross profit (income minus cost of goods sold)

5. Show operational expenses (overhead and other expenses of running your company)

6. Show net income or loss (whether a profit or loss has been made )

Creating a Profit & Loss Statement

The figures in a profit and loss account will come from a number of different sources in your business, so it’s best to organizes and categorize your day to day receipts and expenses into a Chart of Accounts which represents the income and expense categories you want to track and evaluate. This Chart of Accounts forms the core structure of your bookkeeping system, and will be the basis for your Profit and Loss Statement.

A Profit and Loss Statement will usually look something like this:

$250,000       Income
  $10,000        Less Discounts
$240,000        Equals Net Income

   $50,000       Less Cost of Sales/Cost of Goods Sold
 $190,000       Equals Gross Profit

$100,000       Less Operating Expenses
  $90,000       Equals Operating Profit

$5,000        Plus Other Income
    $3,000        Less Other Expenses
  $92,000        Equals Net Ordinary Income (Profit Before Taxes)

  $33,000        Taxes
  $59,000        Net Profit (or Net Loss)

 Accounting Software and Financial Reporting

Accounting software makes it easy for you to create different views of your data. For example, you can compare this month with last month, this year-to-date with last-year-to-date, several months in sequence, or you can convert the figures into percentages and compare them that way. All this makes it easier for you to identify trends over time.

Your goal in business is for your sales and profits to increase, and your expenses, as a percent of sales, to decrease. Look at your profit and loss statements and compare them from one period to another. Are there any sudden changes or anomalies that raise a red flag? For example, if your office expense spending suddenly rose from $100 a month to $500 for one month, you would want to look into this. Or if your staff costs on average 30% of your income and this figure suddenly goes up to 40%, again you would want to investigate.

You can also draw some deeper conclusions than just seeing that more money is coming in than before. Is the increase equivalent to, or better than, the rate of inflation? Is it the result of more sales, or is it hiding the fact that although you have charged more per sale, you actually made fewer sales? And looking ahead, is the rate of increase in line with your goals, or do you need to set a new target? These are just some of the many questions accurate reports can help you address.

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