Your sales invoice should be valuable tool for your company
I’m willing to guess that you’ve given some thought about how your communication looks. You probably have nice stationary and many of you also have figured out how to send emails that include your company logo. But, have you considered how your invoice should be designed in terms of how it looks from a graphics perspective and other “extras” that could be included on it? To say that most small business invoices are “ho-hum” would be putting it mildly. Think about it this way: You put your “best foot” forward when you set out to land new customers. You hand out nice business cards. You have a beautiful website for prospects to visit. You send out marketing materials printed on glossy paper and designed by professional graphic artists. But when it’s time to ask these people for money, you use a standard form that could have been printed out 70 years ago and no one would know the difference. Frankly, this tells your customers that you just don’t care anymore. You sales invoice should be an item that you give some thought to, and I think this applies in two general areas: The graphic design of your invoice, and The space on your invoice where you can include comments or additional information. Invoice graphic design If you’re still working your way through an old box of invoices you had a local printer make for you a few years ago, well, they’re a good chance that they’re sufficiently boring and you should chuck them. There are many ways to customize various invoice templates today. Microsoft Word comes with several invoice templates and they can all be improved with the addition of your logo. Online accounting services like Quickbooks, and online payment systems, such as PayPal, allow you to easily add your company logo. It just takes a few mouse clicks and you’ll only have to do it once. The point is to give the same kind of attention to the invoices you send as you do to your other important business communication. Make it a mailing piece that you’re proud of. Creative use of space There is usually an area where you can enter comments on invoice templates. If you’re using something like a Microsoft invoice template, you can make wholesale changes to type and add virtually any information. Let me forward this idea: Your sales invoice should be a sales piece. Why not use some of the available space to start your next sale with each customer. Use it to promote an “unadvertised special” or news about a new product that is scheduled to be available soon. You can even have some fun with it. Say something like, “If you’ve paid enough attention to read all the fine print on this sales invoice, use code #XYZ123 on your next widget order to get an immediate 10 percent discount! And thanks for one of our most observant customers.” And if you send invoices via postal mail, don’t forget that you can stuff the envelops with other materials promoting your company in different ways. You’re already paying for the postage, why not piggyback another bit of information on the mailing? These are just a few ideas. Remember that the most profitable companies take advantage of every opportunity available to improve their...
read moreA cautionary tale about a brilliant young entrepreneur
By Cliff Ennico As I get ready to celebrate my 63rd birthday, I find myself spending more and more time with young people. As a lawyer dealing with technology startups and other entrepreneurial ventures, I not only find my clients getting younger and younger but also the lawyers I deal with. I find myself acting as mentor for a growing assortment of Millennial attorneys who have chosen to follow the path of solo practice as I have, and in my spare time I find myself coaching student entrepreneurs at local universities. I have joked before in this column about there being no greater pleasure for a 60-something person with a Y chromosome than cornering some poor unsuspecting kid and boring the living crap out of him for hours on end. But my experiences in mentoring youth reminds me of a story – a true one – I learned from my father at an early age. It goes like this: Once upon a time, there was a famous art critic in Vienna, Austria. This critic’s opinions were universally regarded, and his blessing was often considered a ‘make or break’ for young struggling artists looking to secure a foothold in the art world. One day the critic learned about a young army veteran who was scraping out a living doing sketches of people on street corners. Always looking to spot young talent before anyone else did, the critic visited a small hole-in-the-wall gallery where the artist was exhibiting some of his paintings. The critic wasn’t impressed, and he told the young artist so. ‘Young man,’ he said, ‘you have some talent, but your work is very generic and traditional. You are unlikely to make it as an artist, especially here in Vienna which is the center of the European art world (as indeed it was in those times). The artist was disappointed, but after some reflection realized that the critic was right – his future did not lie in the arts. He would need to choose another way to make a living, and choose he did. The young man faced a lot of hurdles in his new profession – for a while he lived penniless on the streets, sleeping in flophouses, fending off pneumonia. Rejected nearly everywhere he went in Austria, he moved to a neighboring country. Making enemies there as well, he was thrown into prison for several months. During his incarceration, he wrote an international best-selling book which is still in print today. Upon his release from prison he rose rapidly. Within 10 years he was a household word in his adopted country. Within 20 years his name was known throughout the entire world. His name is still a household word today, more than 70 years after his death. No matter who you are, I guarantee you have extremely strong opinions about this young man and what he stood for. Nobody today remembers the Viennese art critic who set this young man on his path to fame and glory. His name is lost to history. But you all know who the young man was. You studied him in school, and your grandchildren and great-grandchildren will probably do the same. His name was…Adolf Hitler. You didn’t see THAT coming, did you? This story is a powerful teaching tool for entrepreneurs, and...
read moreLong live the lesson of April the Giraffe!
Although Rahm Emmanuel has more recently popularized this adage, it was apparently Winston Churchill who first said, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” In the world of content marketing, a similar truism has surfaced, and it might be expressed like this: “Never let a viral current event go to waste.” I was reminded of this recently when I was reviewing my weekly analytics on Twitter. One piece of content I shared stood out in terms of how well my audience responded to it. Here’s the Tweet I’m referring to: When I saw how many people engaged with this Tweet, I clicked over to the article it was linking to and discovered that Stephanie Melish’s Entrepreneur piece had been shared 3,100 times. Stephanie got a lot of mileage out of April the Giraffe’s 15 minutes of pregnant fame! This reminds us of one of the easiest and best ways to occasionally supercharge your content marketing and blogs: Piggyback on a current event that is going viral. The events to concentrate on are those that are sweeping through popular culture. You probably remember the blue dress controversy, for example. Also, movies, sporting events, and celebrities fall into this category. Most of these viral events come to mind easily; you just need to find a way to leverage them so they provide a framework (and headline) for a piece of content you want to create. However, if you’re at a loss for what is on people’s minds, you can lean on Google Trends to give you some hints. However, I would trust my personal judgment more than Google Trends because people may not be searching for the day’s top viral content. After all, the thing that makes something viral is the fact that it is doing a good job propagating itself. If you have to search for viral content, it can’t be all that viral. So the next time the whole world is tuned into a webcam following the life of a pregnant giraffe, jump on the bandwagon, create a piece of content around the event, and promote it like crazy via your social media accounts. Image: Giraffe closeup head 2, by Duncan Rawlinson (thelastminute) from Vancouver, BC (Flickr) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia...
read more4 keys to understanding and leveraging ‘customer panel’ surveys
See if you’ve received any requests that sound like this: We want to give you the chance to play a role in helping us develop and improve our financial products and services. To do so, we invite you to be part of the Chase Customer Panel, which is a group of customers who give us their opinion through a variety of short online surveys. I suspect you’ve been approached like this and perhaps you even participate in some “customer panels.” They are probably a good idea for both customers and companies. But there are four key concepts I want to point out here, the first is the way Chase frames this request. The company wants to “give you a chance to play a role.” This is a far better way to ask people to complete a survey than the unadorned “Please take 10 minutes to answer our survey.” Second, Chase is inviting people to join a panel that even has an official name. This elevates the relationship between the company and the customer. It’s almost like being on an advisory committee to the president of Chase…well, almost. Third, this approach – should you decided to join the Customer Panel – gives Chase permission (and the expectation) to keep asking you and other panel members to answer more surveys. If you have an email list, or you feel your business could get some important insights via surveys, consider creating the umbrella of some kind of advisory panel and asking people to join. The survey ‘strategy’ What I’ve described so far is fine, but my last observation about survey groups may be the most important. I have a friend who is part of a survey group for a newspaper. He gets asked to answer survey questions every couple of weeks. He noticed that almost all of the surveys had two things in common: They asked about the Sunday newspaper, and They also asked about a specific health insurance company’s ads in the Sunday paper. Why were the questions almost always focused on the Sunday paper? My friend, by the way, never read much of the Sunday paper, so his answers to the survey questions were pretty poor or unhelpful. However, he found that the repeated surveys on the Sunday paper motivated him to look at it more closely. After all, he was part of an important customer panel, by ignoring most of the Sunday paper, wasn’t he, in a way, shirking his responsibility to the group? This is very subtle, but as you probably know, the Sunday edition of a newspaper is full of ads and it’s important to actually get those ads in front of people’s eyes. Repeated survey questions can help do this for the newspaper. And this brings us to my observation about the health insurance company. These surveys asked the exact same sequence of questions about the health insurance company’s ads and also about the public image of the health insurance company. My friend, who is about to be eligible for Medicare, has lost track of how many times the same questions were asked. The online-real-world connection Then in the mail one day, he got an envelope of information about this company’s Medicare supplemental insurance. Because of his age, he has been receiving similar ads through the mail...
read moreYoutube small business ideas you can do today
Youtube small business ideas fall into two categories: How to make money via Youtube, and How to use Youtube to boost your small business Making money via Youtube There are three ways you can make money on Youtube. Although there are exceptions, I don’t think anyone should start a Youtube project with the thought that it would replace their day jobs. It can be an excellent source of extra money as a “side hustle,” but growing it into an income stream you can live off is very difficult – especially if you live in the U.S. or any other developed country. The three ways to make money from YouTube are to Promote products you sell, Be sponsored by a company, or Collect ad revenue. There is one constant that applies to each of these three monetization techniques: you need good YouTube traffic to make any meaningful money. However, if you are promoting products on Youtube that convert to sales on your website, you can be successful with somewhat less traffic, but this depends on two things: You need to be getting the right people to view your Youtube videos, and You must have favorable pricing and margins on the products you are promoting. We will look at each of these Youtube small business ideas for monetization separately. Product promotion Creating informative videos and building a following is central to selling products through Youtube. Many in the health and beauty categories have done well using Youtube. A seller of hair extensions, for example, grew a good business on Youtube by posting a lot of videos that demonstrated various ways to use the extensions they sold. When this is your approach, you can think of your Youtube videos as mini infomercials: Offer a lot of practical information that gets viewers excited about your products. If you’ve seen any of the television infomercials for cooking products, you’ll see that they are longer than a typical Youtube video and cover more topics. With Youtube, you would want to break down one of these longer infomercials into smaller chunks. To use the cooking example, you would do one on how your whiz-bang cooker creates killer lasagna, then another on chocolate cake, another on pulled pork, etc. It’s through getting repeat visitors to your Youtube channel that you build your following and start ringing up sales. Find a corporate sponsor Finding some deep corporate pockets to fund your Youtube program is probably the most lucrative strategy, but generally, it requires you to have a large following before anyone would be interested. However, if you sell products from major corporations, you probably know that they have some cooperative ad money available and this may be one of the best Youtube small business ideas out there. Talk to your account manager and see if they would be interested in being featured in some of your Youtube videos. You’ll need to have some Youtube followers for this to work, but you wouldn’t need to necessarily be a Youtube superstar to generate some interest. This might be especially true right now when many companies who place Youtube ads are fearful that their ads are going to wind up on a video posted by some hate group. Ad revenue Unless you manage to post a Youtube video that goes...
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