Do Business Well

Your approach to payment of your accounts may have almost as much impact on the performance of your company as does the collection of your receivables.

In a perfect world, we would all enter into small business with plenty of cash. We would make money from the first day, never outgrow our financial resources, and never have a crisis interrupt our ability to pay. I have actually known a couple of small business owners for whom this has been true. Continue Reading »

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How do you find reps? Call the buyers you wish to sell. Tell them you’re planning to introduce a new line into their area, and you wonder whom they might recommend as a rep. I have never had any problem getting one or more suggestions from every call.

After you’ve amassed a list of potential candidates, call each one and do a brief telephone interview. Give him some background on your company and product to see if he’s interested. Determine if he has any conflicting lines (it’s usually considered a conflict of interest for a rep to carry the same items from two factories). Continue Reading »

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Manufacturers, wholesalers, business-to-business service providers, and job shops can all benefit from the use of outside sales representatives. Some companies who deal with the public have the same opportunity, such as travel agents, mortgage lenders, and apartment owners.

What is an independent sales rep?

1. The term “independent representative” sounds exactly like what it is. This person works for himself. He or his company, generally referred to as a rep firm, will not be on your payroll, but will earn their money from three sources of services they may provide: Continue Reading »

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Spammers work hard to understand why their messages are not read and find methods to avoid being blocked. Here, legitimate e-mail marketers are much like the spammer, since they and their suppliers also need to understand what is stopping their messages getting through and identify solutions to this. There are four general points where spam or legitimate permission-based e-mail is identified, and which can stop e-mail being read by the recipient:

1. Inbox identification by the user. The simplest way that spam is identified is by the recipient; if it looks like spam from the header, it will be quickly removed using the delete button. Alternatively, recipients can report spam to their anti-spam software and, if enough people do this, there is the danger that may be added to a blacklist. Continue Reading »

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Finally, this is a checklist of what to avoid in the subject line:

• Make sure the subject line is not too long. If you leave the best to last, the offer may be truncated.
• SHOUTING!!! Shouting is using capitals. It looks unprofessional. Worse still, it is often associated with spam — and spam filters stop e-mails with too many capitals in the subject line. Exclamation marks are not a good idea for similar reasons!!! Some capitalization can work — for example, just on the first word or on the first letter of each word.

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