Sauce Software Blog

A recent study conducted by the University of Maryland’s Smith School of Business showed that nearly one in five small business owners are integrating social media into their business processes, and that technology adoption rates in the U.S. among small businesses have doubled in the past year from 12% to 24%.

Whether your business is ahead of the curve or looking to catch up, small businesses on both sides of the track can learn from the success stories of others. Here’s a list of five companies that are kicking tail and taking names while staying on top of their social media efforts.

Read the full story here

http://mashable.com/2010/06/02/small-business-social-media-success-stories/

Norm Brodsky is the founder of CitiStorage and seven start up’s and a three time Inc. 500 honoree.

For a full range of articles http://www.inc.com/

Ten Commandments of Business

1) Numbers run a business. if you don’t know how to read them, you’re flying blind.

2) Cash is hard to get and easy to spend. Make it before you spend it.

3) Don’t focus on the top line. Gross margin is the most important number on the income statement

4) A sale isn’t a sale until you collect

5) When your short-term liabilities exceed your short-term assests, you’re bankrupt

6) Forgot about shortcuts. Run a business as if it’s forever.

7) Identify your true competitors, and treat them with respect.

You have no friends in business, only associates.

9) Culture drives a company. In the long run, the boss’s most important job is to define and enforce it.

10) The life plan has to come before the business plan

These are an excellent guide for anyone looking to dive into a new business or expand an existing one.

Have fun.

Seth Godin  drives home a  great message in his latest blog.

The circles (no more strangers

It’s so tempting to seek out more strangers.

More strangers to pitch your business, your candidate, your non-profit, your blog… More strangers means more upside and not so much downside. It means growth.

The problem is that strangers are difficult to convert. And the other problem is that they’re expensive to reach. And the hardest problem is that we’re running out of strangers.

Consider this hierarchy: Strangers, Friends, Listeners, Customers, Sneezers, Fans and True Fans. One true fan is worth perhaps 10,000 times as much as a stranger. And yet if you’re in search of strangers, odds are you’re going to mistreat a true fan in order to seduce yet another stranger who probably won’t reward you much.

Let’s say a marketer has $10,000 to spend. Is it better to acquire new customers at $2,000 each (advertising is expensive) or spend $10 a customer to absolutely delight and overwhelm 1,000 true fans?

Or consider a non-profit looking to generate more donations. Is it better to embrace the core donor base and work with them to host small parties with their friends to spread the word, or would hiring a PR firm to get a bunch of articles placed pay off more efficiently?

Seven tips to embrace your business on the web.

1. Make your website a daily tool
   Make your website a visited daily tool for your clients. A clear communication objective will help them  look for the information they require,  avoiding a phone call or waiting for a response. Your website is there to help clients everyday.
2. Identify your relationship with your visitors
   Why are they visiting your website, by studying your website traffic can give some clues on popularity of the different pages. This will help with building a sustainable relationship, and over time you’ll understand what works for opt-in and sales conversion.
3. Make it easy for your visitor to find the right information
   Visitors search for information in different ways, examples of the different search functions which should be on your website are;
   - Search function toolbar
   - Easy navigational menus
   - Categorised content
   - Uncomplicated and easy to use design flow
4. Let your visitor interact with your website
   Make your website the main area where clients or potential clients can contribute through comments, wikis, blogs , forums and  have available open feedback tools for honest input.
5. Make the content suit your visitor
   By categorising the content, visitors can choose by themselves what is important. You can also adjust content after the visitors have searched on Google. By understanding their search terms,  provides you with more clues on their buying patterns.
6. Make your website available through multiple channels
   Let your website accept traffic and leads from any other channels, like the following, different mail groups, partners and suppliers websites, e-marketing lists or RSS feeds.
7. Integrate your website with your business process
   Make your website become a natural part of your business processes, that way there will be no additional work required to keep your website up to date and alive.

Take your business heart to the web

For further information or if you would like to discuss your online requirements, contact Emma Puttick at Sauce Software.

P.S Keep your eyes open for the next Sauce newsletter with information about the new SauceOpen platform to be released shortly.

Emma Puttick

Tags: business, content, process, website ideas

Upgrade your CRM to send an SMS directly to a contact or to a bulk list.

Sign up for 12 months and pay only $29/month including 100 free SMS’s per month. No switch on fee.

Benefits:

• Send bulk SMS’s to promote your events, products and news.
• Contact your  customers urgently, without interrupting them if they’re in a meeting, avoiding a phone call.
• SMS’ing via the mobile phone is tiresome – takes too long even when you are relatively proficient with your thumbs.
• SMS module allows you to type an entire message on your PC, easily edit it and dispatch as necessary.
• Recipient can reply easily, direct to your mobile.

It’s a quick and easy process, to add new contacts/customers to the CRM and now they can easily be contacted via SMS as well.

Some clients have been using this successfully, so we are extending this special offer to all of you.

$29 per month, no other costs. If you need more than 100 SMS’s per month you can purchase additional credits.

If you are interested just Click here and we will take care of the rest.

For further information or if you would like to discuss your online requirements, contact Emma Puttick at Sauce Software.

Tags: Marketing, Sauce Open, se, SMS

If there was ever a time to start learning how to grow your online channel, it’s now. Being creative and starting to use your online tools can help leverage your business, improve customer service and extend your market reach without a huge cost investment.

In this newsletter we’ll be describing three easy ways to help you action an online channel. Some you will already be aware of and even use in your business activities. They are easy, quick and measurable.

1. Tracking Offline and Online Promotional Campaigns by using CRM reporting tools and Google Analytics to measure the touch points. Click throughs to the site is only one part of the measurement, by measuring and analysing the other activities, for example conversions over time (leads vs visitors), lead source via forms, potentials pipeline, market input and revenue will help you optimise your next marketing activity.

   For example, a success story is Shapland Swim School, had the highest online registration in January 2009 via a TV commercial. Hilton quoted “To achieve on-line registrations we’ve invested in advertising on other websites, SEO and television. We’ve certainly found the television campaign managed by our agency RHA Advertising to have the “most bang for the buck” in terms of achieving online registrations and cost per lead. Our franchisee’s send us emails telling us how happy they are with the online strategy. And that’s the best measure you can have.”

2. Online customer service. Create a 24/7 Knowledge Base by publishing FAQ’s in vTigerCRM. By using the database for displaying answers to frequently asked questions, allows for self-service client support. Having the ability to deliver information quickly about products and services from a searchable database removes the need for a pre and post support, lowering support costs for both you and the client. People are automatically turning to the web to get more information.
3. Start a Blog. Blogging is a great way to get more traffic from the right audience. Blogs allow you to engage your customers and guests in a dialogue and humanise your brand. For example, testing new products and services before you launch. Just by encouraging your prospects to engage with you online through a blog or forum opens up a new way to receive genuine client feedback.

The web is turning into a new communication channel.  Companies can now successfully correlate market input to online response rates as an effectiveness measurement.

For further information or would like to discuss your online requirements, contact Emma Puttick at Sauce Software.

Tags: analytics, blog, campaigns, crm, customer service, Marketing, online, reporting

One of the most challenging issues facing business is cashflow management. Having run a small business for nearly 3 years now, we’ve certainly learnt some lessons.  Some of the systems which we’ve implemented have reduced internal inefficients, cross purposes and miscommunication, allowing time to be a more strategically focused company.

Being able to measure the amount of money your company makes and spends during a given period can be used used as a barometer of your company’s health and worth.  Understanding your cash flow lets you evaluate:

• Borrowing needs
• The timing of new hires and major purchases
• The timing of payables

Assessing Incoming Cash Flow Processes

• Your company is not a bank. It’s always a good idea to get the payment terms out on the table at the beginning of the business relationship. This allows you to get on with business of delivering the exceptional service or product, knowing the cash is flowing in.
• Staying on Top of Receivables. Don’t wait to invoice, not even a day. Any extra time to send the invoice stalls the money coming in as well as widening the cashflow gap.
• Accept credit cards. “Can I put that on credit card?” should be a common question within the business, you receive the money within 2 days. Setting up an internet merchant facility is very straight forward these days, there are a variety of different services the banks can offer for all amounts of revenue. DIY alternatives are Paypal.
• Cashflow forecasting. A simple spreadsheet which records actual receivables against a forecast can show a 3 month projection if your business is on track, or you need to notify a provider that an invoice may be paid later than usual.

Assessing Outgoing Cash Flow Processes

• Bill Paying Arrangements. If you have set payment terms, you can ask the vendors if they would consider different arrangements. For example setting up a quarterly payment schedule versus a monthly payment schedule could work better with cash inflows, or having a few extra days will help smooth out cashflow.
• Make the most of your employees. Throwing new people at a problem may not be the best solution. One of the biggest expenses is the company payroll, can additional responsibility be added to current staff? If tasks can be separated and assigned to different people that is great. Think processes, not people.
• Consider outsourcing when processes are in place. At an early stage of a business there are a lot of processes which need to be established prior to outsourcing. However any part of the business which isn’t a core part of your business like, bookkeeping, marketing, copywriting, testing, administration can all be serviced by outsourcing providers.

Tags: business, cash flow, management

Continued from Websites are houses too – Part 1

Last week, I talked about a classic recurring dilemma among IT, and especially web development – that is a perception that making websites is somehow easier and less critical than, say, building houses. When a house is getting build, tonnes of time is spent planning and organising it – but with websites, time spent doing that is often perceived as a waste, and the “just get it done” mentality prevails.

There is a solution for the dilemma faces in part 1, and that is a little something called the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC).  There are many difference processes available for handling a project, and the best should be chosen based on the team, the size and nature of the project, time constraints and experience. A few of the more popular ones are Waterfall, Agile and Iterative (Spiral). I will go into a little bit more detail about the waterfall model, as it is what we use to manage our clients’ requirements.

The waterfall model splits development up into a handful of phases – It basically boils down to Requirements, Design, Implementation, Testing, Maintenance. The idea of the model is to specify as much as possible in an early phase, signing it off, before moving down to the next phase. Any irregularities that are found in a lower phase should be passed up to the earlier phase before continuing.

Continue reading “Websites Are Houses Too – Part 2″

Tags: devlopment, model, process, scope creep

…but zero to a search engine!

There are some who argue that it is useless to use alt tags in images from an SEO perspective. But most SEO experts claim that it does make a difference.

Sure, if you cram in 200 keywords in a single image, it will be useless and ignored. But use a few words that are unique, relevant and useful in describing the image will help search engines such as Google understand what its about.

Continue reading “ALT Tags : A picture means a thousand words”

Tags: content, images, SEO

Spring is well and truly in bloom now, and while you’re taking care of all your other business activities, have you been putting off a website spring clean?

… It’s not as hard as you might think to give your site content a creative lift and draw more interest by your site visitors. Here are a few important design tips to make your pages clearer, interesting and give that polished and professional look overall.

1. Graphical Appeal

Carry through your message in images.

It might sound like a no-brainer tip, but adding some well selected graphics or photos to your pages is great for evoking a response from your potential customers or info-seekers.

• Select some small photos to break up large blocks of text and try to make them as relevant to the text as possible.
• You can get your article’s text to wrap nicely around the image by using the editor’s image align options in the SauceOpen CMS.
• Where do you get images? – try istockphoto.com

This is a great way to attract a potential customer’s eye to a block of text; Putting in a catchy graphic near your critical sales point or call to action is a definite winner.

2. Are you listening? – Put Up Some Signs

In the way that we add images for allure, we can also use a tried and true technique often called signposting – put simply it’s the use of graphical elements, indention and blocking, bullets or numbering, or text styles such as bold and italic that makes your content much crisper and lucid.

1. People on the web have a VERY short attention span! so numbers and bullets are fantastic to use as people may skim most of the text, but bullets are usually read.
2. Bold and italic emphasis should be used within reason, but when really hammering home a point – are essential.

Continue reading “Don’t put off a spring spruce!”

Tags: tips, web design, website ideas