Jan

Business Goals and Accountability

Business goals only become reality when we take the proper steps to reach them. One of the steps that matters in a big way is how we hold ourselves accountable. If we don’t put systems in place that make us accountable to ourselves and to others around us we severely limit our potential. It’s fairly easy to write out your goals, and come up with objectives once you have the tools to do so. What has been a challenge for me personally is getting others to hold me accountable for the goals I’ve set. There are no shortcuts to success and I believe accountability is one of the keys to reaching your business goals consistently.

How to Reach Your Goals More Consistently

There are few simple accountability steps that I recommend when you want to add extra power to your goals. When you add these tools to your goals and objectives arsenal you’ll be able to reach your dreams faster and more efficiently.

Five Accountability Steps for Your Business Goals:

Make your business goals public on your blog, Twitter, or Facebook
Ask your family to check up on you
Tell your team at work what you are doing
Schedule your accountability checkups with the people you trust and respect
Hire a business coach

I know how scary it can be to involve others in your personal dreams and goals. Don’t let that fear keep you from moving forward. Start with someone you can trust and share your goals with them. Ask them for feedback on your objectives. I find that just talking through what my goals are with someone else helps me find the errors in my thought process.

Once you’re comfortable with sharing your goals with a friend or family member, you should carefully consider hiring a business coach. The reason that I recommend paying for a business coach is because once you are paying for accountability you’ll tend to act on the advice rather than just ignore it (which we sometimes do when we get advice from friends or family). You’ll achieve your business goals a lot faster when you have someone personally interested in seeing you succeed.

Business goals can seem overwhelming at first, but when you define the goal, the objectives, and use accountability you can succeed more consistently.

Take action today and reap the benefits of strategic accountability!

Nov

Write An FAQ – Day Eighteen

Write An FAQ How many times have you answered the same “dumb” question? Maybe the only reason it’s starting to sound dumb is because you haven’t done anything effective and efficient with the question. Your FAQ can be a an efficient way to handle your customers needs and it will free up more time for you every day.

Write An FAQ

The simple solution to how to answer less “dumb” questions as a small business owner is to write your own FAQ. As always taking time to invest in a long term solution will pay off for you. Just like the rest of these steps you can implement a solid solution in about 30 minutes and grow and manage your small business more effectively.

1. Read Through The FAQ’s You Receive

The first step is just to scan through your email, support queue, and notes you take when you receive customer questions and complaints. Once you see a pattern of a few common issues make a note of the question or problem and save some of your answers. Go through all your customer questions and come up with 10 or less. Ultimately your FAQ sheet should be short and informative with all the top issues included in it.

2. Write Your FAQ And Provide It Automatically

Take your top questions and write them out with a simple answers. Read them over a few times to be sure that if you were experiencing the problem or had the question yourself the answer would be clear and simple. Now put the FAQ on your website, in a prebuilt email, and in a PDF.

In your initial support response you can provide a link to the new FAQ. You can also put the answers in a canned response in your email and share a PDF of the answers on your site and with your team and customers. Make sending it to your customers easy and automatic.

3. Ask Your Customers To Provide Input

After you’ve sent out your FAQ to a few customers ask them what they think. Are the answers effective? Did it save them time? Once you get some feedback make the changes as necessary so that your FAQ can be an effective and efficient tool.

542 days ago Short URL 3 Comments

Grow Your Business In 30 Days/Instructional/Small Business Resources

customer/customer service/faq/management/time management

Sep

Gmail Canned Responses – How They Can Work For You

If you send a lot of initial responses to an ad or find yourself writing the same response frequently, then Gmail’s canned responses are perfect for you. They also work great if you want to use multiple different signatures. To Start using canned responses, make sure you have labs enabled.

Click the labs icon:

Enable canned responses:

enable canned responses

Click save at the bottom of the labs page:

Now go ahead and compose a new message:

You’ll see your regular message signature in the new email and you can save this if you’d like or clear it out and write a new response.

regular email

Once the body of the message says what you want it to say, just click the “Canned Response” link and select “Save>New canned response..”

canned response

Next you’ll see a window pop up that asks you to name your canned response. Fill it out and click ok.

name your canned response

If you want to have a single line canned response, just be sure to clear the body of the message including your signature before saving a new canned response. Once you have a few different canned responses you can choose them when composing a new message:

use one line response

Take a few minutes and create some responses that will save you time. Until just recently I hadn’t tried the canned responses feature but I am finding it to be a huge time saver already.

Let me know how you are using canned responses in the comments section!

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How To Enable Labs For Google Apps Accounts

Google Apps And Gmail Signatures Now Support Images. Here’s How!

599 days ago Short URL 1 Comment

Instructional/Small Business Resources/tech

email/gmail/time management

Sep

Filter Messages And Save Your Inbox!

Even with the invention of the Priority Mailbox we still need to filter our email in order to get our time back from the email wasteland. I’m sure that there are a million posts on this, but I want you to have a simple guide for instituting a filter right here.

If your logging in and see too much of this:

Too Much Email

Then it’s time to take control back. To begin, all you need to do is click settings:

click gmail settings

Then go to filters:

gmail filters

Create a new filter:

create a new gmail filter

Fill in the ways you want to filter, for instance, filter anything from any email address. Or you could filter anything with the word “Twitter” in it. You can test your search to see how it works before you move onto the next step, so be sure to do that.

who are you filtering gmail messages from

Once you’re pleased with your selection, click next, and fill in the following options. You can label the message (similar to what a folder in email used to do), or you can just archive it so you don’t have to read it. There are many other settings here, so explore them and see what works you. Remember, you can always delete a filter and restore whatever you’d like to your inbox or another location, so don’t be afraid to try something new!

setup your gmail filter settings

Once you are satisfied with your filter settings, choose to either apply it to the existing messages that fit the filter, or only apply it to new message that come in. Once you’ve checked or unchecked that box, click “Create Filter” and you’re all set!

apply the new gmail filter to your existing messages and create filter