November 5th, 2011  Posted at   Business
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Sales training methods all have varying levels of success in the sales world. While sales training consultants and sales training articles debate on methods, behaviors, and appearance, the important laws of sales success will get results. These seven irrefutable laws of sales success will get results, and should be in the forefront of your efforts in all phases of your business developments.

Law 1 – Find Your Customers

Sales training speakers preach that you must find your customers. In the first way of seeing this sales law, the process involves identifying who your customers are. Make sure you know and understand what your target market(s) are for your products or services offered.

Once you are aware of your target audience, you will be much better prepared at finding them. As seen in the second law, you must be aware of this in order to be able to market to them.

Law 2 – Devoted Marketing

Examine your resources, from your sales team training to your personal efforts in marketing, as applicable. Foster these resources into smart and directed marketing campaigns to get what you are selling to your target audience.

Observe sales training articles, which offer a great deal of information on cutting-edge marketing environments. Viral marketing methods, such as social networking communities and forums, are a potential source of business. Opportunities like these offer marketing opportunities for free, and great options for paid advertising.

Chicago sales trainers and sales management consultants from around the world agree that sales marketing must be committed. You and your team should be devoted to reaching your target audience by utilizing the wealth of opportunities available.

Law 3 – Understanding You and the Competition

Sales and marketing training experts agree that understanding is paramount in sales. As seen in a sales training article from Applied Product Marketing: “It is vital that your sales team understands the context of your business and the market in which you operate.” Understanding your services or products, in addition the role you play in the market and in the competition is crucial.

Understanding your products and services, and additionally your goals, are key in business sales training methods that are successful. If you want your customers to trust in what you are selling, you must know and understand what it does for the customer. Likewise, any service of product offered, should represent the business’s goals and direction. The customer needs to know how you are directing your products and services to customers’ needs on a much larger basis. Read more… »

November 5th, 2011  Posted at   Employment Law
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Of all the job responsibilities that HR professionals have, one of the most important is handling employee relations situations which have the potential to raise legal issues. For this reason, it is vital for all HR professionals to fulfill employee relations training which will give them a basic knowledge of employment law. This way, they will easily be able to recognize situations with legal implications. Although every company handles these situations differently, all HR professionals need to be aware of how to go about processing the various scenarios while keeping the law in mind.

No matter what a company’s standard operating procedure is, it is important to identify the roles and responsibilities of HR within the organization. This way, everyone working in HR will be aware of how to respond to these possible legal situations. When deciding which member of the HR team will handle legal issues when they arise, the company must take into account a number of factors. Project team development may determine whether to centralize the HR department or have it decentralized with specialty groups. In a centralized HR department, everyone is able to handle all the different types of concerns that the division is given. In other companies with specialty departments, each subgroup holds expertise in handling specific issues such as EEO, labor relations or ethics.

Different organizations have implemented different techniques for how HR should approach employee relations training with respect to legal issues. Usually the chosen approach will be directly related to the context in which the issue occurs. It has been recognized that in most organizations, a great majority of the issues are informally addressed with a manager or an HR generalist. Other companies have easily accessible procedures in place which allow employees to report a problem, including hotlines to call or drop boxes to submit a problem in writing. HR should establish a method for approaching an issue with the legal department before it arises.

No matter what process the organization chooses, HR professionals must work on project team development as they are often responsible for a multitude of duties and can use all the help available to them. First, it is the responsibility of the HR professionals to gather information related to the problematical situations that arise. Second, they are in charge of seeking legal advice from experts previously identified and selected by the organization. Last, HR is frequently asked to partner with and trust the advice of the legal experts when deciding how to respond to these types of instances.

Since HR professionals do not hold law degrees and cannot practice law, they should not rely solely on their own research. Their means are limited to the use of the Internet to find information relative to the legal dimensions of employee relations issues. Due to the fact that the Internet cannot always be trusted, HR employees must seek the advice of a professional lawyer. Organizations should therefore establish and maintain a relationship with legal experts who have a background and understanding in employment law. Some organizations even choose to employ lawyers on a full-time basis, while others choose to reach out to external sources. A third option, which a relatively small amount of organizations choose to do, is to employ someone to work in HR who has a law degree. Successful employee relations training will allow the HR professionals to work together, along with legal counsel, to manage risk and legal issues for the company. Read more… »

November 5th, 2011  Posted at   Business
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Introduction

A startup with a founding team requires a special kind of company formation that differs from that used by a conventional small business in several key ways. This article alerts founders to those differences so that they can avoid mistakes in doing their setup.

Attributes of a Typical Startup Business

A startup is a type of small business, of course, and its founders want to make substantial and long-term profits just as any small business does. Perhaps some of the empty “concept companies” of the bubble era did not ever intend to build for long-term value but that era is over. Today’s startups need to build value in a sustainable market or fail, just like any other business. Nonetheless, a startup that is anything other than a solo effort does differ strikingly from a conventional small business. Why? Not because the enterprise itself has any different goal other than that of building long-term and sustainable value but because of how its founders view their short-term goals in the venture.

Unlike a small business, a startup founding team will adopt a business model designed to afford the founders a near-term exit (typically 3-5 years) with an exceptionally high return to them if the venture is successful. The team will often want stock incentives that are generally forfeitable until earned as sweat equity. It will typically want to contribute little or no cash to the venture. It will often have valuable intangible IP that the team has developed in concept and likely will soon bring to the prototype stage. It frequently encounters tricky tax issues because the team members will often contribute services to the venture in order to earn their stock. It seeks to use equity incentives to compensate what is often a loose group of consultants or initial employees, who typically defer/skip salary. And it will seek outside funding to get things going, initially perhaps from “friends and family” but most often from angel investors and possibly VCs. The venture will then be make-or-break over the next few years with a comparatively near-term exit strategy always in view for the founding team as the hope of a successful outcome.

The blueprint here differs from that of a conventional small business, which is often established by its founders with substantial initial capital contributions, without emphasis on intellectual property rights, with their sights fixed primarily on making immediate operating profits, and with no expectation of any extraordinary return on investment in the short term.

Given these attributes, company formation for a startup differs significantly from that of a small business. A small business setup can often be simple. A startup setup is much more complex. This difference has legal implications affecting choice of entity as well as structural choices made in the setup. Read more… »

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