Is e-commerce for me?

Is e-commerce for me?
Small businesses run up against the same obstacles on the
market as big corporations. They also have to respond
quickly to any changes and meet the clients' needs. Big
firms can afford expensive promotion and media advertising.
For small enterprises e-commerce is nowadays an important
development factor. .

One report announced that, according to research carried
out in September, an average Briton had spent around 250
pounds on the Internet while the average of all countries
polled amounted to 123 pounds. In the USA each consumer
spent on shopping the equivalent of 119 pounds. Another
good news is, this year more people decide to shop online
compared with last year. Shopping is obviously one of the
possible options of running business online.

Product

How to recognize if it is the right time to start online
activity, too? To find out what goods and services are most
frequently offered via the Internet and which are not it
will suffice to look through the websites of firms and
shops. Selling on the Web has its advantages and
limitations. There is nothing new about mail-order sales or
remote-order service. The advantage is that firms using the
Internet carry out their activity at a low cost. A
mail-order bookstore does not have to incur lease related
costs of a well situated establishment, neither does it
employ staff. A warehouse, if needed, can be located a long
way from the city centre, where space related costs are
low. You can reach clients from remote areas or even from
abroad. As in almost every mail-order system, shipping
costs constitute a problem, though. Furthermore, some goods
are only advertised rather than sold directly via the
Internet, like for instance cars, complex equipment, and
machinery. It is also difficult to sell online the goods
covered by regulation, e.g. black powder guns. Some
chemicals or services including direct contact with the
client (massage therapist, plumber and the like) constitute
a problem as well. In this case the Internet will remain
only a form of advertising, unfortunately, not so efficient
as local press since you should not expect someone to come
from the far end of the country to buy goods. Certainly it
is always worth having a website, although you cannot
expect miracles of it.

Taking attractiveness to potential clients into
consideration, one can divide online goods and services
into two groups. The first one includes these elements
which have to compete in terms of price and product range
with the offer of traditional stores. The other covers rare
goods, not that easily accessible, unique, and intended for
a special consumer. Here online sales has a great potential.

Do your customers use the Internet?

It is worth wondering who buys my products and uses my
services. Naturally, the majority of people who buy
software, computers, and electronic gadgets of all kinds
are the potential Internet users, whereas goods for the old
may not sell well this way. The same will apply for local
market goods. You can always try to expand the target group
of consumers by offering also online shopping; however, you
should consider the costs that are worth incurring in this
case, including both direct ones and labour related ones
(updating, introducing new products and the like).

The services that do not require direct contact with the
customer are also recommended for online selling, as in
case of tourist or financial services,. There is no need to
send any products here but for the confirmation of signing
the contract via traditional mail. It is worth paying
attention to developing services, such as e-consultancy,
e-training and the like.

Among frequently bought items are also printer
accessories,, basic office equipment, or vacuum paper bags.
They can be bought in many places, nevertheless, in an
online shop a wide range of products are available round
the clock. What is more, the shops which "remember" what
their customers bought facilitate further shopping.

We launch e-commerce

Each new way of selling is a challenge for a firm. It is
reliability that matters to the client. It is unacceptable
that when an order via the Internet is received, there is
no assigned person who is going accept it and prepare goods
for shipment. First, you should consider the outsourcing of
running the website and shop. If you decide to have your
own website, it is worth using the services of an expert
agency, whose specialists will support us with drawing up a
marketing plan or advertising and preparing the visual site
identification and competition analysis. A correctly built
online shop should as well be able to handle such problems
as: how to facilitate the process of placing an order for
customers and how to prevent the phenomenon of abandoned
shopping carts.

The websites of firms which begin their Internet adventure
contain the elements that can negatively influence the way
companies run their business. For instance, such firms
boast about the producers and distributors they cooperate
with by putting names on a site as well as links to their
websites. Taking a small company starting its business into
account, we show the potential customer where to look for
the item which they are interested in (our offer may not
prove to be the best).

Good websites certainly bring measurable benefits to firms.
They reduce advertising and promotion costs, broaden the
group of potential customers, create communities of loyal
clients and support brand-building. It would be a pity to
give them up.

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This article was translated by mLingua Worldwide
Translations, Ltd. mLingua provides professional language
translations in all major Western and Asian languages,
software localization and web site translation services.
Please visit http://mlingua.pl

Closing The Sale is the Tipping Point

Closing The Sale is the Tipping Point
Thank you author Malcolm Gladwell, for your exciting,
revolutionary, perceptive and timely book, "The Tipping
Point." His identification and description of the process
that defines so many procedures in society has almost
become generic, commonly used, a household term, repeated
frequently everywhere. Although Gladwell did not publish
this unique book as a selling manual, "The Tipping Point"
is a legitimate phrase, quite accurately utilized in
describing part of the selling process.

Think about each of the items that comprise the selling
process: Prospecting, identification, research,
questioning, presentation, handling objections and closing.
Each part of the process is necessary for the success of
the next. Each component is critical to the sales process
yet all are useless unless an attempt to close the sale is
made. If you have read this ground-breaking and popular
book, you will easily identify the closing component as the
aspect of the selling process known as the "Tipping Point,"
the point at which all of your efforts before it suddenly
yield a mutually satisfying conclusion. In this case, the
sale is made!

As a salesperson, whether a professional or not, do not
allow the stigma so often associated with closing sales to
stop you cold. You will know when you achieve the rank of
"professional" when you deeply understand this simple
proclamation: Too many salespeople succumb to the
complexity and awe associated with the "science of
closing." Learn to think of the close as simply the
"Tipping Point" in the selling process. Perhaps this idea
will remove some of the pressure so many salespeople
experience while considering closing.

Remember that selling is actually the process of simply
helping your prospect to buy. The job of the salesperson is
to help clarify their need and expertly offer a product or
service that meets or exceeds that uncovered need. Since
many people do not like to make decisions, your job is
simply to help them decide that by purchasing from you,
their needs are met in a most satisfying manner. They must
clearly see that the value they get from your product or
service far exceeds the money that they will spend in
acquiring it. At this point, the "Tipping Point" occurs and
everyone gets what they want.

Professional salespeople know that that they add unique,
considerable value to their products and services
eventually bound for the prospective customer. They
understand that "The Tipping Pont" is the point of decision
in every sale where everyone wins! This is the critical
point of understanding that builds their income.

Remember, closing is simply "asking for the order," nothing
more. Do not be intimidated by the very thought of closing.
Closing the sale is simply a logical step in the natural
progression of the sales process. It is the "Tipping
Point," where you realize the full return on your selling
efforts. Go get 'em!

----------------------------------------------------
Daniel Sitter, author of both Learning For Profit and
Superior Selling Skills Mastery, has garnered extensive
experience in sales, training, marketing and personal
development over a successful twenty-six year sales career.
http://www.superiorsellingskills.com
Visit his resourceful blog at http://www.idea-sellers.com

How Accurate Are Your Project Estimates?

How Accurate Are Your Project Estimates?
Do you excel at predicting the time, funding, and resources
your projects will require?

Whether your organization decides to design a new system,
launch a new Web site, or overhaul your company's policies,
these endeavors will require people, schedules, funding,
resources, requirements, testing, revising, implementation,
evaluation, and many other elements.

You may have seen this phenomenon already: projects are
risk magnets. Why is that?

The possible reasons include the fact that projects
typically involve many dynamic aspects, yet they're often
constrained by finite conditions. These contradictory
forces make it extremely difficult to determine with
pinpoint accuracy the time and effort required, and set the
stage for plenty of budget and schedule "collisions" during
the life of the project.

When my clients or colleagues invariably ask, "How long do
you think this effort might take?" I usually experience a
knee-jerk reaction. Instinctively, a part of my brain that
once excelled at solving math problems on timed quizzes
goes into overdrive. "I know the answer!" it screams.

Yet, unless that project or task is something I've
performed many times before -- under very similar
conditions each time, and with good records of my actual
hours spent -- providing an accurate estimate can be quite
elusive. As I strive to imagine all of the stages and steps
of a process, as well as fathom the unknown variables or
things that could go awry, it's no wonder that I hardly
ever guess 100% correctly, particularly for new endeavors.

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Estimating Techniques Can Help Manage Risks
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Did you know that estimating is an invaluable tool for
anticipating and managing these project uncertainties?

Whenever we can determine our schedule and budget
requirements with reasonable accuracy, it reduces the risk
of running out of time, resources, and funding during a
project.

Yet with all of the emphasis we place on creating accurate
estimates and bids, we still seem to have difficulty
developing realistic predictions of our time and effort. If
we look carefully at the evidence, I believe we'll find
three basic, underlying clues to the reasons for our
challenges with estimating:

-- The presence of hidden or unknown variables that are
difficult or impossible to anticipate, and sometimes even
more difficult to resolve.

-- Our often-idealistic views of our own capabilities. We
tend to imagine that we can accomplish much more than is
possible in the time allocated.

-- A strong human desire to please other people by telling
them what they want to hear. (After all, who wants to be
the bearer of bad news?)

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12 Tips for Increasing Estimating Accuracy
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To remedy these shortcomings, below are 12 ideas for
boosting the accuracy of your estimates:

1. Maintain an ongoing "actual hours" database of the
recorded time spent on each aspect of your projects. Use
the data to help estimate future projects and identify the
historically accurate buffer time needed to realistically
perform the work.

2. Create and use planning documents, such as
specifications and project plans.

3. Perform a detailed task analysis of the work to be
performed.

4. Use a "complexity factor" as a multiplier to determine
whether a pending project is more or less complex than a
previous one.

5. Use more than one method to arrive at an estimate, and
look for a midpoint among all of them.

6. Document caveats, constraints, and assumptions in your
estimates to bound the conditions under which your
estimates would be meaningful. (Anything that occurs
outside of those constraints would be considered out of
scope.)

7. If the proposed budget or schedule seems inadequate to
do the work, propose adjusting upward or downward one or
more of the four project scoping criteria: Cost, schedule,
quality, and features.

8. Consider simpler or more efficient ways to organize and
perform the work.

9. Plan and estimate the project rollout from the very
beginning so that the rollout won't become a chaotic
scramble at the end. For example, propose using a pilot
program or a phased implementation.

10. In really nebulous situations, consider a phase-based
approach, where the first phase focuses primarily on
requirements gathering and estimating.

11. Develop contingency plans by prioritizing the
deliverables right from the start into "must-have" and
"nice-to-have" categories.

12. Refer to your lessons-learned database for "20:20
foresight" on new projects, and incorporate your best
practices into future estimates.

In conclusion, by using a set of proactive estimating
techniques to scope, plan, and constrain your project
conditions, you can dramatically improve your estimating
practices, reduce and mitigate risks, and greatly increase
your project success rate!

----------------------------------------------------
Adele Sommers, Ph.D. is the author of the award-winning
"Straight Talk on Boosting Business Performance" program.
She helps people "discover and recover" the profits their
businesses may be losing every day through overlooked
performance potential. To sign up for more free tips, visit
her site at http://LearnShareProsper.com