Get Better Leads: Improve the Quality of Your Sales Funnel | All Business

~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Ah, leads. They’re your best friend and your worst nightmare. We’ve all wasted time chasing the wrong leads, so it’s understandable that thinking about them would cause some stress. But when they’re the right leads, life is good.

Let’s focus on a few strategies to get better leads into your sales funnel so you spend less time nurturing them to make a purchase.

1. Make Your Offers Irresistible to the Right People

Better leads starts with better targeting through your offer. Whether you’re giving away a whitepaper, a free consultation, or something else of value, make sure first that it’s a killer offer. You want people to jump on it and gladly hand their email address over.

Read More.

4 Steps to Creating a Killer Marketing Plan Today | Small Biz Trends

~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Marketing is one of the most critical components of your business’s success. You may have a fantastic product or service, but if customers are not aware it exists, there’s no point in continuing the line of work.

In order to make sure your product is exposed to your target customers, you need to develop a robust, killer marketing plan. Once you’ve spent time identifying the four Ps, start adding some elements and details to your strategy. Let’s look at the areas you should focus on when developing your marketing plan.

Read More.

What Startups Need to Know About Regulation A+ | Business News Daily

~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

After a lengthy holdup in Congress, it’s official: Nation-wide policies allowing any interested person to invest in a business through equity crowdfunding will go into effect this summer.

On March 25, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission announced its final set of new rules that will make it easier for smaller companies to access investor capital through crowdfunding, and provide investors with more investment choices. These rules, known as “Regulation A+,” update and expand the existing Regulation A, and are mandated by Title IV of the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act passed in 2012.

Read More.

How Online And Offline Communities Are Changing The Way That Businesses Succeed | Forbes

~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

download (1)The word “community” has grown a great deal in the last decade thanks to the advent of social media. While we’ve always had local communities where we live, we now have online communities large, like the San Francisco Giants’ 2.8 million Facebook fans) and small, like scrappy groups of gamers trying to restore an incomplete game. However, the perspective on what an online and offline community is has grown exponentially.

For example, Assembly is a former YCombinator graduate that has created an online community (even a social network) that can easily turn into a software company. Products as early as a simple idea to fully-established projects can join Assembly and members of the community can follow and even join the company, eventually become owners of the company through any skill they have, including coding, design and product strategy. While it’s become common for social networks to include pages dedicated to companies to follow their projects, Assembly takes it a step further by integrating “followers” into projects so intimately that they’re effectively co-founders.  This has led to random followers (as diverse as you’d find on Twitter TWTR -1.96% or Facebook) from all over the world helping them create a diverse portfolio of software projects.

Read More.

3,000 Goldfish! Dumped Aquarium Pets Multiply in Lake | Live Science

~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

They multiply like … fish! Apparently, a handful of goldfish dumped into a lake in Boulder, Colorado, just three years ago have reproduced and now number in the thousands.

The explosion of these exotic fish, which are not native to anywhere in North America, has biologists worried and trying to figure out options for the animals’ removal.

“Based on their size, it looks like they’re 3-year-olds, which were probably produced from a small handful of fish that were illegally introduced into the lake,” Ben Swigle, a fish biologist at the Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW), told Live Science.

Read More.

3 Smart Ways to Root Out Your Leadership Weaknesses | Page 19

~ knjohn ~ 1 Comment

downloadA great leader is always improving and learning. Here’s some top leadership advice for discovering blindspots in your abilities and transforming them into advantages.

It’s hard to address one’s own flaws, but as any great leader knows it’s a necessary step toward improvement. Why? Because most people have developed fixed ways of thinking over the course of their lives. These repeated, flawed patterns drive them into mental ruts and stagnate their progress.

Of course, that probably sounds like the last thing you’d want as a leader. It’s important to identify the blindspots in your conscious way of life that might be holding you back, and use them to unearth deeper opportunities for growth. Here are 3 ideas from Robert Bruce Shaw’s Leadership Blindspots for how to reach your blindspots, discover your weaknesses, and turn them into triumphs.

Read More.

Tony Hsieh self-management memo to Zappos employees | Business Insider

~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

The online shoe-seller Zappos has been experimenting with a self-management organizational structure known as Holacracy for nearly two years.

But on April 30 the company plans to be fully manager-free, according to a company-wide memo CEO Tony Hsieh emailed late last month.

“Having one foot in one world while having the other foot in the other world has slowed down our transformation towards self-management and self-organization,” he wrote.

Employees who don’t like the new structure will be offered severance packages if they resign by April 30. To get their severance, however, they must either read the management book “Reinventing Organizations” or just email a statement that they are not reading it.

Read More.

The Incentives That Really Motivate Your Employees | Inc.com

~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

benefits-cake_31443“You never say thank you,” young advertising copywriter Peggy Olson complains to her boss, Don Draper.

“That’s what the money is for!” he retorts.

This exchange from TV’s Mad Men perfectly captures one of the enduring challenges of the workplace: sometimes managers and employees have vastly different notions of which incentives really matter.

I would argue that-including in the case of Peggy and Don-there is a generational component to such differences. Don, a child of the Great Depression and a Korean War veteran, is a classic Traditionalist (the generation born in the 1920s and 1930s) for whom work is a transaction. As he says earlier in this exchange, “I give you money, you give me ideas.”

Read More.