myRetailer.ca

“Communicate everything you can with your associates.” – Sam Walton

It is so true, the more people know, the more they care and the harder they’ll work.  So why is it that so many business operators keep so many secrets? Do you share your sales numbers? Sales targets? What about other metrics – average sale, customer count? Why not go to the extreme, do you share your target vs actual income statements? If not, what are you afraid of?

By simply sharing information, you are empowering your team. If your team knows what your sales targets are, and what they actually achieved, they’ll try harder and achieve more. If your staff understands what profits are and what makes for a profitable sale, they’ll make better decisions and your company will become more profitable. (more…)

Keep Loyal Customers Loyal by Being Dependable and Stocking Essential Items

From Flickr - avilon_music

Become dependable to your customers in the services and products you offer and you’ll go a long way to keep your customers loyal to your company.

Let me illustrate my point.

A few weeks ago I needed a car wash and drove to the local car wash I’ve gone to for years. I parked the truck, walked inside to purchase my car wash only to find out that they ran out of soap for the touchless car wash. Can you imagine? The entire car wash shut down, because they ran out of soap? As I walked out frustrated, I was thinking to myself; “How can you run out of soap at a car wash? If it was my car wash, I’d always make sure that I have at least a month’s supply at all times. Wow much can it cost to inventory soap, especially if you run a busy car wash?!” (more…)

How can you leverage ‘FREE’ to gain customers and grow business?

I recently read Free – The Future of a Radical Price, a fascinating book by Chris Anderson that really got me thinking. In his book, Anderson goes into great detail about how certain businesses, especially in today’s digital age, have built entire businesses models based on a single price – $0. Think of companies like Google and Facebook, or even free iPhone apps and free ebooks, what do they all have in common? They give away their core product for free.

If you consider an author or consultant, they may give away free partial or full ebooks on their site (as I do on Retailer’s Roadmap to Success), in efforts to gain more readers who will become familiar with their work, in hopes that they will turn into paying customers by purchasing an upgrade, the full book, or perhaps a speaking engagement at some point in the future. (more…)

Truly great leaders all have two things in common. First they have great empathy and regularly ‘walk the floor’, communicate and connect with their employees. The second character trait is that they the boldness and tenacity to make the tough decisions needed to lead the company.

One of Canada’s most effective business leaders is Annette Verschuren, President of Home Depot Canada and Asia. Verschuren possesses that rare balance between great empathy and incredible tenacity for getting the job done.

I can recall a comment made by one of her office staff,  “28,000 associates in Canada don’t work for Home Depot, they work for Annette”. Now that’s quite a statement if I ever heard one. After you meet Annette for the first time, you can easily see why they think that way. She really does care about her staff (all of them), and she leads the company to great performance with resolve each and every day. (more…)

The Yays and Nays for Marketing a Small Business

Yes, Maybe or No? via Flickr from ‾olǝƃuɐ‾

Marketing is not what it used to be. What used to be all about newspaper, radio and TV advertising, is now all about internet, social media and direct mail marketing.

When you look at your own business, have you changed your marketing strategy in the past five years, or are you still trying to do the same old thing and achieve new results? In my opinion, here are a few Yays and Nays to consider:

Marketing Nays

• Newspaper – news print readership is on the decline, yet advertising is still expensive.
• Radio – with so many stations diluting the market, it no longer has impact.
• TV – very expensive and too much dilution.
• Yellow Pages – (unless yellow pages online) usage of traditional yellow pages has plummeted in recent years, replace with assorted online websites. Carrying ads on their site is also more expensive then other mediums
• Twitter – I haven’t been able to prove the  ROI / economic value to my businesses using Twitter, yet. It can be a time suck, and reach a different market then I’m intending. But, I remain optimistic and continue testing.

Marketing Yays

• Websites – make your website easy to find, informative, up to date and relevant.
• Staff Blogs – builds an online community and encourages people to visit your website regularly.
• Facebook – setup a fan page to help build an online community and to become a part of their online community. It doesn’t take a lot of time, and its an additional place to be found and push out your promotions
• Facebook Ads – a very effective marketing tool that enables you to narrow in on a very small and specific niche in the market place. They’re also less expensive then you think
• Google Adwords – a very effective advertising tool to get in front of people searching for something that you’re hopefully selling. If you know what you’re doing, this can be very effective. There’s lots of help available in this field if you want to outsource.
• YouTube Segments – this can be a very effective tool for providing informative content to your customers, and using a flipcam, video can be fun and easy to create.
• Email Campaigns – not as effective as they once were, as long as you have permission, you keep them relevant and you don’t abuse the privilege, it is still a very useful tool.  When looking at pushing out promotions, email is still king.
• TV Listing Channel Ads – if you must do TV, then do the TV listings channel. It is more reasonably priced and you’ll get more bang for the buck.
• Direct Mail – whether it is via email or snail mail, direct marketing to your customers works every time.  It may be time consuming, but know that the response rate on Direct is the highest of all channels.

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