You can now download the May issue of Better Business Focus . Please feel free to e-mail Better Business Focus to your friends or colleagues.
Better Business Focus: Expert Inspiration for a Better Business.
Better Business Focus is the essential key for business owners and managers. It achieves that by focusing on the way in which successful businesses compete and manage their organisations. It focuses on how people are recruited, coached and developed; on how marketing and selling is undertaken in professional markets as well as in markets with intense competition; on how technology and the Internet is reshaping the face of domestic and home business; and on how people are being equipped with new skills and techniques. In short, it offers expert inspiration for a better business.
Below is a selection of articles from this month’s issue, and we hope you enjoy the read!
- Urko Wood
How to make the competition irrelevant: Most leaders agree that obtaining competitive information is essential for developing an effective strategy. Gaining competitive intelligence is often viewed as similar to gaining military intelligence. - Barry Urquhart
This is Serious. Smile. Laugh: Laughter, fun and levity appear to have been lost to many business settings and processes. A primary cause is the pandemic. Compounding the circumstances is the transactional nature of sales and contracts at present. So too is the impersonal character of online commerce. Algorithms and AI (artificial Intelligence) don’t appear to have any sense of humour. - Dr Lynda Shaw
Managing anxiety coming out of lockdown: During the pandemic we have all coped in different ways; some of us have adjusted more easily whilst others have had to deal with pain and hardship, or with feelings of burnout or isolation. Whilst people who have had to shield may understandably need time to adjust to coming out of lockdown, many of us may be feeling anxiety for a variety of reasons. - Peter Thomson
13 ways to increase sales and qualified leads: Looking for lead generation techniques that actually increase sales? My thirteen top tips will help you to generate lots of qualified leads by avoiding the common mistakes that many salespeople make. - David Finkel
The single most powerful thought exercise you could do to get your company culture on the right track: As a business coach, I talk to thousands of business owners each year who are looking for guidance on how to shape their company culture for growth and independence. They understand the importance of company culture, but often struggle to shape it in a meaningful way that benefits both their company as a whole and their team members. - Tamara Ghandour
Burst of Innovation – get from obvious to innovative: When we talk about innovation, we tend to approach it as needing to get past the incremental and obvious ideas, and jumping right to innovative ideas. However, as much as you want to get to those big, revolutionary ideas, this technique often falls short. - Sunil Bali
Refuse to drink Haterade: Relationships are like seat belts. If they don’t click they won’t help. - Paul Sloane
Harness the random with this method: The use of chance is a key element in lateral thinking. How can you deliberately introduce chance into your creative thinking? The Random Word method is very good. Here is another brainstorm method for you to try – Roll the Dice. - Debra Murphy
10 practical content marketing tips for small businesses: Content has become a big part of every small business marketing plan. Most online marketing strategies rely on content because without content there is nothing to optimize for search or share for visibility. We provide 10 useful tips to help you get started with content marketing. - Justin Bariso
Feeling Stressed or Overwhelmed? Try the Help-First Rule: It was not a good day. I woke up behind schedule. I had to finish writing an article. I was scheduled to give a presentation later that day, and that wasn’t finished, either. - Mindy Gibbins-Klein
7 ways to find your purpose: Finding your purpose has become an important, almost trendy, thing to do. The pressure is immense, to find your purpose, your reason why. Purpose has become a kind of holy grail, and many people feel like failures if they don’t know theirs or can’t articulate it, which is sad. - Andy Bounds
Small talk. Soft skills. Subtlety. Virtual comms can be very dry (Or as someone recently described them to me – “an unending morass of tedious rubbish”). - Thom Dennis
How to stop tokenism & break the stigma of disability in the workforce: Approximately 15% of the world’s population live with some form of disability but only 2-4% have disabilities which cause significant difficulties functioning, yet disabled people are over a third less likely to be employed than non-disabled people. - Amy Vetter
3 ways to combat workplace stress and anxiety: In the past year, our workspaces have changed a lot. Many of you have gone from having a dedicated office to working entirely remotely to switching back and forth in a hybrid model. No matter where you do your work, though, a lot of the stresses are the same. Deadlines, high-pressure clients, and complicated tasks are perpetual concerns—so you need skills and techniques to manage stress and anxiety that are effective no matter where and how you work. - Jeff Haden
The only sure way to become successful: Do the thing no one else will. For a moment, a question I was asked during a Q & A with several thousand college students stumped me: “If you can only give one piece of advice about how we can become successful, what would it be?” - Pete Foley
Zoom fatigue and creativity: If you want to be innovative and creative, being well rested isn’t a luxury, it’s essential. And I mean really well rested. It doesn’t take a scientific study to know that someone who is exhausted is probably not at his or her creative best. But there is compelling data that shows creativity and decision making suffers before we are even aware of fatigue, and long, long before we get to the exhausted stage. - Nigel Collin
Is your ability to influence important in leading change? To get people embracing change you need to become a master influencer. - Marla Tabaka
Productivity increases when Entrepreneurs celebrate small wins: What if I told you that acknowledging and celebrating your completed goals, you know, the small stuff, can boost your mood, energy, and productivity?