TOP 5 MISTAKES YOU DON’T WANT TO MAKE IN THESE DIFFICULT TIMES

Recession is official! Like most business owners, are you looking for items which can be tossed overboard to cruise your ship easily? Think again before jettisoning items. They could be too valuable to lose.

Minimizing cost in every plausible way is a reflex response to economic turbulence, and if done intelligently, can certainly keep your business stable in hard times. In the past, managements have committed blunders in trying to survive through recession. Also, whatever ever you do never hurt innovation. Innovation is the key to increase performance and growth in a dying economy.

Here are five business mistakes that companies generally make in recession. Try to avoid them!

Mistake # 1: Dread and Panic

Don’t panic, because if you do you will make more mistakes. Panicking will only aggravate the situation by leading you towards the other mistakes on this list. Turn off your TV and radio. Stop listening to news once in a while. The constant doom and gloom coming from the talking heads will fog your mind and you may deviate from the road to your success. Turning your business into ‘safe mode’ out of fear will not yield you fruitful results. Instead of panicking identify your weaknesses, learn from your mistakes and adapt to the changes which will help you to overcome these turbulent times.

Mistake # 2: Fire Talent

Salaries are obvious expenses. With the demand for your products and services may be declining, dismissing employees may seem inevitable. Are they really? Trained employees are an asset to the company and if you fire them, there’s no guarantee you’ll be able to get them back when your business picks up. Talent is the most important driving force of innovation. Though, cutting back on people, especially really smart, high-priced people, is a quick way to cut costs, however, in the long run it may cause irreparable damage. Hence, do everything you can to retain your pool of talented, enthusiastic workers.

Mistake # 3: Cost Cutting

Cutting expenses and lowering prices are necessary. However, decreasing prices to increase sales during recession is a bad idea. Discounts and sales to some extent are acceptable but slashing prices as a selling strategy will harm your business in the long run. It depreciates your product or services. Discounts will increase sales for a period of time but they’ll flatten again and you will be in a vicious cycle of constantly lowering your prices to chase those sales.

Never crop your marketing budget. If you want to generate business, you have to market. In fact, now is the best time to advertise to your business. Thus, review your marketing plans to make sure it’s effective. Economizing on technology could be equally devastating. To survive in today’s competitive market, keep yourself visible online. Moreover, innovation and technology are proportional. Thus minimizing technology will minimize your chance to innovate.

Mistake # 4: Change Suppliers & Vendors

Building a good rapport is very important in business, even with suppliers and vendors. It takes time to build a good relationship, throwing away that relationship in bad times to save few bucks is not a good idea. Never get enticed away the cheaper rates of other vendors which might result in compromise on the quality of supplies and services.  Also judge the reliability of the supplier before buying their product. Even if everything seems ‘okay’, talk to your current supplier before abandoning them; they might compete.

Mistake # 5: Build Wall Instead of Bridge

Companies quit globalization. Emerging markets are sources of generation new revenue and acquiring talent. Thus spend few extra bucks and expand globally. Now is the time to build bridges and reach out to others. Building walled castles and retreating into it will not help.

Successfully driving your business through a down economy is not a child’s play. You have to be extra careful to avoid making basic mistakes and take advantage of the present scenario to strengthen your business. Winners always emerge out of recessions unscathed!

Sandy Mason works as a SEO executive in Jobsbridge. For More Career Updates, stay tuned and visit Jobsbridge.

AN INSIGHT ON BRANDING IN RECESSION

Recession, meltdown, slowdown, economic doom, downturn, stagnation — whatever you may call it, is the best time to invest in branding. Why? Well, when money is tight people tend to cling to their wallet. They think twice before spending their hard-earned money and thus they intensely study a product now, more than ever. From branding perspective this thinking helps in brand building.  So, think strategically and work towards to make your brand more visible now.

Positioning Your Brand

A brand is the face of your company. It represents the services that your company promises. What comes to your mind when you think of branding? An attractive logo, a catchphrase? If brand positioning is done correctly it can catapult your business to new heights. Thus, positioning a brand is very important in terms of gaining people’s confidence and winning the brand race. Brand positioning is a must in recession because:

Expresses your uniqueness
Increases the value of your brand
Makes your brand widely visible
Once your brand is widely accepted, people will defend it when it is at stake.

Brand Identity and Brand Awareness

Definition of brand identity states ‘how you want the consumer to perceive your product or your brand’. Creating brand identity and increasing brand awareness is a step-by-step procedure.

Have a clear idea of your brand and research on brand image.
Keep aside your personal likes and dislikes and focus on the objective of the company.
Design a unique identity for your brand keeping in mind your goals, audience, and how different you are from others.
Brand identity and brand awareness goes hand in hand. Be conscious and design your brand image intelligently, analyze the market and learn about what market leaders do and what mistakes they have made in past and how they recovered. Finally, bolster your brand message at every single opportunity you get.

Axing Marketing Budget – Bad Idea

In tough economic times, everyone is looking for ways to cut down costs; however, it is advisable that you resist slashing the marketing budget, the reason being ‘Visibility Loss’. If you stop marketing you will lose visibility and if you lose visibility you lose your market share. Remember, when out of sight you are out of mind. Thus instead of cutting marketing costs, think of cost-effective ideas to stay top-of-mind. Branding during recession is essential because:

It saves time of your sales department and decreases you sales and recruiting costs
It helps to stay on top-of-mind with increased visibility
Increases brand awareness
Educates clients and prospects on new ways to use your services
Discounting battle is a no-win battle. Ideally, the brand that avoids discounting emerges stronger as the brand equity of the competitors has faded away due to heavy rebate.

Winning the Brand Race

It takes courage and sometimes changes in your business strategy to become a winner. Now is the time to revise and improvise your business strategies.

Educate your employees on core brand values
Your employees are your best brand ambassador. Ensure that they understand your brand inside out and convey your brand values to others.

Don’t slash prices
Don’t panic, economy will recover. So don’t cut prices to attract clients. Cutting prices depreciates your brand and may cause irreparable damages.

Don’t compromise on quality
Now is the time to find clients who will shop for the quality you provide. Hence, instead of slashing prices concentrate on improving the quality.

Nurture your customers
Send e-newsletters, postcards, emails to build customer loyalty. Remind them of your products and services and stay top-of-mind.

Recession is not eternal. This temporary phase will end and market will pick up again. Remember, recession is not permanent but brand is. Therefore don’t take decisions which may have adverse effects on your brand. However, if someone is selling a better service at a lower price then you have think seriously to offer a permanent discount or add value to your brand. Think strategically to make your brand stay for a long time. Tough times don’t last but tough brands do.

Sandy Mason works as a SEO executive in Jobsbridge. For More Career Updates, stay tuned and visit Jobsbridge.

Handling Emotion at Workplace

We have a unique guidance system within ourselves called ‘emotion’. Whatever name we call it, primarily, there are two kinds of emotions…either we feel good or we feel bad. Emotion is also a guidance system within us that steer us towards certain behavioral actions.
Even at our workplace, we cannot be bereft of emotions. The events happening around us in our workplace also lead us to certain actions depending on whether we approve of and like some of the events or we disapprove of. But can we afford to have emotional outburst reacting to these happenings around us?
“You are not here to try to get the world to be just like you want it to be. You are here to create the world around you that you choose – while you allow the world as others choose it to be to exist also.” ~ Abraham-Hicks

It is possible, that at times, you tend to have emotional outburst at your workplace. But there’s a stigma attached to emotional responses in the workplace that compels many executives to just bottle up their feelings.
The unhealthful result of what experts call “emotional suppression” has been shown in studies to cloud thinking, promote job unhappiness and negatively impact work performance. So it is advisable to get emotionally attuned to the emotional culture of the organization.

If your emotional build-up at a point in time is very high, don’t vent at work, excuse yourself if necessary and go home. Lean on your personal network, a therapist or even a career coach who can offer some objective advice. You can also try writing about the incident from the point of view of your antagonist. Stopping to reflect will allow you to cool down, deconstruct the problem and find ways to move forward by understanding why your antagonist acted the way he or she did.

Develop a deep rooted appreciation and affection for yourself and think most positive (good) thoughts about yourself. Explore the positive and good things that you have as an identity and build on them. Thoughts without emotion do not have much attractive power. Every thought, has in itself, some creative potential or attractive power, and in conjunction with emotion are the most powerful. Use your emotions to guide you to a positive path. If you’re constantly battling strong emotions at work, it is very important to consider whether you really fit in, since every organization has a different emotional culture.

Once you understand that, for those of you who are getting much of the same, day in and day out, meeting the same men, getting involved in abusive or dead end relationships, having the same amount of money in the bank every year and more debt, still searching for that dream job, still hating what you are doing now, finding yourself no thinner now than when you started a year ago, your current thoughts are pretty much maintaining what you already have in your life. In order to effect change in your life experience, thoughts in combination with great emotion are necessary. Which means you need to have an emotional fit where you spend most of your day?

Sandy Mason works as a SEO executive in Jobsbridge. For More Career Updates, stay tuned and visit Jobsbridge.

SILVER LININGS IN A FINANCIAL MELTDOWN

There is always a gap between present realities and future expectations without which there wouldn't be any enterprise, investment, credit, commerce, or currency. Whenever, at a certain point this gap becomes enormous, it creates a vacuum. This brings the need for readjustment, called recession. However, it is hard to find anything positive in the current economy. Jobs are reduced, markets reacting from dizzying highs to plummeting falls; debts are rising, inflation…there are myriad issues that compel us to draw comparisons to the Great Depression.

But as the saying goes every cloud has a silver lining, economic turbulence is no exception – common wisdom suggests that every crisis opens up opportunities for innovation. Innovators who figure out different ways to solve the problems in current will have opportunities to create new growth businesses.

The good news is people are saving money again. The Bureau of Economic Analysis reports consumers saved an annualized $297 billion in the second quarter — more than 10 times higher than the first quarter, and the highest quarterly savings since 1995. Saving in 2005 was worst than in 1933. Saving went out of style because, at the rate things were going, few saw a need to save but now people are scrambling to rebuild and replenish their personal balance sheets by saving again.

Necessity is the mother of invention. With the hike in oil prices people are opting for electric cars from Toyota and General Motors.

How does saving help economy? Countries, like people or business, grow wealthier over time by saving money and investing it wisely. The result of borrowing with little or no saving made our economy collapse. When an economy saves money, it has the resources it needs to invest without borrowing from someone else and hence, creates real wealth. Domestic savings creates money which can be invested in investments in projects that eventually create jobs, keep interest rates low, and push the economy along at a sustainable pace.

The bottom line is ‘work hard and spend less’ will make you wealthy, ‘borrow heavily and spend more’ will make you poor.

During recession marketing budgets may also get slashed. But if a firm has the resources and proper strategies then recession is the right opportunity for a firm to generate revenue and build market share. Here are three such strategies:

• Chalk out marketing plans. A marketing plan is like a road map, which includes goals and schemes supporting the overall vision and strategic direction of the firm. Coherent implementation of the plan greatly increases the chances of meeting goals and outperforming.
• Build a sales team. Hiring full-time salespeople and building a strong sales team works hand in hand with marketing program will help achieve this goal.
• Implement niche marketing strategy. Niche practices help differentiate a firm and eliminate competitors hence focus on a small niche market.

Along with the above strategies every company should focus on soft skill training, regularly monitor client acceptance and retention policies and have a transparent communication of policies and procedures throughout the organization.

Though it creates an overall pessimistic outlook, here are few benefits recession:

You will start thinking about investing in a more stable and inflation-free investment options, which is a good move. And, oh, buy dollar now.

Recession brings out the creativity juices in you which lead to better productivity and more breakthroughs. Also you will think of creative ways to lead a healthier and greener life. You will consider reducing non-essential household power consumption, walking the pavement or riding a bicycle instead of driving a car, more home cooking, more vegetable eating, and many other benefits.

Recession is good for your personal finance management. You will track every penny spent more vigorously than ever. Retail businesses will usually offer you more discounts for a longer period to attract and retain customers and visitors, which is good for you.

Recession will bring family members close and bring you close to God. You will think of God more and seek for spiritual guidance more.

What comes down must go up – nothing better than a rebounding economy. Recession will test and form your character and willpower. So be strong and courageous.

With all this in mind as we venture into a new year, we must once again look for a silver lining. The collapse of the stock and housing markets will make way for a new social order. Though the bar for success is high yet, there remain ample opportunities to be seized by those who don’t lose faith. Recession is just a correction, for a better and sustainable future. A new day is almost at hand.

Sandy Mason works as a SEO executive in Jobsbridge. For More Career Updates, stay tuned and visit Jobsbridge.

HOW TO ADD VALUE TO YOUR BUSINESS?

Considering today’s cutthroat competition in business environment every activity carried out in an organization is scrutinized to make sure it pays its way for the business. This clarity creates both opportunities and threats for in-house professionals. The opportunity is of participating actively in making strategic decisions for the company and thus taking your career to new heights in the process, where as the threat is of losing the job at hand because you are inappropriate to the new role in the organization.

How can you increase the value of your unit and make yourself inevitable for the business? This article will answer all your questions.

Make Strategic Decisions Based on User Needs

This is a two stage process:

1. Research and gather information
2. Formulate your mission and strategy

In the first stage, assess the attitude of the senior management to ensure that they are willing to listen. To achieve this align your goals with those of company’s. Keep yourself informed about your industry and your boss’s priorities. Attend company-sponsored training, team-building events and read business journals. This stage paves the way for formulating mission and strategy. Find out the process for making strategic decisions. Maintain a library of all information collected. These investigations will help you identify the areas where you could play a significant role in formulating a strategy. This information will form the base of your strategy. Some of the information dependant strategic decisions include; targeting market segment, new investments, location of factories and offices, new product development and launch and pricing and Promotion.

Every product and service has users. Find out why and how they use your output. One particularly useful way of deducing this out is to ask what would happen if you did not offer that service. Even your coworkers could be your user. So, you must learn about their real needs and connect to employees, partners, and customers wherever they’re located.

Use every opportunity to let management know about your efforts. Your responsibilities do not end with suggesting ideas only. Volunteer to implement these ideas. This extra effort will facilitate good ratings in your performance evaluation.

Make your Product Unparalleled

There are innumerable products and services in the market similar to yours. Find out if they are better that yours, if yes then what makes those outputs more attractive than yours? Though there are other options available, what would make your users to stay with you? Your users can buy information elsewhere and probably they do.

Your challenge is to customize and add value to your output so that your users find it hard to do away with your product and services. There are various aspects where you can seek improvement to create a unique product – look and feel, feature and functions, broad scope. Apart from these consider accessibility, usability, utility, quality, customizability, packaging, flexibility and reusability of your output as the success of the product depends on these aspects too.

Market Selection

Key to every marketing strategy is to divide market into segments and group customers with common needs. Segments can be based on departments, product lines, or industries served. Do not assume that a single service will suit all customers. As they have needs and priorities hence services should be different for distinct segments of market. This approach will help to change your service from mediocre to an excellent one.

Evaluate Sales and Marketing Based on Feedback
Evaluate your product offering from time to time and take feedbacks seriously. These feedbacks will help you to prune and polish your product.

Consider the following ways to collect feedback:

Include a feedback form with every item you send out. Try to keep it short and crisp.
Maintain a call and chat log. Analyze this to identify the demand patterns.
Formulate your sales and marketing strategy based on the feedbacks collected to increase the sale of the product. Revise your pricing as with change in product pricing does also change. Nothing comes for free and it’s high time your clients realize that.

Utilize the Power of Technology

The great benefit of today’s technology is that it allows access to remote information from the user’s desk top. With the help of technology you can collaborate between people with integrated e-mail to share files, schedules, and other critical information is great way to increase productivity as now you can work smarter and faster. With the advent of technology networking has become easy. Networks help you reach more customers and serve them better. With the help of technology you can share accurate, up-to-date information more easily. Internet and its search and retrieval tools make work much easier.

Outsource Selectively and Build Partnership

Outsourcing is one of the prevalent marketing styles. Outsourcing brings more skills and knowledge at a lower cost. However, before outsourcing chalk down what you should outsource and what you should retain, e.g. systems development and upgrading systems are typically outsourced but policies and procedures are not.

Building effective partnerships with clients and suppliers is significant. From individual level to organization levels, all kinds of partnerships are important.

Develop Multifaceted Skills

Sharpen your existing skills and learn other skills to to bring improved benefits to the business. Develop communication and interpersonal skills. Keep yourself informed of business issues, organisation ‘know-how’ and ‘know-who’. Try to learn all tricks of the trade. Develop more and more skills to make yourself jack of all trades and master of some. You can achieve this by taking up management training classes and participating in various industry events and courses.

Sandy Mason works as a SEO executive in Jobsbridge. For More Career Updates, stay tuned and visit Jobsbridge.

TWELVE GOLDEN RULES FOR AN INTERVIEW

Always be early

There is no better way to demonstrate how much you value your Interviewer’s (as well as your own) time than to arrive for the Interview ten to fifteen minutes ahead of schedule. Remember, being late for the interview will create a negative impression that will persist throughout the interview session (s). Arrive a bit early, get composed, collect your thoughts – and you are ready to go!

Know your prospective employer

Before starting off, you must have a thorough knowledge about the organization. Go through the company’s web site and/or Annual report and Brochures and learn about their products and services, the inter organizational structure, current business news about the company and also gather information on the company’s major customers and competitors. Finally, know your Interviewer’s name and make sure that you pronounce it properly while using the appropriate title (Mr., Dr., MS etc.), because the Interviewer is the front ending person for the Company and for you he/she is the most important person for the next half-an hour or more.

Mental preparation 

Prepare yourself beforehand in relation to the competencies the company is looking for rather than the actual questions. Also, think beforehand about how you will provide evidence of certain competencies and qualities. (For e.g., how will you demonstrate that you are a good Team player – must be borne out by incidents drawn from your past engagements).

Know Yourself

You must read and know your official CV thoroughly. Read through your official CV, then disassociate yourself mentally and put yourself in the shoes of the Interviewer. Try to think up relevant questions that you would ask if you were the Interviewer. In order to convey positive messages about your competencies, motivation and perseverance, ensure that you can give at least one (if not more) example for each of the skills and attributes that the employer is looking for.

Job Knowledge

You should have a crystal clear understanding about the job offer and understanding of the types of duties you would be involved in. Further, try to mentally align your qualifications, skills and experience with the requirements of the job such that you can justify how your capabilities will match the job profile.

Silence is Golden (if used properly) 

Use silence and intentional pause to your advantage. Time is occasionally needed to think and to reflect. The interviewer will respect you for taking a question seriously enough to give it a moment or two for consideration before answering.

Avoid giving “Stock Answers”

Most employers know these stock answers when they hear them. Avoid them! If your answers are not personalized to your situation, they will sound forced and unnatural.

Do not try to convince the interviewer about a point

Do not believe in the Myth that the most important thing in an Interview is to convince the Interviewer about a point. It is better to lose a point and win a job. Though you may cite some examples in support of your point, do not unnecessarily try and convince the interviewer. Always keep in mind that he/she is trying to learn what type of a person you are, not merely what you know.

Managing Questions is more important than merely answering

Giving binary answers (Yes/No) does not help in general- much more is required. Managing questions means answering them in a way that demonstrates specific aspects about your competence. This helps in co-relating you’re past experience and the proposed assignment.

Use Body language

Good eye contact, a warm, natural smile and a firm handshake can help you overcome nervousness, develop a personal rapport and present a confident image.

Handling Difficult Questions

There are some questions which are perceived as particularly difficult to handle, Viz.(In the Past ) : Which of your weaknesses have you tried to eliminate?
(In the Present): How assertive/accommodative are you? How good are you at making decisions?
(In the Future): What would you like to achieve in the next 12 months? The rules for answering these are the same as those for handling any questions, because questions are asked primarily to see how you react.
Thus, while answering, stay relaxed, be honest, keep in mind the points that you want to make about yourself, and turn the matter around appropriately so that you can emphasize porosity while minimizing weaker areas.

Positive Endings 

Never forget to thank the interviewer (irrespective of how many questions you have been able to answer!) and convey your enthusiasm for the job position offered. For example, you can end the interview on a positive note by smiling, shaking hands and thanking the interviewer, and wishing him/her a nice day.

Sandy Mason works as a SEO executive in Jobsbridge. For More Career Updates, stay tuned and visit Jobsbridge.

KNOW YOUR WINDOWS 8 SHORT KEYS

We are going to the new age of windows8.It’s a bit different than previous one. So why not to learn the short keys to make the work easy. Let’s check for the shortcut keys.

With the launch of windows 8, it is obvious that tech geeks will look for shortcut keys to get more habituated with windows 8. The operating system is great in terms time takes to start up and shut down. The major differentiators of Windows 8 with its predecessor is it does not load all the applications in the startup itself; rather it comes up with GUI and starts loading the rest of the application in the background thread. For a user who is starting fresh on windows 8, he might face a usability challenge during the initial time. The below documents describes some of the shortcut keys to make users more habituated with Windows 8. Enjoy the latest revolutionary Operating System from Microsoft.

1. : switch between the Start screen and the last-running app
2. + B : Switch to the (classic) Windows desktop and select the tray notification area
3. + C : displays the “Charms”: the Settings, Devices, Share and Search options
4. + D : launches the desktop
5. + E : launches Explorer
6. + F : opens the File Search pane
7. + H : opens the Share pane
8. + I : opens Settings
9. + J– Switches focus between snapping applications
10. + K : opens the Devices pane
11. + L : locks your PC
12. + M : minimizes the current Explorer or Internet Explorer window (works in the full-screen IE, too)
13. + O : toggles device orientation lock on and off
14. + P : switch your display to a second display or projector
15. + Q : open the App Search pane
16. + R : opens the Run box
17. + U : open the Ease of Access Centre
18. + V : cycle through toasts (notifications)
19. + W : search your system settings (type POWER for links to all power-related options, say)
20. + X : displays a text menu of useful Windows tools and applets
21. + Z : displays the right-click context menu when in a full-screen app
22. + + (plus) : launch Magnifier and zoom in
23. + -(minus) : zoom out
24. + ,(comma) : Aero peek at the desktop
25. + . (Period): Snaps the current application to one side of the screen (Right side)
26. + Space: Switch input language and keyboard layout
27. + Enter : launch Narrator
28. + PgUp : Move the current screen to the left-hand monitor
29. + PgDn : Move the current screen to the right-hand monitor
30. + PrtSc : capture the current screen and save it to your Pictures folder
31. + Tab : switch between running apps
32. + Shift + V : Cycles through toasts in reverse order
33. + Arrow Keys: Switch to the (classic) Windows desktop and enable Aero Snap

Sandy Mason works as a SEO executive in Jobsbridge. For More Career Updates, stay tuned and visit Jobsbridge.