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Product You: The Person as the Product
It’s common wisdom that if you have a service business, YOU are the product. So, when marketing gurus bother to look at the service industry, they advise you to promote YOU, the product. In my opinion, that advice is misleading at best and destructive at worst.
Considerations For Valuing a Service Business
A common problem occurs when an entrepreneur, who has been building a business for a period of time, decides to take on a new partner
Dressed for Success: L.L. Bean Takes On Retail
Bean had designed the Maine Hunting Boot to solve his own problem of wet feet, but once it was created, he knew it was going to be a hit. He was so sure of its innovative design that he even paid the hefty sum to have it patented. Once the local shoemaker had made a few more pairs, Bean began to promote his product.

J. Willard Marriott Quotes
J. Willard Marriott Quotes
Location is Not Everything
Guerrillas are constantly on the lookout for important lessons from their peers. A good source of lessons is to analyze the sixty-second infomercials delivered at networking events.
Believing The Plan
Mary had a delivery service business. Her idea was to market to senior citizens who couldn’t get out every day. She came to me as a SCORE counselor because her business was struggling and she thought she needed marketing help. She had been marketing to seniors for more than a year and was frustrated by her results. She hoped I would have the silver bullet that would change everything
How to Develop Your Service Business
Most of us don’t go through a single week without buying some type of service product. The increased prevalence of service industries over the last two decades has made this the fastest expanding sector of the economy. The service sector, as defined here, includes the major industry groupings of trade, finance, insurance, communications, public utilities, transportation, and government, as well as business and personal services. And it accounts for almost three-fourths of the Nation's employment.
Five Steps to Finding the Right Keywords For Your Website - Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Keywords and phrases are the foundation of search engine optimization. To find out which keywords will be most important for your service business in Denver, ask one powerful question: What do people type in the search box when they look for companies like yours? It doesn't look that powerful when written on paper. In fact, it's a very simple concept to skip over, but as you drill down to what people really put in that little box, you'll see all kinds of things pop out at you that you may not expect.

9 Components of Good SEO - How to Help People Find Your Service Business on the Internet
Millions of people search for service businesses every month. When they conduct those searches, they aren't looking in newspapers or ads in the hard-copy Yellow Pages. Over the last fifteen years, the Internet has become the dominant technology for local service business searches.
Sales Coaching – How to Find Clients
What do you do when you are just starting a business and need your first client? What if your existing clients have closed their purse strings? What if you just want to grow your business and the only way to do that is to get more buyers?

How to use the Free classified for marketing purpose
This article will provide some information about using the free classifieds for business marketing, what is the advantages and what we need to know before placing our Ads.
How to Ruin Your Business Reputation
No matter how desperate for customers you are, you must get that under control. People will sense desperation and either run from you or try and take advantage of you. Neither is all that good for you. So what can you do? Here are 3 tips to help you stay strong no matter what's going on in your business.

Independent Consulting: Applying the 80/20 Principle to Your Business
The 80/20 principle applies to everything in life, including growing your consulting business. It comes down to managing your limited time so you’re doing the highest value work, and how to outsource the lower value work. One warning: There is something I believe you should never outsource.

Building your Starter Business Dashboard, in Excel?
Running your business without a dashboard is like driving your car without one. You can't manage what you don't measure. Your business dashboard keeps you running fabulous, fast, and forever.

How To Get Client Testimonials When You Want Them
Just about every service business relies on some form of ‘proof’ that they can deliver what they offer. And client testimonials are among the most sought after marketing weapons for business owners to have in their arsenal. But how do you go about getting a client testimonial that is worded well enough that you can actually use it? Do you find it difficult to be bold and just ASK for it?

Define Your Sales Process - Simplify Your Advertising
To define your sales process, you must think about the steps that potential customer or clients go through before they hand over their money to you. How do they get from not knowing you to becoming a paying customer? Then, you simply create a path for them that makes it easy to follow from one step to the next and then promote it.
5 Ways To Find Affiliate Programs That Match Your Home Business
Affiliate program commissions can mean the difference between your business either sinking or swimming. For one thing, there is no limit to the money you can gain from using affiliate programs. Best of all, establishing an affiliate marketing business is extremely simple and costs little to no money.
Cred-Ability: What it is, how to get it, and what to do with it.
Regardless of whether you are in the service business or you sell a hard product, everyone needs to establish their credibility, especially with prospective clients. But if you're a consultant, advisor, or coach, then it's harder for your clients to evaluate the value of your advice and recommendations. So what should you talk about to establish your credibility? You might be surprised at the answer.
Business Finance Article - How to Evaluate Your Business & Improve Your Bottom Line During a Recession
Find out how you can run your business more efficiently and more effectively... Follow these tips… and you can increase your bottom line, even during the recession.

High Traffic Does Not Equal Sales
Getting traffic to a web site is not nearly as challenging as getting sales. Many web site owners are frustrated and disappointed with the performance of their web sites, and it is caused by the usual methods of generating traffic. There is a proven strategy which works by taking advantage of the real mechanics of the Internet. Although I focus on online sales here, the principles I cover work in traditional marketing too.
Management of Intellectual Property- Finding your Forgotten Business Asset.
For a service business it is particularly important to identify and manage Intellectual Property (IP). This article explains what IP is and how you can use it to benefit your business.

Your Greatest Asset
One of my clients (we’ll call him George) came to me because he wanted to lose weight. He desperately wanted to lose weight. Over the course of ten years sitting behind a desk, he had gradually packed on an extra fifty pounds which, he painfully admitted, had become an encumbrance. His knees and back bothered him most of the time and he was often winded. With a very demanding work schedule involving a lot of travel, room service, business dinners – there was scarcely any time left for his wife and three children, let alone for self-care. I suggested a shift in his priorities might be in order if he was to be serious about tackling his weight loss goal. “But I don’t have time to exercise!” he protested. It’s a familiar refrain that most working adults can identify with.

- Business Development Training - How to Beat the Fear of Meeting People
Recently I presented a business development training session at a conference. The audience were managers from all across Australia. I gave them a 2-minute break and asked them to get up and talk amongst themselves. It can get scary when we have to meet new people.But – from a business development perspective – it is extremely selfish when we are not brave enough too reach out to people we don’t know.
Controlling the Assumptions in Your Sales and Marketing Strategy
When you incorporate a new strategy into your service business there are certain assumptions that are made upon which the success of your strategy relies. These assumptions need to be monitored and controlled to give your company the greatest chance of accomplishing your stated objectives. The assumptions we make as business leaders are limited to two primary areas: 1) the external environment and how it will change, and 2) the industry in which we operate.

How to Be Different in a Homogeneous Business World
It's hard, isn't it? Making your service business stand out from the rest is a challenging task. When it comes down to it, every realtor helps people buy or sell property. That's it. Every consultant offers advice that will either help people avoid pain or increase pleasure. Every doctor diagnoses illness and prescribes a remedy. Every salesperson offers a product that is strikingly similar to the competition's offering. What do you need to do to stand out?
Four More Ways to Market Your Business in 2009
Your success as a business owner or executive will be largely determined by how many high quality clients you can attract and retain. My last article covered four ways to reach qualified prospects. In this article I will cover four more ways to market your business to potential clients.

Four Ways to Market Your Business in 2009
Your success as a business owner or executive will be largely determined by how many high quality clients you can attract and retain. Following is a detailed discussion about how to use different sales and marketing techniques to draw attention to your business.
7 KEY STRATEGIES TO BOOST YOUR BUSINESS
Learn all you can about marketing. Marketing is absolutely crucial to the success of your business and you avoid it at your peril! New business owners can think that marketing is quite a complicated process. However, it's not rocket science and the basics can easily be learned.
Top 10 Computer & Internet Small Businesses
Computers and the internet have become essential parts of nearly every business these days, so it makes sense that a large number of computer and internet businesses have sprung up in recent years. Whether it's repairing a computer or providing people with internet access, these small businesses can generate hundreds of repeat clients in no time due to their widespread appeal. Here's a look at the top 10 computer and internet small businesses currently available.
Sales Training For Service Businesses - Why Should I Use You? - Part 3 of 3
Sales Training is not always what is required for many service companies. Why should some one use you?

Sales Training For Service Businesses - Why Should I Use You? - Part 2 of 3
Sales Training is not always what is required for many service companies. Why should some one use you? If your answer is service or quality then you need to read this article as that just won't 'cut the mustard' in today's business environment. Part 2 of 3.
Learn How To Price Your Products & Services
Some businesses don't have to worry about pricing because there is a market price for their goods or services that can't be modified, such as the price of developing a role of 35-mm color film at a Photo franchise shop, for example. But most businesses have to decide how to price their goods or service and whether it will be lower, the same as, or higher than the market price.

Is Business Planning Necessary For A Home-Based Business?
To be successful over the long haul, every one-person business needs to do some planning. The more organized the planning - the better the choices you will make. It is not necessary for you to have a full-blown business plan, like the ones used to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for the start-up and growth of businesses with a lot of employees. For the one-person business a simple business plan will suffice.

Small Business Tips: Insuring Your Business Success
Over Easter there was a large fire at Coorparoo in Queensland, where a number of small businesses were burnt out. This is a devastating event for any business, but what made it more so was that a number of the small businesses were not insured. What was the effect? Let me tell you about one small business and the effect this has had on them. This small business was a service business; they were starting to get a brilliant reputation in the industry and had a number of major contracts on the go. They had employed a number of staff to work in the business and things were looking rosy. Insurance was on their to do list, but as things got busier and busier it never seemed to make it to the top of the list. As their information was critical to their business, they regularly backed up all of their computers.

Low And No Budget Home Based Businesses Any Woman Can Start Part Seven
Starting a business of your own with little or no money is actually easier than you might think. So if you are sitting around worrying about what tomorrow will bring, think about taking your fate in your own hands with one of the easy to begin businesses detailed here. Maybe one of them is the perfect low budget business for you, and even if none of them are just quite right, maybe they will help you decide exactly what business you do want to start.
Start "Branding" You
It's not simply about showing how you're different from your competitors. It's about having your prospects conclude that you’re the only solution for their problem.
THE THREE R’S OF SERVICE BRANDING: REACH, RECOGNITION, AND REPUTATION
By Robert Croston Think about your most recent branding campaign. Were your television ads as successful as you'd like them to be? Perhaps the billboards didn't create the recognition that you were looking for, but your online ads on Yahoo! and AOL worked quite well. Did you pick the right professional athlete to represent your firm's services? If you're reading this far, and you work at most service businesses, you probably think I'm nuts. You don't do any of this. Well, maybe you're a big firm and you do (kudos to you), or you've tried something here and there. But in most of our service business realities, advertising-as-a-primary-branding-vehicle is not the norm. And it shouldn't be.

FIVE STEPS TO GETTING THE FEES YOU KNOW YOU DESERVE
By John Doerr One of the most common laments I hear from service business executives goes like this: "Our services are becoming a commodity. Everyone is out there saying they can do the same thing we do, pushing fees further and further down. Prospects are just buying on price." Unfortunately as service providers, there are aspects of what we provide that have become commodities. Price competition is rampant. However, if you follow these five steps to provide value before, during, and after the sales process, you will get the fees you know you deserve.

Shut up and take the money
Are you over selling? Are you listening for the customers ‘Closing Statements?’ A ‘Closing Statement’ is anything the customer says that is positive about your product, service, business or you.
10 Common Business Planning Errors
I coach entrepreneurs on the business planning process, an exercise that has been instructive as to errors people make when they write their own business plans. Here are 10 common business planning errors and how you can correct them.
Investing In Yourself Pays Off
I had a new client who had been putting off investing in herself. She has spent thousands of dollars on her website, business cards and general 'stuff'. 'Mary' has a service business and did what many people in her industry do to 'get' business and end up burnt out and not very profitable. Within the first hour in our planning session, she realised she had been spending 80% of her time on 20% of her clients, who gave her 20% of her business. In other words she spent most of her time focussing on the least profitable clients.

Create Your Signature IP for Easier & More Successful Marketing
If you have a service business, you would have realised by now that it’s way more difficult to sell and market than a tangible product. However, services do provide us with more flexibility for packaging and reconfiguring them into different ‘products’. But, without identifying your signature IP or your core area of mastery, you will always struggle to market your services. Here are some steps to help you identify the essence of what you do – your core mastery. It may be what you do for one niche and not another, or it may be one service you provide out of many to the same group of clients. From that, you need to distil what it is you do into a signature service.

Now You Can Be A More Motivational Manager
All your staff are perfect, right? They are highly motivated and fully productive. Maybe? Could they be even more motivated and more productive? Most probably. This article shares some secrets of highly motivating your staff.
Why Media Training is a MUST
If you're launching a PR campaign, you want to make the best presentation possible, media training is imperative. You owe it to yourself and to the media to be as well prepared as possible.

Top 10 Reasons Home Staging is a Great Home Based Business
If you have a flair for decorating and an interest in real estate, Home Staging could be the right career for you. This service business, also called House Fluffing, Real Estate Staging or Home Styling, is based on the art of decorating a home to sell quickly and for top dollar. Home Staging is a great service business to run from a home office for the following ten reasons.
Empower, Educate, Create Need and Convert With A Simple Checklist
If you’re an expert, and what you do would require or benefit from regular check-ups or check-ins, then consider a checklist. It can help your clients see the need for your services.
Why Having a Degree Doesn't Make You an Expert
Many people who hold qualifications automatically think they are capable of dealing with their clients and attracting new business. But this is not always true. In fact for some industry sectors it is nearly always a wrong assumption. Did you gain a qualification that never taught you how to deal with clients? This article tells you what to do now.
8 Ways to Boost Service Business Revenues Part 2 of 2
If you want to boost your service business revenues consider these ways to improve customer loyalty and generate more sales - without investing in expensive advertising campaigns.

8 Ways to Boost Service Business Revenues Part 2 of 2
If you want to boost your service business revenues consider these ways to improve customer loyalty and generate more sales - without investing in expensive advertising campaigns.

8 Ways to Boost Service Business Revenues. Part 1 of 2
Service-based businesses are fundamentally different to product-based businesses. Service providers experience different sales and marketing problems (or challenges), and often have more complex relationships with clients. However, if you want to boost your service business revenues consider these ways to improve customer loyalty and generate more sales - without investing in expensive advertising campaigns.

How to Advertise your Business for Sale
You’ve worked hard to grow your business into a successful venture. Now you want to sell it and reap the benefits of all those years of hard work. There are many questions involved with selling a business, but the most important is: How do you find qualified buyers?
Don't Struggle for Years, Buy a Professional Practice and Jumpstart Your Growth
Professionals Can Profitably expand their practices by buying competitors practices. This article provides tips on how to do that successfully.

Finding Qualified Buyers for your Business
You’ve worked hard to grow your business into a successful venture. Now you want to sell it and reap the benefits of all those years of hard work. There are many questions involved with selling a business, but the most important is: How do you find qualified buyers?

Other service business Related Articles

Improve Customer Service thru Professinalism that CATORs to All Your Clients
Is Customer Service a concern for your business? Do you feel that your employees pay only lip service to serving the customers whether internal or external? Read how a short word can begin to create a culture of superior customer service.
Internet Marketing: Web Design and Development Businesses Exceptional Customer Service is the Name of the Game
Are you an Internet Business Service Provider? Many small business owners are actively seeking exceptional service from their Internet Provider and unfortunately receiving anything but stellar service. These 5 tips may help improve your business and create loyal customers.
Do you have Renowned Customer Service?
Do your customers leave your store / take delivery of your products and think, "Wow, it is so nice to buy from this business!!" Is your business well known / famous for your customer service? Do your customers tell others about you? If not, you do not have renowned customer service. Face it. Your customers can buy the products and service you sell from a lot of different competitors. The only thing you really have to differentiate your business and yourself is your service.
2.5 Ways to Improve Small Business Customer Service
Great customer service is one of of the pillars that supports a successful small business. Offering great service to your clients, prospects and vendors will help establish your reputation, build trust, create brand equity and fuel growth. What are the customer "pain points" when it comes to service? How can your small business become better at delivering a great service experience?

Marketing is about Differentiation
Without a differentiated service, your service becomes a commodity because you become subject to the market, and vulnerable to someone else with a lower price. To command a higher price for your service and maintain superior profit margins, you must differentiate your service and provide more “perceived” value.
Local Versus National Answering Services
Today, businesses have the choice of using a local telephone answering service for their business or picking a service that answers for local as well as national clients. Each type of service has its benefits and depending on your type of business, it may be beneficial to choose a local or a national service to answer your calls.

Can An Answering Service Lower Stress
Is it possible for a telephone answering service answering service to lower stress? If you are a small business owner and are tethered to your business then a service can help break those chains and give you your life back.

The Significance of Customer Service
The quality of a business’ customer service to its customers is one of the most visible and significant aspects of organisational performance. Many organisations however find customer service to be one of the most challenging and neglected areas of management. Gary discusses in this article the significance that customer service has to the success of a business.
How To Raise The Bar Of Your Small Business Customer Service?
Profitable companies are raised on the backdrop of excellence in customer service. Irrespective of the size of your business or customers, you have to develop and deliver high quality customer service, which more often is the differentiator between a good business and a great business. As small businesses you can too deliver superior quality customer service by considering these simple and effective points.
Five Attributes that Lead to Exceptional Customer Service
As a business owner, I have developed a keen sense of the attributes of people who are highly motivated as well as those qualities that lead to counter productive behavior. Regardless of the industry, customer service is key to the success of your business. Unfortunately, there are many examples of people whose poor customer service has been memorable: people who have left us on hold and forgotten about us, waitresses who never return to our table, the customer service person who leaves us on the phone for several minutes. We all have experienced poor customer service at some level. This article illustrates how Five Attributes Can Lead to Exceptional Customer Service. I refer to them as the PAULA(sm) Customer Service Success Program.

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