The one thing that every Smart Hustler knows is that learning is the key to growing a business. Our Smart Business articles are designed to provide the best information in every aspect of business – marketing, finance, social media and more.

how to survive the holiday sales roller coaster

How to Survive the Holiday Sales Roller Coaster

The holiday season is literally a sales roller coaster. In November and December, you are riding high as customers eagerly search for the perfect gifts and spend liberally. Then January rolls around and you watch sales plummet as customers pinch their pennies and close their wallets. What’s a Small Business Owner To Do? If you’ve ridden...

A Day in the Life of Alex Reed of Bamb Creative - Insightly Customer

How CRM Helped a Boutique Marketing Agency Grow

This article is published in partnership with Insightly, providing CRM and project management solutions for small business owners. Anyone who runs a small business knows that there are many different components that need to be kept straight in order for it to run smoothly. One of those top priorities is customer management. In a recent...

How In-Store Design Affects Your Customers Buying Behavior

How In-Store Design Affects Your Customers Buying Behavior

How can you make sure that what your customer sees in-store makes them more likely to buy, rather than less? All five senses can have an effect on the manner in which we shop. Classical music, for example, leads shoppers to make more expensive purchases. The most important sense, however, is sight. Your customers utilize sight more...

How to Turn Your Customer Service Team into a Revenue-Generating Machine

How to Turn Your Customer Service Team into a Revenue-Generating Machine

Too often, small business owners consider customer service to be a necessary but expensive part of their organization. Using the strategies in this post, convert your customer service team into a revenue-generating profit center. The typical structure in a small business’s sales process might look something like this: Pre-Sale: Sales team runs the show. Sales representatives...

Small Business Sales: Should You Be Surcharging Credit Cards?

Surcharging Credit Cards In Your Small Business: What You Need to Consider

Adding a fee to credit card transactions (known as “surcharging”) became permissible in 2013, as a result of a class action lawsuit against Visa and MasterCard. It’s taken awhile for that information to trickle down, but more and more businesses are aware of it and surcharging is catching on in some locations. Should you...