The key to winning loyal customers is to stand out from the competition. Not sure how to do that? For a lesson in differentiation, today we invite you to listen to an interview with Sassa Akervall, CEO of Akervall Technologies Inc. (ATI), the manufacturing company that makes Sisu Sports Mouthguards. Back in the late 2000s,...
The intersection between business and consumer is not what it used to be. With a growing base of tech-savvy consumers, many businesses are struggling to cater to an audience that has greater expectations and more options than ever before. In partnership with Microsoft, Smart Hustle is sharing this article on Will Technology Be Your Best...
Have you ever experienced truly exemplary customer service? I bet you’ve never forgotten it if you have. But of all the hundreds of customer service transactions you experience every year, have you ever considered why a particular instance should be quite so distinctive? Chances are, it’s because the customer service representative you were dealing with...
What can your business learn from the pre-Presidential election polls? Elections are mostly a "luck of the draw." Our country is divided roughly 45% Republicans and Democrats, Conservatives and Liberals. The other 10%, give or take are the undecided and that's what our Presidential races are largely about. From what I can gather, in this latest...
Businesses today are run very differently compared to the businesses of old. Once upon a time, to keep everything in order, your office needed to be filled with filing cabinets, boxes, and clutter. And those filing cabinets, large and unwieldy as they were, were filled with paper copies of everything - often in duplicate,...
While marketing allows brands to attract new buyers, good customer service can help them retain customers and nurture loyalty. Plenty of brands pay more attention to the glamorous side of business; marketing. Here, they spread the word about their brand, create a catchy visual sprinkled with an impressive tagline, and juggle several online channels to generate...
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...
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...
The cost of providing superior customer service is high, but the cost of not providing excellent service is a loss that no amount of price cutting or product innovation can substitute. It’s a given that customers are the most important asset any business can have, so it’s understandable that owners and managers sometimes shy...
Marketing isn’t just creating a small brochure or placing an ad on Craigslist. It’s creating (and sticking to) a dedicated strategy to increase your sales. To continue growing you need new customers, but to gain new customers you need to invest in marketing. Many small companies don’t invest enough in marketing, which leads to slow...
