bwagy

Sales through retail chains can often be a pain, especially when it comes to reporting, a lot of businesses rely on restock numbers to calculate sales.  Which are of course quite delayed (in terms of reporting) and not often accurate.

So what can you do to get live sales reporting?

Using RFID technology and a detector at the store front (which can be a small unit) you could tell when your stock left the store, hook that up to a 3G device and you can get live sales reporting.

Which would make things much more interesting.  Simple technology, someone please do it, or if it exists implement.

You can be really really specific with your market.  In fact squeeze it.  Make it small enough that you can deliver insane value to this subset.

The intriguing thing? Once you get this market – because you’ve been so specific, delivered insane value, your customers help you grow the market.

By squeezing and focusing you can actually grow your original market.

Unfortunately I fell ill last week and had to cancel some appointments.  Most were understanding (hey I don’t want to get you guys sick) some not so much.  One disgruntled person said could have given us more notice.  Hang on? It’s not like people plan on being sick….

It was then I wondered wouldn’t it be neat if there was a service that benchmarked small businesses call etiquette – the service rings up businesses and follows certain procedures to rank and score a business.  This is then shared online for all to see.  Then we can find out which are good to deal with and businesses can get a realistic view of their call staff.

Big businesses already do this (to a degree) but not in such an open format.

Imagine comparing a new hairdresser based on call manner.  As Drucker says “what gets measured gets managed”… I think we’d rapidly see an improvement.

Talking with other entrepreneurs looking at starting businesses (anything from a cafe to a saas provider) and how they tell their story there is one thing I have noticed…

That I cannot fathom the idea of a new business that isn’t story telling and engaging.

That is sharing their story and engaging the community to help grow their business.

What is your story? What can you share? How can you build a community?

Even a cafe with a blog or a Petrol Station with live tweets? A doctors blog sharing advice or heads up on common ailments.

No this wouldn’t be relevant to everyone but it would be relevant to those that matter – your community.

If you are looking at starting a business (or launching a new product), look at how you can strategically build a community, engage and build real relationships… even 6 months before you want to start it…

The past weekend I attending my third unconference.

It was a real blast, instead of the normal conference where you are there to listen, at an unconference you are there to engage.

And it’s through the engagement that REAL learning can evolve, it’s that experience, discussion back and forth.  In contrast at a normal conference you go to listen then apply.

So what is an unconference? Simple there is no agenda, you turn up and the attendees just add their own topics.

A session is more a discussion than a speech, the topic is set, a discussion point is created and you go from there.

Hang on does it actually work? Yes.  Amazingly it does.  Topics are self selected, so by definition only something someone really wants to talk about and you get to pick which sessions you attend (versus sit through a boring session awaiting the next good one).

What I suggest is that you set up your own unconference, for your industry, company or network.  Invite internal/external people from right across the board and let them go.  The less agenda the better ;)

Paralysis kills business, procrastination is cited as one of the biggest regrets by owners of failed small business.

When you have a small team, procrastinating for a few hours can be a huge cost, as each person carries a larger impact on the bottom line.

What I suggest is develop some systems or processes to highlight when it is happening, then how to deal with it, much better to identify and deal with it now rather than tomorrow.

It doesn’t take long and is well worth your time investment….

I did a radio interview this morning and one of the questions was how does an idea become a chapter in the book.

Well it has actually gone through a few filters, as you may know from my Great but not great enough post that is the first big filter.

For every blog post that makes it about 3 don’t.  So for the 300 or odd so posts that are live, about 900 haven’t.

Then for those that made it live, the filter was based on popularity, my personal favourites and relevance.

By the time it has made it to the book, it has gone through three filters, at each step ideas have been refined, questioned, and put back together.

All I am doing is providing a series of filters, where at each step the most remarkable stuff makes it through and the rest drops off.

This is all that YouTube does, or that email newsletter, or the people you follow on twitter.  They provide a filtered view of the mass content.  By following and engaging you get access to the end result.

So what do you filter for your customers? Can you deliver filtered (and relevant) content do your audience as a way of engaging? For if you can, you’re customers will love you for it.