Earlier this year, while in attendance at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, I found some particularly useful business tools amidst all the consumer gadgets that you can use to increase your competitive advantage in business. You’ll be able to read about them here and, through the wonders of technology, watch some videos of them as well — but more on that later.

DYMO File to Organize Your Office

If your office is like that of most small businesses, you probably have a lot of paper that needs to be organized. Even with the much-touted “paperless office” talk of … Read the rest

Boost productivity and gain a competitive advantage.

Enhancing productivity is what much of the technology revolution is about. When you can find the right tools to boost your productivity in business, you gain a competitive advantage. When you can find tools that also stretch your mind, you have a viable advantage that leapfrogs over the competition.

Lenovo Laptops — X61 And T61

Lenovo has some laptops which continue to dazzle and provide a solid competitive advantage. You’ll find the new X61 to be very lightweight (less than 4 lbs.) and powerful. It comes with 3 USB ports, one IEEE1394, (Firewire) … Read the rest

Remaining Profitable in a Consumer-Driven World

Here’s a recent experience I had that may serve as a tool for determining how your customers will respond when faced with a similar challenge. Learn how you can profit from thinking this way for a new world and a new way of doing business.

Maybe something like this has happened to you on an unsuspecting day. So there I was, just minding my own business when suddenly it happened. I wasn’t thinking about much of anything when I suddenly had the desire to hear a particular song. The song started going through my … Read the rest

How to Deal With the Weeds

Weeds inhibit growth in farming. They grow around your crops and sap energy and life from the growing plant. It is a regular part of farming to eradicate the weeds and in relationship farming you have to apply the same principles to grow your business.

There are what I call “weedy people” out there. You know who I’m talking about. These are the people that try to sap your energy, your time, your money and all the good that you do. Some do it consciously trying to harm you. Most will do it without … Read the rest

Relationship marketing — which I refer to as relationship farming — involves a process that can help you operate your sales and marketing optimally. The principles of effective marketing are similar to effective farming and how a farmer begins the process which leads to harvest.

Study the Soil

Before the farmer plants the seeds, he has to study the soil. This means that the farmer has to think hard before even sowing the seeds. The successful farmer discovers what types of crops grow best in certain kinds of soil. You don’t plant orange trees in Alaska and expect a great … Read the rest

Relationship marketing is vital for your success in business. Successful people know that business is built on solid, mutually-beneficial, profitable relationships.

Establishing, building and maintaining positive, profitable relationships in business is very much like farming. Some say that business is war. They use analogies to combat, killing, beating the enemy, etc. I think that analogy is missing the point of what business is all about. War is about killing people and destroying things. Even if you win in war, you lose a lot.

Farming, on the other hand, is about creating and growing. It is about scientifically researching what is … Read the rest

What Your Customers Don’t Want

It is a new era. We’ve heard that before about the new economy, the dotcom wave and how things are not as they used to be. Well, surprise, they have changed once again. The old ways of marketing have gone the way of the manual typewriter, the ink blotter and the fast-talking, cigar-smoking salesman with the derby hat.

Customers today want to have companies there to help them, not badger them. Even new economy companies think that by sending a barrage of unwanted e-mail messages, they’ll get through and penetrate the minds of the customers. … Read the rest

The Internet is a fundamental part of our businesses, our culture and our life. Just because many companies with wrong business models have been hit doesn’t mean that the Internet is going away. In fact, the Internet is a more vital part of what we do now than ever.

Here are some specific ways the Internet will be part of our businesses and our lives as we look to the future.

Faster access to what we need — Right now most of those on the Net are doing so with 56K modems or less. No wonder it hasn’t changed everything. … Read the rest

The changing and morphing of the Internet is in full swing.

The industry has gone past “brochureware” and static websites. Interactivity and customer service are the words heard today more often than anything. There are several major trends that will affect you and your business. You can use them to your advantage if you know what is coming and how to profit from it. Some of these trends include:

Fast Is Not Only Good, but Also Necessary

Your customers want answers fast. Ironworks is a product from Ironside (www.ironside.com) that is a B2B (Business to Business) website for manufacturers and … Read the rest

Reality is hitting the Internet.

In the old days, you know, back in the 1990s, all you had to do was start a new dot-com, use the word “cool” a lot in your promotion and watch the stock price soar. It seemed impossible that you could make money that way back then. Welcome to Mission Impossible II — no, not the movie, but the concept of making money on the Internet. To make serious money on the Internet requires some principles that are tried and true and some clever new ones. Check out this list of some important concepts and … Read the rest

The other day I was thinking about how the Internet and the web have changed so much of what I do in business. I realized how much I can do now that I couldn’t do or would have been almost impossible to do just a little while ago.

Here are some ways that you can use the web to make your life easier and get more done. Warning: What you are about to read can revolutionize your business and personal life.

Get the Best Price

Every buyer wants to get the very best price possible. The web has some tools … Read the rest

Imagine having the power of a desktop computer, including Internet accessibility, with you wherever you are.

You can have this with a device that you can carry with you easily. It could be something like a Palm Pilot, Pocket PC device or other handheld device. Usually these devices enable you to keep a list of customers, maintain your calendar, send e-mail (on some units) and do other functions that would previously have only been available on a laptop computer.

I’m using a Palm Tungsten/T at this time. This little device gives me the ability to keep thousands of people — … Read the rest

It is different now. The world is changing once again. Just when we thought we could launch new dot-coms, run up the stock price, have a grand party and rejoice in a New Economy, reality has a nasty little way of peeking in like Dr. Seuss’ The Grinch Who Stole Christmas and disrupting our pattern.

Yes, it is different now for businesses in the New Economy. Yet, we can learn a lot from the Old Economy and the principles that don’t change. The mood in technology today is that we have to get down to serious business. Off come the … Read the rest

We can all agree that the pace of life today is faster than ever, due in large part to the rapid change in technology.

We complain about it, but we can overlook the benefits of today’s fast-paced world. Would you rather have to wait longer to get vital information you need? Think what it is like at the airport when you’re waiting for a delayed flight. Think about delays in traffic due to an outmoded transportation system (our “super” highways). Speed in some places would be better than ever.

There are keys to getting ahead and keeping your business on … Read the rest

We live in a new era. The way things were done before do not necessarily count today. This new era has different rules. If you’re using the old rules in a new era, you’ll make as much progress as a wagon train would against a newly minted starship equipped with warp drive!

In today’s environment, success requires a never-ending devotion to using the best tools and having the best attitude to serve the customer. Customer needs and expectations are different, so you have to embrace them before your competition does.

Here are rules that you need to have in your … Read the rest

Every business today needs an online presence, but blowing it on the internet is easier than you think if you have the wrong assumptions about what a good website is. Perhaps we can learn what to do by looking at what not to do. Here are some ideas that will help a company to go out of business on the Internet fast.

Really cool ways to blow it online:

• Have a really slow website that has lots and lots of graphics showing what you think is really cool. After all, you tried it on your really fast T3 or T1

Mac vs. PC? Unix vs. BeOS? Linux? What is the best platform to use? Is it Mac or PC?

In today’s environment it doesn’t matter. I’ve come to believe that we need to be agnostic about which platform to use but religious zealots when it comes to serving customers.

Recently I reviewed the new MS Office 2001 for Mac. I have used MS Office for many years and currently am using Office 2000.

Office 2001 for Mac provides Word, Excel and PowerPoint, along with Entourage, a nice e-mail program and personal information manager. This program, similar to Outlook 2000, syncs … Read the rest

Focus on the relationships of business, not the electronics of it.

We live in an E-crazed world. Everywhere you turn you hear about E-Commerce, E-this and E-that. Seems that some are thinking you only have to put an E in front of a word and you are in the digital age. How ridiculous!

No matter how sophisticated our technology gets, we still are working with human beings. This is something the wise and successful businessperson knows. The technology of 100 years ago was amazing at its time, but it still required the human connection. One hundred years from today we’ll … Read the rest

Reps have come to rely on Google for a lot. Sure, you use Google for searching. This is a particularly useful tool when looking at what is happening with customers, and we can use it to look up competitive prices on various components. This search engine has permeated our culture and world in such a profound way that it is now part of our vocabulary (“I’ll Google that and find out”). We have turned the name of the company into a verb. When we Americans do that, you know it is integrally woven into our culture.

Yet, do you know … Read the rest