Highlighted below are some of the main social media relationship tools that I am personally having a tremendous amount of success with. Tying them to my specialized WordPress blog makes the whole concept cohesive.

Google Apps

Google Apps is such a no brainer! Startup costs for any new office with networking and computing equipment are crazy enough without even taking into account the software and maintenance pieces. Google Apps gives business owners a way to cut costs in email, calendaring and purchasing office suites. I use these powerful tools in all aspects of my social marketing business communications endeavors.

TweetDeck

In building social media business relationships, you need to know what people are saying about your company as well as your competitors. An easy way to do this is through an aggregator. My favorite is TweetDeck by far. TweetDeck gives you an automatically-refreshing picture of what people are saying about your brand and/or competing brands. Doing it all from one app, makes this much easier to stay on top of your business relationships especially as your social network and business grows.

LinkedIn

Linkedin is arguably the most powerful business networking, career tool, out there. It’s focused and purposeful. You create a “profile” which becomes a resume on steroids. Linkedin Groups are a focus point for relationships. News, Events, Discussions, Comments, and Job offerings. These can become tremendously useful resources of information. I share my articles and events in these groups which instantly promotes and relationships begin.

Joining specific groups like opennetworker.com you can increase your connections exponentially. I now have over 10,000+ LinkedIn connections.

Twitter

With Twitter… tweeting inspiration, ideas, and thoughts can be extremely useful. Up-to-date company and product information is as well. One business idea that I use is taking the RSS feed of my main customers and tweeting them on twitter. Mitel, manufacturer my company represents, uses Twitter for sales engineering support. Check out Twitter’s own guidebook for businesses.

Note: Don’t just “billboard”. Interact with your twitter community and grow relationships quickly.

Constant Contact

Let’s face it, everyone is attacking your customer base. How do you maintain your base and relationships? One great tool in accomplishing this is Constant Contact. Constant Contact’s email marketing tool helps you keep customers and prospects coming back. They offer attractive, professional-looking email communications (and templates) to stay in regular contact with your list which helps build strong customer relationships. I especially like their reporting.

Facebook and Facebook Pages

Facebook and Facebook Pages can be a tremendous tool in opening events and articles to even more users. There are literally millions of people that only use facebook for business relationships. Don’t underestimate this social networking powerhouse of 500 million users.

Rapportive

Rapportive – For the Gmail fans, I being one of them, shows you everything about your contacts right inside your inbox. A Gmail-only tool that replaces the unappealing ads on the right hand side of your screen with tons of useful information about the people you email. Just open up any message from someone and you will see information about their job title, latest tweets, and direct links to their social profiles.

Xobni

Xobni is a tool I wrote about a few months ago. In my opinion it is a must have for Email, Twitter, Linkedin, Hoover, Skype integration. It’s easy, powerful, and I especially like the auto-calendar-date email appointment tool.

As I am becoming more proficient at using these new tools I am finding the power and purpose in them. They have become an integral component to my success online and my career locally as I am sure they will for you.

As you can see crowdsourcing worked out extremely well for this dealership which was a small business. As a matter of fact it became a real win-win for them and the artist. Not only did they get their jingle economically… they became a media phenomenon because of all the activity around the offer. Television stations, radio talk shows, and newspaper articles blossomed. The day of the award they were all there. You just can’t afford this kind of attention normally and here it was being offered free (gratis) to both parties. Powerful!

“…the world is becoming too fast, too complex and too networked for any company to have all the answers inside.” – Yochai Benkler. Yale University from The Wealth of Networks

So what is crowdsourcing?
Simply… “crowdsourcing is the act of outsourcing tasks, traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, to an undefined, large group of people or community (a “crowd”), through an open call.” – Wikipedia

What are the key ingredients to successful crowdsourcing?

Focus – You and your company need to be laser focused on what your looking for. If not then crowdsourcing will take you all over the map with your project, most likely, ending in a disaster.

Right Crowds – This is huge and needs some real thought. In my example earlier Austin was a great “right crowds” location for a specific sounding jingle. They wanted something catchy and country sounding.

Clear Reward - To get real talent there needs to be a budgeted reward. This doesn’t always need to be cash however. Notoriety can be a great motivator as well. Take some time and think about what your “right crowds” would want. Critical!

Implement – Now that you have an idea, product, etc., how do you implement it into the company? If you spent some time on the “focus” then this is pretty straight forward. If not… implementation will be extremely tough.

Small Business Crowdsourcing Ideas?
How about using it for designing your logo? Every time I have mentored or started my own business there was always loads of time spent on logo design. Here’s a great site to do just that: 99designs

What if you need funds for your creative business? Take a look here: Kickstarter

Maybe you’re looking for expert advice for your business but only have funds for an hour? Then look here: Gerson Lehrman Group

Beta testing anything in your company can be a great crowdsourcing event. The information gleamed from these testers, most times for free, can become invaluable. These beta tests can be product, website, media, and generally anything you want a crowd response and improvement ideas.

Social Media and Crowdsourcing
LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter are great data collectors if used properly. They all offer powerful avenues to make offerings and/or collect data easily and inexpensively. Do not underestimate the power of social media for crowdsourcing success.

Crowdsourcing 2.0
Here are examples of some of the newer crowdsourcing 2.0 offerings today. While these are larger offerings it is interesting to see the ideas offered.

DesignCrowd: “DesignCrowd gives you access to a ‘virtual team’ of 31,074 designers from around the world (via a process called crowdsourcing) – helping you to tap into the very best international design talent available, at a low cost. Post a project on DesignCrowd and watch designs pour in from around the world (the average project receives 50+ designs). “

Gigwalk: “We turn iPhones into a second paycheck and instantly connect businesses to the talented Gigwalk community workforce to do Gigs using the Gigwalk iPhone App.”

“This is really the biggest paradigm shift in innovation since the Industrial Revolution” – MIT professor Eric von Hippel, specialist in innovation management.

Hopefully you can now see crowdsourcing as a potentially powerful tool for any business small or large. While today it might not be for everyone the offerings are growing daily. Just Google “Crowdsourcing” and you’ll see what I mean.

Special Note: I had posted this also on Biznik.com and received very mean-spirited responses (comments). Enough for me to cancel my subscription with them. It seems there are some pretty nervous (scared) artists that see this as a direct attack on their industry. In other words “you can’t get quality work through crowdsourcing”. My interpretation: You can only get quality work through paying top dollar through a consultant. I don’t subscribe to this. While there are always good sound business reasons for hiring a consultant they are not always necessary. Competition, generally, is healthy especially to the small businesses (consumer) bottom line.

What is Pay Per Click?

Simply put, PPC consists of getting potential customers to notice your ad with search keywords. When people search on Google, Bing or Yahoo using one of your keywords, your ad may appear next to the search results. This gives you the power of advertising to a specific audience that’s already interested in your business offering.

Nice, right? To achieve these lofty goals, like everything worthwhile, you need to do some research first. I know… I know.

Who Offers Pay Per Click? The three major companies offering pay per click advertising include: Google AdWords, Microsoft Ad Center and Yahoo Search Marketing. There are many others to be sure, like Linkedin and Facebook for example, but for simplicity sake I will use Google’s products.

Keyword Research as Easy as 1-2-3.. The goal here is to find those keywords that have just enough searches for them to be worth your time yet the price that you are paying for the click through remains reasonable. Below are some tips and links to help you do effective PPC keyword research.

1. Let’s say you own a restaurant in Boise and you want to find some keywords to target… I recommend starting with Google AdWords Keyword Tool. Copy all your keywords into a text file and get ready for the next step.

Just to make things easier to understand let’s say this tool returned 3 main results:

boise restaurants
restaurants in boise
best boise restaurants

2. Now we need to estimate the traffic that those 3 keywords can send you. To do that you’ll take your keyword, for example boise restaurants, and go here: Traffic Estimator. Here’s a great tip. Type your keyword inside the box between brackets [ ]. Don’t use quotes. If you use quotes Google will return broad results. In other words, it will count every possible keyword combination that contains “boise restaurants” which you don’t want. Use [boise restaurants] for the best results.

To be successful you must have the highest amount of click throughs to your web site while staying in the budgeted amount for your campaign.

You will now see how many AdWord clicks you can get for this keyword. Take that number and multiply it by 20 to have a realistic idea on the amount of traffic that you will get from a natural search. Why multiply by 20? Google estimates that 5% of its users will click on the AdWord ads. You can do this again for all your main targeted keywords and you will get a great snapshot on the global traffic that you should receive.

3. Getting an estimate of traffic is tremendous but we also need to know how these words will trend and are trending. Are they dying, growing, stable? To do this there is another useful tool called Google Trends. To check the trending of your keywords (i.e. dying, growing, stable or seasonal) you will need to take your same keywords and place them inside quotes. For example “boise restaurants”. This is an ongoing process but extremely good to know information.

By using a keyword research tool and testing your keywords out you can effectively use those keywords that have the highest click through at the lowest cost, helping you to make more money.

Easy right? I know it’s a little complicated but after you do one or two it gets easier to understand. By doing the research upfront I promise it will be worth it to your bottom line. With that said… As you begin to research and design your ad there are some common “newbie” mistakes that can be made. Let’s look at these.

PPC Mistakes

Blanket Coverage – National Advertising
You can target by state, city, zip code, etc. People buy from local companies. Targeting specific cities in your ads will result in higher click through rates (CTR).

Always Bidding for the Number One Spot
Lower spots can have higher CTRs (click through rate). Many profitable PPC campaigns do not bid for the infamous 1st spot. Try bidding for the 4th or 5th spot, and work your way up.

Mistaking CTR with Conversion Rates
Looking exclusively at the CTR (click through rate) is not necessarily an indicator of your best performing ad. You could see higher CTR, but not necessarily higher conversion rates. Successful conversion rates will lead to successful return on investment for your campaign.

Not having a “Call to Action” Content on your Web Site – Landing Page
When the customer, through their search, clicks your positioned page in their search results, congratulations! But the sale hasn’t been made yet. What good are massive clicks to your web site if there’s not great content and a compelling “call to action”?

Not using Brand Names as Keywords
If you have a great new product offering, don’t bid on generic terms like “music player”. Bid on “iPod” for example. Capitalize on popular names!

Budget Warning
Make sure you have thought through your average sale profit and what PPC is costing against that. So many times new users get caught up in impression counts, conversion rates, and so on without doing the math.

Believe it or not you can figure out what your competition’s keywords are.

Bonus Advice!

Research your Competition
Believe it or not you can figure out what your competition’s keywords are. This can be crucial information in structuring your AdWords campaign for obvious reasons. Check out PPC Web Spy which lets you see competitor keywords while you do basic Google browsing. Powerful information.

Pay Per Click is a great way to build traffic to your website offering. Just watch the budget and do the research up front and you will quickly receive leads and sales.

With that said… do the recipients still put their rewards in a conspicuous place for all to see? Of course they do because no matter how it’s presented everyone still likes to be acknowledged. My goal, and should be yours, is to take this powerful tool up a notch however. With a little tweaking, and if properly executed, recognition can be a great motivator and loyalty builder for any sales force.

For those Giving Recognition:

Personal Recognition is Necessary for Top Performance
Seems like a no-brainer to me and yet I don’t see a lot of this going on in smaller teams and when it does in larger teams it’s not very meaningful. The certificate presentation with a nervously presented generic praise is better than nothing but comes off insincere many times. So how do you make it meaningful and sincere?

An example of this was when I received stock options personally for some competitive work I did. While that was extremely cool the founder took it up a notch. He put a personal note on the options page congratulating me on my specific work. What a motivator!

“People may take a job for more money, but they often leave it for more recognition.” -Bob Nelson

Recognition should have a personal touch. Not some generic compliment but specific to what the accomplishment was. How did it help the company? It needs to be genuine.

5 Hot Items for Successful Personal Recognition Giving

1.) Have a purpose. Is it a meaningful reward and recognition system?
2.) Don’t wait… along with evaluations/appraisals offer on the spot kudos!
3.) If you’re having a rough time giving out recognitions re-think your criteria.
4.) Believe it or not… a money reward rarely works.
5.) Choose an award that will highlight the achievement in a special way.

For those Receiving Recognition:

It’s OK to Receive Kudos
One of the issues that I’ve had with recognition giving is the lack-luster attitude from the recipient. They seem embarrassed in receiving recognition which makes me a little uncomfortable giving it. Seriously… who doesn’t like getting kudos. I know I do. So why do they act like it’s a pain?

Answer… self-esteem. We all tend to look at the total picture of ourselves and many times find that picture lacking. The fact of the matter is we can be admired for parts and pieces of what we do. There is no need to “fluff-off” this recognition. It’s OK to be recognized and act grateful for the reward.

The recipient needs to realize that they don’t have to be perfect to be deemed competent. Express this in some way to the team prior to recognition. A clear understanding of how and why a reward is being given is extremely helpful. It also keeps others from making judgement calls on the worthiness of the recipient.

The Power of Personal Recognition
I wish I could tell you that I’ve always been really good at this. Not true. Many times I found myself waiting until the last minute before a company meeting putting together a certificate and presenting such with a generic thanks. Shame on me. I have changed my ways however. Taking some time and effort to prepare my recognition presentation… I now enjoy an increased loyalty and respect from my team. They are inspired to do more. Goal accomplished! I can’t recommend this enough. Start today with genuine and sincere praise and you will see, first hand, the power of personal recognition.

What they don’t realize is that this training session isn’t all about them. Someone in the room may find tremendous value in the material. By discussing the “faults” of the training, others start to feel less than interested in the subject matter. The message gets diluted and so does the training. Also, in their self absorbed mindset they miss information that could have been useful to their own sales career.

“There is nothing weak about valuing the opinions of others and asking for advice from time to time.”

Are you that salesperson, sales manager? Candidly, I have been. Here’s what I learned that helped me get to a “next level” in my sales career by becoming trainable.

What does it take to become trainable?

Humility
To become trainable you must have humility, an acceptance that you don’t know everything. You should…

1. Look for nuggets not issues with the training.
2. Add to the conversation – not the opposite.
3. Keep from proving points to show your brilliance.

Humility is a tough pill to swallow for many. Especially in sales. We are taught to be self-confident, in control, at all times. But it is imperative that we are in a trainable state of mind.

State of Mind
Here are some questions to ponder to make sure you have the correct state of mind for training:

1. When you see an invitation to participate do you look for avenues, excuses, to not attend?
2. Do you ask the trainer what this is about to validate that you don’t need the training?
3. Do you look at the material when you arrive to see if there’s anything of “value” to you?
4. Do you talk with people, text message, leave for cell calls, during the training?
5. Do you feel you’re too old to be trained anymore?
6. Are you opened minded enough to understand the benefits of the training?

Understand the Benefit
A fact of life is that life and circumstances are always changing. Change is hard. Training is always going to ask for a certain amount of change. That’s just how it works. This is not a bad thing however. The power of gained new knowledge, or changed new knowledge, is the possibility offered to accelerate your sales success.

“When you’re green you’re growing… and when you’re ripe you’re rotten”

The added value to all this is when employers see you respect the knowledge of those around, they’ll be more inclined to promote you. You will stay excited and motivated and a new (or existing) potential customer will feel and see this. A good thing.

Don’t sell your career short by not being humble enough, bringing the correct mindset to learn, and the understanding of how training will benefit you in the long term. Knowledge is sales power.

As I was signing the paperwork I asked the manager… “who was going to be held accountable for making sure that all the items that needed to be done would be scheduled” as I would be leaving with the van in a week. Looking a little confused at the question he eventually assured me my salesman and/or he would do just that.

“If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell 6 friends. If you make customers unhappy on the Internet, they can each tell 6,000 friends.” -Jeff Bezos

Monday, Tuesday, nothing scheduled. Wednesday I dropped by because the temporary tag had expired. I had never bought from a dealer where they didn’t provide the plates. I was told that I needed to go during business hours and do this myself somewhere else. Starting to get frustrated… I asked where we were on getting the add-on’s scheduled which he replied he would try to get the mats and bumper fixed Friday.

Thursday, Friday no call until Friday evening late which I was busy and it went to voicemail. Saturday, half way to Seattle, I get a call from the salesman wanting to know when I could get in for the bumper and mats. Now I am not happy. I hang up with him and call the manager.

The manager asked how I was and I told him I was not happy. I explained that the license plate issue was the first problem as I had been driving around on expired tags. He immediately took offense and insinuated that I was calling him a liar as he was positive he explained that to me. I have now gone from not happy to mad. For the next 10 minutes he defended everything they hadn’t done. Furious now, I summarized it for him this way… “I am now taking a filthy mini-van to my ill wife with no mats, bumper not fixed, nothing done. I suppose you feel that is my fault?”

Settling down, he then wanted to know what he needed to do. In as calm a voice as I could muster I explained “I made that very clear a week ago when you were happy to take my money. It was inconvenient to take immediate delivery of the van, as you know, and I did it as a favor to you. It’s unfortunate you didn’t follow through. When my wife gets well I will give you a second chance to do the right thing.” I am pretty sure he thought I was looking for a freebie. I wasn’t. I just wanted what was promised.

Don’t Commit Business Suicide
This dealership didn’t take ownership after the sale at any level. When confronted the manager was confrontational, arrogant, and rude when it would have been so easy to have been otherwise. I will never refer them to anyone I know. I would be afraid to.

Do you currently have safeguards in place so that poor customer service never happens? Check out these customer service facts:

1.) Even in a negative economy, customer experience is a high priority for consumers, with 60% often or always paying more for a better experience.
Source: Harris Interactive, Customer Experience Impact Report

2.) 81% of companies with strong capabilities and competencies for delivering customer experience excellence are outperforming their competition
Source: Peppers & Rogers Group, 2009 Customer Experience Maturity Monitor

3.) Out of best in class companies: 91% provide customers the ability to track issues over the web, 57% measure support center success across email, chat, web, and voice, and 62% use integrated voice response (IVR)
Source: Aberdeen Group

4.) 70% of customer experience management best in class adopters use customer feedback to make strategic decision. 50% of industry-average organizations and 29% of laggards do.
Source: Aberdeen Group, Customer Experience Management: Engaging Loyal Customers to Evangelize Your Brand

5.) The top three drivers for investing in customer experience management are:

1. Improve customer retention – (42 %)

2. Improve customer satisfaction – (33 %)

3. Increase cross-selling and up-selling (32 %)

Source: Aberdeen report – Customer Experience Management: Engaging Loyal Customers to Evangelize Your Brand

6.) A dissatisfied consumer will tell between 9 and 15 people about their experience. About 13% of dissatisfied customers tell more than 20 people.
Source: White House Office of Consumer Affairs, Washington, DC

7.) Retailers and hotels provide the best average customer experience in North America overall as an industry.
Source: Forrester Customer Experience Index 2010

8.) 90% of North American firms view customer experience as important or critical. 80% of the firms would like to use customer experience as a form of differentiation.
Source: Forrester’s The State Of Customer Experience

9.) 86% of consumers quit doing business with a company because of a bad customer experience, up from 59% 4 years ago
Source: Harris Interactive, Customer Experience Impact Report

10.) For every customer complaint, there are 26 other customers who have remained silent
Source: Lee Resource Inc

11.) Customer churn is caused by customer feelings of poor treatment 68% of the time
Source: TARP

12.) It takes 12 positive service experiences to make up for one negative experience
Source: “Understanding Customers” by Ruby Newell-Legner

13.) 91% of unhappy customers will not willingly do business with your organization again
Source: Lee Resource Inc.

“The goal as a company is to have customer service that is not just the best, but legendary.” -Sam Walton

14.) Happy customers who get their issue resolved tell about 4 to 6 people about their experience.
Source: White House Office of Consumer Affairs, Washington, DC

15.) Attracting a new customer costs 5 times as much as keeping an existing one
Source: Lee Resource Inc.

16.) 76% of companies motivate employees to treat customers fairly and 62% provide effective tools and training to gain trust with their customers.
Source: Peppers & Rogers Group, 2009 Customer Experience Maturity Monitor

In my organization I have asked for the salesperson to be onsite when the installation occurs. I and/or the President make a personal visit or call to see how everything went. We have a customer care representative call periodically with surveys and such to make sure they continue to be happy customers. We have seen increased purchasing, referrals, and long term loyalty with this process

Bottom line, reputation and referrals are the life blood of any business. Don’t sell and forget. It could become your business suicide.

Resource: Customer Service Statistics

With that said, many are slowly waking up to the realization that their “tried and true” practices and product offerings are simply no longer effective. Marketing, products, and culture changed but they didn’t. Now their competition that “got it” is ahead of the curve. Many times as much as years ahead. Let me give you an example…

Years ago I introduced social media marketing and its applications to my company and more specifically sales teams. Amazingly only one person really grasped the vision and power. She understood the possibilities and ran with it. With a local economy downturn this person now had the power of selling through other regional markets without any real costs. The big picture. Of course the soothsayers, a year or so later, were now trying to imitate her success and quickly realizing that it takes time. They are now playing catch up and are behind the curve.

“If you are not willing to risk the unusual, you will have to settle for the ordinary. (via Great minds)” -Jim Rohn

Businesses are living breathing entities. You are either feeding them or they die. Sales success is not any different. What new idea, new process, or new excitement have you brought to your organization?

Success is your responsibility
It is so easy to get wrapped up on the daily sales processes where future planning, marketing, and educating get left behind. I’ve talked about business and sales plans before. There is a real need to stop and smell the roses so to speak. What is your current industry doing? What are the current and future market trends? Do you really know your competition and have they changed? Are you capable of directing and understanding how to keep up and excel?

My industry is not any different than most. I talked about holistic selling before it was popular to do so. Very few understood where I was going with this. Now we have virtualization of phone systems, location based integrations, and cloud based services. Our competition is not only from traditional players but now from search engine companies and router manufacturers. Presenting this to my sales team I found them terrified of the implications. They are going to have to re-think, re-learn and the hardest part… change. Unfortunately most won’t until too late.

“If we don’t change, we don’t grow. If we don’t grow, we aren’t really living.” -Anatole France

Over the years I have watched prosperous businesses and sales professionals fail because they simply could not keep their minds open to a changing world and market. They wanted to stick with “tried and true” processes that made them successful for years. I watched as a router/switch company became a phone system company and changed my industry overnight. Many couldn’t make the change to VoIP and are either dead or dying. Today those that are selling solely phone “appliances” and not services, (hosted, virtualized, cloud based) are going to find themselves behind the curve and possibly in trouble. My guess is this example can apply to pretty much any industry.

A bit of advice
Do you find yourself in this same predicament? Here’s a bit of advice… Do not change everything. But do change. Take some time to look around, investigate, and understand what is happening to your market. Educate and wrap your arms around this information. Put it into your newly developed business/sales plan and execute. Most importantly become an evangelist and an expert. At the very least you will find your career and business less tedious and possibly gain back some of that mojo you had when you first started.

“Traditional business phone systems cost thousands of dollars to set up and maintain. By eliminating the need for complex hardware, lengthy installation and technical expertise, small businesses get the functionality and flexibility to easily connect with customers at a fraction of the cost of a traditional PBX phone system.”

The above quote was from a Fox News article. I have seen these arguments with other articles as well. Unfortunately they’re very misleading. What they don’t tell you is all this “revolutionary business phone technology” is riding on another provider’s network. I don’t care if its Cloud based, DSL based, MPLS based, or whatever based. That’s just how it works. So if they don’t pay their bills what happens to you locally?

Technical expertise is still needed locally. Either by the provider or your company. There simply is not a phone that is completely plug-n-play. What about QoS, LAN CPE (customer premise equipment), and so on? Heaven forbid you have a sound quality issue.

Buyer Beware
My market has experienced multiple hosted provider failures with one that “forgot” to pay Qwest millions of dollars for the right to ride over their network. Qwest pulled the plug and guess what… customers had few or no options. A large Realtor office was sitting there with phones they bought that were now useless. They didn’t own the phone system. No dial tone, No long distance, nothing. If that wasn’t bad enough… they also could not get their business critical numbers ported to another provider due to legal challenges. Bad for business.

To combat the upfront phone costs many hosted providers are “advising” their potential customers to buy them used off eBay. Now there’s a bit of sound business advice. Who’s going to support this customer with phone issues? I am pretty sure eBay won’t and it looks like the hosted provider is bailing as well.

My organization has been working with a large multi-site car dealer that for the last year has been trying to get hosted working from another provider. While originally they were told there would be “huge” cost savings they ended up buying a new fiber backbone and large broadband increases to make it work. The costs and quality have been so prohibitive that they are removing the solution and they are not alone. Many medium-large sized companies are re-evaluating their decisions to go hosted.

Ask these Questions
Here are some questions to ask before leaping into hosted…

1.) Do you have references using a broadband WAN solution I would be using?
2.) What is needed on my LAN?
3.) Do you offer local support – not through the phone only?
4.) Are you a CLEC?
5.) If you go out of business what are my options?
6.) Do you offer a phone book listing?
7.) Is there an upgrade in phones?
8.) Who is responsible for the local data equipment needed and configured?

Hosted definitely has it’s place if thought out properly and implemented correctly. Partner with a reputable company. Don’t expect the quality to be as good as a CPE solution however. Understand that your entire communications system is reliant on a WAN connection (i.e. DSL). If you can live with these items and are looking for a flexible, low-upfront cost, small solution then by all means go with hosted.

Communication systems are not simple “How many phones and voicemail users do you want?” configurations any more. In trying to consult with a potential last minute client I typically see panic turn to full on terror. “What do you mean it takes 3-4 weeks to get a digital trunk-T1! I’m open for business in a week!” and/or “I just need a phone system… I don’t have time for this!”.

Of course I oblige with a quick install… they pay for temporary lines and a quick system configuration. They’re always grateful at first but then come the complaints. Not a win-win in my opinion. Here are some basic questions you should be asking.

Phone System Considerations – 8 Critical Questions
1.) What services are actually offered by various business lines carriers at your new location? Time frame?
2.) Is the building wired correctly for these services and communication systems?
3.) Does a premise (CPE) communication solution or a virtual (HOSTED) solution make sense?
4.) How does the new solution affect the current data network, software integration (i.e. CRM), and/or your 1, 2, and 5 year IT plans in general?
5.) Do you have the IT resources/knowledge needed for a VoIP/SIP solution?
6.) Is there a place for a phone system? Do you need a rack, environment change (i.e. A/C), virtualized server, or is co-location a better option?
7.) Do you have remote users, other locations? What is the best connectivity needed to make this work?
8.) Mobility? Are you going to connect to smartphones and/or tablets? Will there be an integration with Android, RIM, or Apple?

Order Taking a Phone System – A Recipe for Disaster
There are those that will turn to the Internet and order their system. Easy right? Don’t have to deal with the pushy sales professional – consultant. That’s got to be good. “I will have 10 phones please and could you add an order of fries to go with that?”. Of course I’m exaggerating here a bit but you get the point. Months later I get the call… “My phone system sounds terrible. It’s affecting my business and sales. I’m tired of the non-local support. Can I re-use my phones?”. What a mess. Their upfront investment a waste of money. The importance of a phone system to their business has now hit home.

Communications Systems are Critical to ALL businesses!
There are a lot of factors in designing a usable, affordable, communications system. It is imperative that you put some thought into this prior to purchasing. Other than the computer it’s the single most critical interface you’ll use . It needs to be easy, simple, and specific. Team up with a respectable provider and interconnect. Make them prove their configuration. Negotiate a fair price and for heavens sake don’t wait until the last minute!

Armed with this new closing power I went to work. Lean forward, pressure was on. Palms up forward facing, body sitting back relaxed, pressure was off. Lean forward and stare at the potential client and not say a word. Serious pressure. People would actually start to sweat.

“Body language is a form of non-verbal communication, which consists of body posture, gestures, facial expressions, and eye movements. Humans send and interpret such signals almost entirely subconsciously.” -Wikipedia

I still see a lot of this type of manipulation today with some motivators and coaches. They run into the room full of non-motivated people with aggressive body and hand movements. In an effort to control they ask to repeat after them with a hand raised and so on… And you know what… it works! For awhile.

As time went on my sales, sales management, positions went from high pressure sales into a more consultative sales role. In this environment, a much longer sales cycle, inserting this kind of pressure absolutely did not work. Now what was I supposed to do? There was a silver lining. As my sales manipulation techniques increased my customer perception techniques increased as well. This I could use.

Slightly squinted eyes as if something hurt… I hit a nerve. Fidgety… losing interest. Rub their face… irritated. A quick shocked look… too high. And so on.

The power of perceiving and interpreting body Language is a significant aspect of modern communications and relationships. This can be very relevant to management and leadership success as well as to all aspects of the sales process where communications can be seen and physically observed.

Body language goes both ways:

• Your own body language reveals your feelings and meanings to others.
• Other people’s body language reveals their feelings and meanings to you.

I have watched, time and again, sales people in the sales initial, presentation, and close blow it because they had no clue what the customer was “really” telling them. It’s always amazing how their “perception” would be so different from mine when we would debrief.

“Sow a thought and you reap an action; sow an act and you reap a habit; sow a habit and you reap a character; sow a character and you reap a destiny.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson

Next time you’re out on an appointment watch their body language more closely. Be cognizant of yours as well. The better you are at reading a customer’s body language the better the chance of success. At the very least it will help you stay focused and sharp.