113Tidbits: More Of What Keeps Your Business Rolling In A Down obama Economy

What I Ride Since The Car Is Dead

In a prior life as a call center worker, I would have blamed a lot of people but now I look and say what could I have done to prevent a problem? The number one action (and yes I knew this but didn’t do it) was to test the system before announcing and promoting the call.Now mind you, working as a salesperson on the phone selling stone sinks is quite extraordinary, I had assumed I understood how it worked from the training that was available and I didn’t. So I accepted responsibility for needing to reschedule the calls that were failures and took each failure as a learning lesson.

First lesson: Always test …always.
The conference call system is fairly new and once discovered I really wanted to use it. The features and benefits for a free system were “off the charts.” I was further impressed by an email from the company’s CEO who had learned of my canceled call and wanted to know about the difficulty and what they could do better.

Second Lesson: When a customer even a free customer has an issue, find out what you can do to solve the problem and possibly prevent it from recurring.
In order for me to answer the question for myself and the CEO as to what can be better I needed to make sure I understood how this system worked. Often times when I have a question I will become the teacher since if I can successfully explain it to someone else then I understand it myself. So I developed three videos of enhanced training for this system which is called Callifower. These videos are below.

Third Lesson: You understand an important topic well enough if you can teach it.
Now this is where my business analytical and consulting skills really kick in. I stepped back from this situation and asked, other than my group who else would benefit from this conference calling system and training? Here is a short list:

1. There are groups using conference calling extensively now. They include network marketers, internet marketers launching products to name a few.

2. Companies with employees in remote locations. These can include outside sales people on the road, managers of stores in multiple locations, trucking companies with drivers on the road, employees in multiple offices or plant locations. Are you beginning to see the opportunities.

Fourth Lesson: Be open to how technology developed for one group can be applied to non-targeted groups.
This is the advantage of working with a business consultant exposed to a wider range of company practices. However, like companies not all consultants have expertise in marketing tools like blogs, video, social networking, conference calls, syndication, direct response and more.