Small business, Tips and more...

Just a short message: Looks like there are some plans on having our SBSC meeting around the mid of November in the shape of a nice dinner.
Ideas? feedback is always well received!

Exchange labs is definitively a good thing. By principle it is.
We have one important implementation here in Slovenia and we are facing some issues that can affect the overall opinion about the success of the project.
Exchange Labs is not so reliable. In many cases is offline, a few emails never arrive to destiny and for some reason emails are routed to the spam folders on the recipient side.
My advise is: The value of Exchange Labs for your customers is huge, but the service is still not fully functional and that is something your customer should know in order to set the correct expectations.

I'm sure that we are in the middle of an important crisis that will touch most of the small business around. The fact is that we don't really know how can this affect our business. I think a few things can happen:

• Expensive credits
• Greater difficulty for getting new credits
  
• Less tenders and project financing
• Less attention to the small business sector

At the same time there are some good things that can happen:

• The need of decreasing expenses will be stronger on the customer side
• The need of increasing products visibility inexpensively will drive customers to the Web
• Authorities can try to help small businesses because of their power on employing people

The role of technology is definitively to help organizations to decrease unnecessary expenses and improve their approach to the market in order to improve sales. That means that something we need to be sure on including within our plan is communication. Here some steps I'm thinking to implement in B4Contact:

1. Concentrate on value added that means: effectiveness, savings in comparisson with competing products, speed of implementation, affordable prices, possibilities of upgrades.
   
2. Decrease importance on value added that means: technical specifications, easy to use, savings on training (because in any case training would be a new cost), aesthetics.

In any case making a list like that in your company would not be a bad idea, it will help you on your communication strategy. I'm sure that would make the difference!
History also lets us know that in moment of crisis there are always a few that really know how to get advantage and find profit. I would strongly agree on letting open doors for new opportunities that might arise, always respecting the organizational values and ethics.

A big question for me is: Is it a good moment for realizing new ideas?

I think that would be prudent to wait and see how the financial situation will influence your business area. Personally I think this crisis will have medium term consequences and that means that will be each time tougher to manage healthy cash flows; starting the crisis with a negative balance can be an advantage for the competition.

Someone said that now is time for saving?