People often wonder how startups can survive when they don’t have anything to sell. The product or service is just a glimpse of an idea, or better yet, a few lines of code written on a night of inspiration. What does it take to start with a dream, build a whole reality upon it and stay strong along the way?
A couple of years ago, I was dealing with a very common parenting dilemma. How can I help my 7-year-old son enjoy reading?
Every team has its own needs. Take the software industry for example. One team is coding, another is testing, while others are cooking up a marketing campaign. We know from experience that these simply don’t mix. That’s why it’s so useful to use Topics to keep your teams’ communication and collaboration focused on what matters.
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It starts with an innocent tap on the shoulder — a colleague asks a brief question about an upcoming deadline. No big deal, right? Two conversations and four emails later, you’ve officially wasted almost an hour.
I’m not here to tell you the story of how companies big and small fail to acknowledge the importance of using proper collaboration tools. The cat is out of the bag and has been for years. The market simply isn’t mature enough to take the plunge. What I want to share with you today is the typical scenario where office hours become pure chaos due to simple distractions like the one mentioned above. I’m 100% sure these will strike a chord with fellow office workers far and wide.
Photo by David Pisnoy on Unsplash
For more than 10 years we have been working with communication service providers around the world and one of the biggest challenges they’ve always reported has been customer churn. Even the best service in the world can’t prevent customers from fleeing if what you’re offering isn’t what they need.
Two weeks ago we announced the 4PSA Partner Meetup that will take place in Madrid, Spain at the beginning of summer on June 1-2, 2015. We want to see you there, face to face, and chat the good old-fashioned way 🙂 You will also be able to meet with fellow service providers, exchange ideas, share experience, and have some drinks.
Besides the fun part, there are lots of reasons to join us there. In April we released VoipNow 3.5, in the following days we’ll be launching VoipNow Mobile 2.0 and VoipNow 3.6, and Hubgets is round the corner. With every new version, we are extending the feature set, creating new opportunities for service providers. We want to make sure that you know how to make money out of all the new stuff.
A fast-growing business may be synonymous with success, but not necessarily with smooth sailing too. A business doesn’t just manage itself, and even when there’s high demand for your product, you can fall short in aspects that actually sell it. Like your phone system.
Ask yourself this: if you had to add an extra phone line right now, how much time and effort would it take? How about handling your calls when you step out for coffee, or tracking KPIs? If your organization depends on picking up the phone in a timely fashion, you might want to look into a cloud-based phone system.
When creating a new product or launching a new service, the first question you ask yourself is whether it will be successful and you will be able to sell it. Marketing theory says that you start with the user’s needs and then build products/services to meet them. In reality, after the launch it doesn’t work like that anymore. You already have your solution and want to find a way to match it on potential customers’ needs. As soon as you can sense any opportunity there, you can start building your approach.
In this first article of the series, we will start with medical practices. Imagine a medical partnership with a couple of practitioners and a couple of nurses in a small office, a receptionist, and a legacy telephony system.
It started with a tweet…
Most people try to sell to anyone with a pulse. Big mistake. Selling to no-targets costs a lot & is usually non-repetitive. Focus!
This made me think of something all companies, big or small, older or younger face every day. The combination of finding the right customers and creating replicable selling scenarios makes all the difference.
As the end of this year approaches, everyone is making retrospectives of 2014 and forecasts for 2015. I’m sure you’ve already read a thousand times how great 2015 will be for communication and collaboration. Just a few thoughts I read lately: