Becoming an entrepreneur is a state of mind. Be positive and you can become one. Entrepreneurial spirit is the first step. The following may get you into the right frame of mind.

• To be an entrepreneur, you need to be passionate about the business you wish to build. This will drive you on during good and bad times to eventual success.
• You may look at the people around you at work with better and more interesting jobs which you think you could do just as well, if not better.  Examine your skills and think about where and how they could be used to better effect. Consider updating them by enrolling in training and college courses.
• Study the careers of business icons such as Sir Alan Sugar and Sir Richard Branson. They are both self made men who worked hard on their innovative business ideas and developed their small businesses into multi-million pound and multi-national companies. They had the instinct to anticipate and react to where there were gaps and opportunities in the market and jump in to fill them. Alan Sugar, for instance, revolutionised the early sound systems market with innovative products at affordable prices. True entrepreneurs are adept in improvisation and have the foresight to diversify to meet changes in the global business world. Another example is Richard Branson who had success with his own music label and retail outlets. Over the years he broadened his horizons to transport and created his own train and airline brands. People such as these will be an inspiration to would-be entrepreneurs.
• How annoying is it to see work colleagues waiting around to be guided when they have finished a task or something goes wrong. This type of inefficiency is unacceptable to entrepreneurs. They have the drive to go ahead and find solutions. Assess the systems and procedures at your workplace and, using your entrepreneurial qualities, determine what can be done to reduce inefficiencies and time wasting. Explain the problem and your solutions to your boss. This is a great way to show your ingenuity and your initiative and enterprise will stand out. Offer to tackle a project outside your normal duties. If you succeed, you gain confidence, new talents and expertise and your bosses will be impressed.
• Be willing to take a risk based on the ‘more risk, more reward’ saying. No business has ever flourished without the owner taking risks at critical times
• All entrepreneurs are creative and innovative and new ideas should be considered from all angles to determine if they are likely to work. Use whiteboards and computer graphics packages to make your visions come alive.
•  Think outside the box and take existing scenarios and see if they can be improved. Can existing products or services be altered to provide a more customer friendly service?
• The entrepreneurial spirit is infinite. Step outside of your comfort zone and open your mind to new possibilities.
• Remember that nothing was ever achieved by big businesses without unique and creative ideas and the desire and drive to develop them. It could be innovative ice cream flavours or ‘green’ roofing materials – an entrepreneur has the vision and energy to take an idea and run forward with it.
• This leads to customers and clients. They are the people who will buy your goods and services, so their satisfaction must be key to the ideas you are considering. Think about what is wrong with certain markets and how they can be improved or expanded. Once you have identified a product or service which you wish to develop, you can focus on the solution.
• Some people start up online businesses whilst still being employed and work on a part time basis. However, if you are thinking along these lines, you must differentiate between you as the online entrepreneur and the employee. When you run your own business, you are the one who makes the decisions and decides when to expand or diversify. The umbrella of your day job will not be there to stop you ‘getting wet’ indefinitely. Take it slowly and evaluate each step. You can soon identify lines which are making money and those which are not. Abandon the unsuccessful lines and, learn from the mistakes and develop new ones. Using your entrepreneurial spirit, you may find it is not long before you can work full time on your new business and focus solely on implementing the ideas and vision you have for it.

Almost all successful entrepreneurs started small and used their vision, creative and innovative ideas to develop and expand their businesses over the years. You can strive to be the next one if you release your inner entrepreneur.

This post was brought to you by Company Formations 247. We are a company formation business devoted to providing you with all your start up solutions.

• What will I use the headset for?
Will you use them for answering and making calls? Do you have a lot of online meetings/webinars? Do you listen to previously recorded seminars?

• How many hours of the day will I wear them?
The amount of time that you wear your headset is a tremendous factor. You don’t want to snatch them off your head and fling them out of a window or worse at one of your co-workers or loved one. Your headset should fit comfortably.

• Which type should I choose? Only you can make that decision. Do you need one that will need an adapter for special add on equipment? Or just a regular plug in?

• How much do I want to spend for them?
The price range for headsets can run from around $14 to well over $500 (please keep in mind, that just because it is expensive it is not necessarily the best).

• How much noise and activity goes on around you? You might want to look into a bin aural headset with a noise-canceling microphone. Are you completely focused or do you work in a call center environment? You can choose the mono aural headset.

• Do you often have to leave your desk, return, and find that you have missed an important call that you waited 2 hours for? Do you enjoy phone tag? A wireless set with an adapter called a handset lifter may be your answer. The handset/headset lifter is a device that connects to your telephone; it allows you to answer calls as you move around freely. The typical range is anywhere from 100 ft of your phone up to 500 ft.

With a headset, whether it is for a PC or a standard telephone, some of the benefits are:
• Freedom and more productivity. You can use the computer easier, take notes, and work on paperwork/files.
• It reduces neck and even back strain.
• The microphone is stationary – if you have to move about, your voice will be consistent making it easier for the other person to hear you.

The standard telephone headset still reign in a large majority of companies, (including major corporations) are not using VoIP (voice over internet protocol). A few have switched over in certain departments. The reason is that a landline is more stable (don’t go out during power outage) and it generally produces better sound quality.

Most headsets for the computer will not fit your telephone and vice versa. The headsets for a PC are a 3.5 mm jack and are two prongs and your telephone uses a 2.5 mm and is single. However, you can buy a PC headset adapter to avoid the expense of buying a separate headset for your telephone. Before you rush out and buy a pc headset adapter, make sure that it is compatible with the telephone that you are going to pair it with.

Which is better, the PC headset or the standard telephone headset? It depends upon what you choose and what is allowed at your job.

How to Get Solid Results

The key to top performance is that the coach facilitates the learning of the person who is being coached. In other words, although the coach is providing guidance, the person being coached must be permitted to think through problems and issues on their own. This allows the coached employee to begin thinking in terms of problem solving without intervention. Sales performance coaching should be viewed as a partnership in sales training and not simply instruction on how to sell. Sales coaching uses the many different aspects of sales, including branding, communication and product positioning and teaches sales employees how to use their own, individual strengths to reach the targeted market. By focusing on the individual salesperson, sales coaching performance enhances a sales force by targeting specific strengths and weaknesses.

Types of Coaching

The two types of sales coaching, strategic and tactical, simply take different approaches to helping sales staff bring in new business or increase sales among current clients. Strategic coaching focuses on account penetration, tips for accessing decision makers, and dealing with competition using an overall account strategy. Tactical coaching is a more hands-on approach to teaching as the coach observes an actual sale call, noting areas for improvement and providing feedback to the coached employee.

Benefits

Because sales coaching focuses on the strengths of the person being coached, the process instills confidence, and connect with existing and potential customers with a more positive attitude. Sales coaching can benefit any member of the sales team. Seasoned salespeople are able to upgrade skills and learn new selling strategies while new salespeople achieve successful sales more quickly. The company benefits from a stronger bottom line, a larger customer base and increased profits. Sales coaching also offers a new approach to sales department training as coaching is more interactive than traditional methods of sales training.

Sales coaching performance allows sales teams to focus on their own strengths and weaknesses in an effort to improve performance and motivation. By replacing negative thoughts with confidence, sales coaching eliminates roadblocks to success. Each individual salesperson is able to build internal resources that help them connect with existing and potential customers, outperform competitors and ultimately, increase sales. Businesses benefit from increased revenue, improved market share and reduced inventory as sales increase.

Thanks to Sales Overdrive at http://www.salesoverdrive.com/ for this article.

How to Choose Your Marketing Plan

Art marketing, like anything else in life, will benefit from a simple, direct, and actionable plan. It has to be simple so that anyone can understand and follow it. It has to be direct to create a relationship between the artist and the buyer. And it has to be actionable to produce results.

It’s also advisable to choose only a few marketing strategies that you feel comfortable working with. Since each marketing strategy can expand in depth and scope, choosing too many will result in overwhelm and failure.

Ask For Help If Necessary

In addition, it’s important to realize that if you are not familiar with marketing online, it’s perfectly fine to ask for help.

There are two ways you can get help:

One, you can hire a marketing mentor to teach you how to do it yourself.

Two, you can or hire an online marketing company to do it for you.

If you have an interest in learning how to market online, the do-it-yourself approach provided you have the time to study, will be less expensive and put you in control.

A Five Step Online Marketing Plan for Artists

Here is a five step online marketing plan for artists:

1. Create a platform to showcase your work. You can do this by building a website or a blog, or both. If you don’t have the technical skills, it is possible to hire a web designer relatively inexpensively on a freelance job sites. Your website should feature a video or a slideshow showcasing your art. Your blog should feature posts that either talks about your experiences as you create art or that provides how-to information on creating your particular type of art.

2. Find a way to build a relationship with visitors. The most popular method is to create a newsletter that keeps subscribers updated on the work you are doing or providing information for those who desire to create art. Another option is to create a fan page on a social networking site like Facebook or MySpace. You can also build a following on Twitter.

3. Choose how you will attract traffic to your website or blog. Basically, there are only two ways to do this: one, buy traffic, which will save you time; or two, get free traffic, which will save you money. Your decision depends on whether you have more time or money available for your marketing. An example of buying traffic is Google pay per click (PPC). An example of creating free traffic is uploading videos on YouTube.

4. Search engine optimize (SEO) your website or blog. You will need to research the best keywords for your particular art, then place them strategically within your webpage according to the best SEO practices—for example, in your title, meta-description tag, lead paragraphs, and so on.

5. Finally, create backlinks to your website. These are links coming from other websites to your own. You can do this through various methods: doing a link exchange, posting comments on the blogs of other artists, or creating a Squidoo page.

Essentially, what works for marketing art online is the same strategy that works for any niche. For this reason, when you study basic marketing techniques online you will get a detailed perspective on exactly how to implement these five basic steps to your marketing campaign.

Aunt Jemima products were sold and have continued to be sold to predominately white households by playing on popular ideas about race, class, and gender and using the plantation South as a reference point. In the ads, as in the real antebellum South, putting a black Aunt Jemima in the kitchen kept white women out of it, simultaneously offering solutions to the management of black labor and reinforcing ideas about white femininity. The continued marriage between the product and Aunt Jemima persona was so close that white housewives were constantly advised that “Aunt Jemima does all the work so you don’t have to,” and that the path to pleasing husbands was in following a recipe created by a supposedly real Louisiana slave. Thus the key to the trademark’s success was that while it could not offer real slave labor, it could offer the next-best thing, a kind of slave in a box that summoned not only Old South food but the social order among whites and blacks, men and women of the plantation South.

A survey of 633 bank consumers was analyzed with the purpose of developing a profile of the adopter of financial services derived from demographic, behavioral, and psychographic variables. A multiple discriminant analysis model was constructed and consistent with diffusion theory it was found that a unique profile does exist for the adopter of financial services: relatively younger, more affluent, of higher occupational prestige, financially disciplined, an opinion leader, heavier user of credit, and less impulsive.

Exploratory research further suggested, in addition, that unique and more specific profiles might “nest” inside the larger service category, thus permitting profile design for individual heterogeneous innovations. In this study the adopter of the Home Equity Line of Credit was found to be relatively younger, more affluent, an opinion leader, more frequent financial services institution switcher, a deliberate decision maker, and one who selects financial institutions differently than nonadopters. Managerial applications of the model were suggested, with which to manage other financial services.

Here we explore how product designers can create the SAFE values and embed them into the product through the new product development process. It also empirically evaluates how well the initial design goals of the product designers are implemented in the final developed product and explores the factors that help or impede this implementation. The developed product is then evaluated by consumers from the target market of the product to assess the effectiveness with which they perceive the values the designers embedded into the product. In this context, it also evaluates the role of consumer expectations.

Longitudinal multiple informant data were collected on 62 different products in the new product development process over a period of one year and were analyzed. The results indicate that product design does, indeed, create the SAFE values and that the product designer is central to this value creation. The analysis showed NPD creativity, cross functional integration and experience as important factors that can help designers overcome resource constraints and bring their initial visions of value in the products, to reality.

The research shows that when the vision of the designer is more successfully manifested in the final product, it is more likely that the consumer will perceive the values as they were intended to be perceived. This research finds that user centered market research is key in informing designers about the needs of the target market and bringing their conception of value closer to the target market’s conception of value. This type of creative and user centered approach of bringing new products or service ideas to the target market will define how products are created and marketed for years to come.

This research attempts to address this strategic issue by conceptually developing and empirically testing a model to help managers choose brand concepts for international markets. A brand concept specifies the basic needs consumers should perceive a product or service can satisfy, and facilitates product positioning and brand image management. Environmental characteristics of foreign markets are hypothesized to affect the market success of brand concepts. Such characteristics include industrialization, urbanization, and modernity. To limit market heterogeneity effects often found when examining country characteristics, the environmental units of analysis are cities and towns.

Survey and secondary data were used to examine how product performance is affected by brand concept selection given particular foreign market characteristics. Sixty four regions across 11 countries were analyzed using 16 environmental variables. This yielded two environmental constructs: modernity and urbanization. Mail surveys were administered to international marketing managers covering 31 brands of U.S. consumer goods exported to 125 foreign markets. A total of 213 usable responses were received for the blue jeans and athletic shoe product categories for an effective response rate of 57%. Informants provided performance data for each region within the country they managed and an assessment of the brand images or concepts used in each market.

Results indicate that modernity strongly moderates the performance of brand concepts. Specifically, when the market is characterized as being low in modernity, brand concepts should have a strong functional emphasis. When the level of market modernity is high, the performance of social and sensory brand concepts improved markedly. To a lesser extent, the same moderating effect was found for urbanization. In addition, modernity’s moderating effect was evident even when urbanization was found to be low. Hence marketing managers should pay special attention to a market’s level of modernity, and to a lesser extent the degree of urbanization, for developing brand concept strategies in foreign markets.

Marketing is one of the most important tasks for bed and breakfast operations and the one that most frequently gets pushed aside. Many bed and breakfast operators are frustrated about marketing because of the lack of immediate gratification. The primary marketing approaches used by bed and breakfast operations are brochures, directories, guidebooks, newspaper ads, and reservation services. The most effective means of promoting a bed and breakfast operation has been word-of-mouth advertising. Carefully planned and well performed marketing strategies can help ensure that travelers will tell others about the comforts and advantages of bed and breakfast accommodations.

Industry experts predict that bed and breakfast operations will, in the upcoming years, achieve a more prominent role within the hospitality industry. A greater number of state tourism offices are now including bed and breakfast listings in their materials. In addition, there is increased standardization of ratings by organizations such as the American Automobile Association and the American Bed and Breakfast Association. These organizations are generating positive word-of-mouth communication among innkeepers.

Bed and breakfast operations have become increasingly popular with travelers who do not want to stay in more conventional hotels or motels. These travelers are looking for a place to relax. Most travelers who stay in bed and breakfasts are seeking short vacations relatively close to home where they can find variety, not necessarily in the location, but in the accommodations themselves.

In general, bed and breakfast guests form an affluent group. The majority of guests in country-inns and bed and breakfasts are baby boomers with a median age of 44. More than half of all bed and breakfast guests come from households that are located in the wealthiest areas of the nation. Knowing that bed and breakfast guests are independent, relatively wealthy, well educated and frequent travelers, operators should develop effective marketing strategies to find those individuals, attract them to the property, and treat them with friendly, personal service which can generate new and repeat business.

Those individuals who were selected through the assessment were subsequently trained in a structured sales training program. Individuals who successfully completed both the assessment and training were assigned to loan sales positions. Thirty-six trainees successfully completed both aspects of the program and comprised the test group for this study.

The selection assessment center, a series of sales simulation exercises, included roleplays of sales encounters and a sales presentation. An assessment rating was assigned to each candidate based on performance in the assessment center. The six-month training program included classes in sales skills, product knowledge and credit skills as well as on-the-job training. A training rating was assigned to each trainee based on performance in the training program. Follow-up productivity data, based on loan sales volume, was used to evaluate the success of the combined selection and training program.

Productivity comparisons were drawn between the 36 test group subjects, who were selected through an assessment center and trained in the sales program, with a comparison group, the remaining salesforce of 421, who were neither assessed nor trained in this program. The productivity of the test group was also investigated to determine if assessment ratings and training ratings would, each independently, be significantly related to productivity.

Test group subjects significantly outperformed the comparison group on all productivity measures. Results from the study suggest that, in combination, assessment center selection and structured sales training provide a good means of identifying and developing successful sales people. Assessment center ratings achieved in the center were directly related to subsequent productivity. The finding suggests that assessment centers, primarily used for managerial selection, can be effectively applied to the selection of sales candidates. Training ratings were unrelated to productivity.

The training ratings do not appear to sufficiently differentiate amongst individual performers. However, training does appear to contribute to effective performance; as a group, those who were trained outperformed the non-trained group.