Posted by hecto on February 27, 2009 under Tips | 
When presenting your work before, team member or costumer your communication and your presentation skill are the two most important aspects of your presentation. It is crucial that you know what you are going to present and make sure you are prepared.
How to improve your presentations…..
Be prepared
The most important point when presenting is to be prepared. Preparation helps you to feel confident because you will know what you are talking about and are aware of the reason why you are making some key points. For many people the presentation part may not be so difficult because they know what they are going to say and have practiced this, however they don’t prepare themselves when it comes to answering tough questions and therefore they hesitate to find suitable answers. Therefore when you are preparing make sure you have a basic outline of what you may say to people when they ask you questions.
Know what you are presenting
When preparing the firstly ask yourself: What are you going to say and why do you want the audience attention? Firstly you need to be clear of what exactly you are presenting and then make the message clear to your audience and find possible ways to make your message memorable.
Know your audience
You need to know who will be listening to you and how much knowledge they would have about what you are presenting. More importantly it would be a good idea if you knew what their interest and concerns are, otherwise it is nothing but a waste of time when presenting your work to someone that may not even be interested. By gaining good knowledge about your audience then you should also know what kind of presentation they would like, whether it should be quick to the point, well detailed or even precise.
Practice
Many individuals make the mistake of nt practicing what they are going to present. It must be noted this is a mistake that many people make at first. By practicing your presentation you become more comfortable with what you are going to say, therefore when you are actually presenting you work you are able to focus on the audience and understand their response, rather than concentrating what you are going to say next. Remember when you present don’t talk as if you have memorized all your words because then you will just sound as if your are reading a book to your audience, you want to sound natural.
Present
Make sure you are prepared and arrive early to make sure that everything is set up, as you wanted it to and if it is not you have enough time to make these changes. Before you presentation if possible talk to people that will be in your audience, this will help you to feel more confident around them. When you are presenting don’t forget to make eye contact, this is allows the audience to know that it is them you are talking to and not yourself.
Posted by hecto on under Business Plan, General Management, Tips |
Once you have a business idea and you want to go ahead with it, a business plan is the next step before you do anything else. It is the business plan that will lead you to the next steps.
The general idea about a business plan is that it’s something the bank forces you to do if you are requesting a loan or on the other hand you are trying to persuade investors to invest in your business. However if you do think like that then you should probably stop because a business plan is actually necessary for you no matter how you plan to finance your business.
The main reason of writing a business plan when you have a business idea is to test if that actual idea is viable in the first place. Writing a business plan will essentially also help you to work out if your business idea has a chance of becoming into a successful and profitable business.
By writing a business plan you are required to research about your idea to get all the necessary information that will turn your idea into a successful enterprise. If after the research and after you finish your business plan it turns out that your idea doesn’t work then dump the idea and think of something else. All that has happened is that you have lost time but also learned from it.
On the other hand if you decide to go ahead without a plan and your business fails then you would have lost a lot of valuable resources because you may have failed due to the fact that there could have been thing you didn’t know but could have known.
You probably want to get on with your idea straight away and think you know everything but it always helps to be patient and invest some time and energy into writing a good business plan that will help you avoid failure. Remember “failure to plan is planning to fail”.
Posted by hecto on February 25, 2009 under The Internet, Tips, Training |
E-Learning is probably a term that you have heard before or may even have participated in it as in today’s modern world this is widely used in organisations and households. Also known as Electronic learning (or e-Learning or eLearning) this is a kind of education the instructions come from a computer and not a human. Usually there is no interaction with a person during E-Learning. Many government and commercial organisations worldwide make use of E-Learning to train their employees about a specific application that the organisation may have developed or even educate their employees on topics such as the environment. E-Learning has spread at such a great speed that Universities offer courses to enable those who are unable to attend lectures in a physical locations to still graduate, via this method of teaching, most student who take these courses rarely or never see their lectures.
The E-Learning industry is estimated to be worth over 38 billion Euros worldwide; in the European Union (EU) for example over 80% of the e-learning products are produced abroad. To help you understand just how big E-Learning is and at what a rate it is growing then it may help knowing that in 2006 nearly 3.5 million students in USA were taking part in online learning institutions. Universities in United States view this as a method of increasing their revenue as E-Learning can be applicable for a wide variety of people. For some people E-learning has given them the opportunity to get a degree due to the fact that E-Learning also offers a great deal of flexibility. On the other hand E-learning requires highly trained employees to work with students on-line. Not only must these employees know their subject area well but they now must also be trained to use the computer and internet will.
Posted by hecto on February 19, 2009 under Business Software |
With a small business Consumer Relation Management (CRM) software a business is able to manage more efficiently. CRM is a process implemented by a company which deals with contacting their consumers. This process is used to learn more about the customers’ needs and behaviours in order to improve and build on relations between the business and their client. Ultimately through the use of CRM business are able to use technology combined with their human resources to stay close to their customer and the value them more efficiently. To have a better idea of CRM it may help by understanding that for example an employee from a department such as; sales, customer service, human recourses’ or marketing is able to access the CRM software and find the required information about a customer that would be stored in the system, the idea behind this approach is to essentially improve the services that are provided directly to the costumer, simultaneously the information stored in the CRM system is used by the sales and marketing department when targeting the consumer.
It is probably a known fact that CRM software is vital for large companies who have a large customer base and managing this efficiently may probably be very difficult or even impossible with CRM. However one should ask if it is really worth it for a small business to have CRM software. Many companies probably hear of many different CRM systems that brag about their features and how they are the best, this of course makes the selection of CRM software a difficult task. Until getting to the point of thinking about CRM a business may have been doing fine by just using the combination of Microsoft Outlook and Excel to perform their CRM tasks. Though a small business may be thinking of transforming their business and implement a CRM system to help them improve their customer base and relations. For many small businesses CRM is unknown territory and it needs to be entered with a lot of care and research in the field.
So before deciding on a CRM a number of factors need to be considered, first you need to think about the stage your business is at and the objectives. Also what will CRM bring to your business in the first place? Yes it may make the customer buying experience much better which could lead to more repeated business, however if the sales people are not willing to sell then CRM software will not really improve the situation much, it is the sales people that need training or replacing. Now on the issue of choosing CRM software, again this is a difficult decision because there are so many different companies providing alternative CRM software. The best way to pick the right software is to balance out the price, software features and if the company you decide to buy from is there to really support you throughout your CRM experience.
