Keep the Flu Away This Fall Season

With the arrival of fall and winter, unfortunately we also see the arrival of the major flu season of the year.  As the air gets colder and dryer, the flu virus can remain a more stable form of the virus as well as stay in the air longer, making winter prime season for the flu to spread.

In fact, influenza is actually an Italian phrase, influenza difreddo, meaning “influence of the cold.”  So, while we may be in the midst of welcoming the cooler evenings and chances to cuddle up in our warm wooly sweaters and sit by the fireplace, it’s also now the time to gear up for a fight against getting sick and decreasing our productivity this year. 

Healthy Tips to Prevent the Flu

Catching flu can easily decrease our work for more than just a few days.  It can wipe out our immune systems and leave us dragging for weeks, along with being more susceptible to other colds and viruses.  If this just doesn’t fit into your schedule, here are some tips to follow to stay healthy and productive all fall and winter long.

Eat Well, Sleep Well

Perhaps the number one way you can take care of your health and well-being during these months when the flu is running rampant is to sleep & eat well.  Sleeping well will ensure that your body has time to reboot, recharge and keep your immune system powered up.  Eating a well balanced diet will give you the nutrients, minerals, vitamins and energy your body needs to keep going and to fight off any flu virus that might try and get in.

Eat extra vegetables like dark leafy greens and brightly colored red and yellow vegetables to give your body an extra boost.  Eating yogurt on a daily basis is also known to lower your cold susceptibility by up to as much as 25% by boosting your immune system.

Plan Ahead

Planning is more important than ever during this time of year in order to eliminate stress.  Fall tends to be a major gear up time in the office, with a big push after the sometimes “lackadaisical summers.”  Compound that with the upcoming rush of holidays: Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s Eve, and the tendency is to build up stress, whether consciously or unconsciously.

The more planning you can do, in terms of on the job and off the job, the better chance you give your health.  So start planning now for things like Thanksgiving travel plans, holiday menus, gifts, etc.  It may feel like it’s way too early or that you’re just making your plate worse now for no reason, but it will actually help relieve underlying stress you aren’t even aware of.  And, when holiday season actually hits, you’ll be that much less stressed!

Make Work Environment Comfortable

Most offices feel overly cool during the fall and winter months.  Feeling cold makes you tense and will stress your body more to overcompensate as it tries to keep itself at normal body temperature.  You will also have a very hard time feeling relaxed.

Bring in a small heater to regulate your body temperature; it can also increase your comfort level by releasing tension and making you feel more relaxed.  A footrest that puts your feet at an angle and heats at the same time will warm, soothe and relieve tired legs.  When you are relaxed, your immune system actually produces more chemicals to fight off infections.

Use Humidifiers

Humidifiers are often used during these months because it tends to be the driest time of year.  Humidifiers are also beneficial in preventing the flu and colds, as low humidity makes the nose dry and more susceptible to infection.

However, if your office is running a humidifier or if you have one at your personal desk, make sure to clean it regularly.  They can harbor mold and bacteria that can become airborne and compromise your immune system.

Disinfect!

It may not be the most popular thing at work to be the biggest germaphobe, but it could be the easiest thing you do to keep yourself healthy.  Most flu is caught by direct contact from touching a surface touched by someone sick.

Coughing and sneezing are widespread this time of year and all it takes is touching a surface that’s contaminated with airborne droplets.  Keeping your desk and common areas disinfected will greatly reduce your likelihood of getting sick.  Wash your hands regularly and any time you come in contact with common surface areas.

Exercise

Exercise is an easy (relatively!) and all natural way to boost your immune system.  It is capable of increasing those precious virus-killing cells in your body, and while it may not keep you from getting the flu altogether, if you do get it, chances are those higher levels of killer cells will shorten the time and intensity you suffer.

Give Up “Tough”

If you do happen to get the flu, forget the “tough it out” motto that would tell you to get yourself into work and just make it through.  Not only will you most likely increase the length of time you’ll need to recover, you’ll put your co-workers in jeopardy of getting sick as well.  Take the appropriate time to stay home, rest and get fully recovered before heading back into the office.  Your work and your office pals will thank you.

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Got more tips to keep the flu away? Share with us in the comments.

Photo by Elliot Stokes.

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3 Ways To Optimize Sales Rep Performance

After coming up with a good business idea and launching a business, the biggest challenge a new business faces is getting enough leads. This can be overcome by learning about effective marketing. However, even after a company has created a successful marketing campaign, the business will not prosper unless the sales team can convert those leads into sales.

Let’s face it, selling is difficult. Human beings are complicated and persuading someone to part with their money is often difficult in an economy where the cost of living is constantly rising. You have to convince them that your product or service is of more value than the money they hold in their hands.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at some ways a company can optimize their sales process to convert more leads into sales after marketing has done most of the heavy lifting.

1. Use the Best CRM Technology

While sales are primarily a job that requires human interaction, technology can make it easier for salespeople to do an effective job. Through customer relationship management (CRM) software, companies can streamline their marketing and sales process, improve customer experience, and sort out prospects from customers. When it comes to comparing CRM tools, the two that stand out are Salesforce and Oracle, both cloud-based CRMs. Since it’s possible to argue for both sides, deciding which one is best for your company depends on what it is that you need.

2. Onboarding and training

You would not expect recruitment to be much of an issue. After all the economy is continuing to grow and organizations have many openings available. However, the sales representative position appears to be the most difficult to fill after skilled trading roles. There are many reasons why this is the case but one prominent one is that recruiters often use old-school recruiting methods to find entry level sales representatives. For instance, many companies recruit sales people on the basis of dangling the high-income carrot. However, when candidates apply for the job, they are quickly overwhelmed by crusty sales managers who have high expectations and demand unrealistic quotas. Even if they accept the job, the turnover rate is high, which means that the sales manager has to go through the whole process all over again.

Unless someone is already a successful salesperson, the promise of high salaries and generous commissions is not enough to overcome a newcomer’s fears about asking people to buy. When the fear of rejection is higher than enthusiasm for making more money, fear wins out.

A better way of recruiting sales representatives is by focusing on improving onboarding and sales training.

When sales managers fail to use an onboarding process, then they default to throwing new sales reps into the business in the hopes that they will figure things out on their own. This creates anxiety and disorganization as the sales reps fumble through one disastrous sale after another. This cycle is followed by one of anger and frustration for everyone when sales reps finally quit after a few days, weeks, or months.

Onboarding is a process of introducing the new sales rep to the company culture so that they can more quickly become productive employees.

Through onboarding and training a new sales rep learns:

• How to engage prospects and make a presentation.
• How to learn from mistakes.
• How to approach a sales meeting with confidence.
• How to enjoy the job, stay productive, and get better at sales performance.
• How to handle rejection without taking it personally.
• How to stop being afraid of prospects or the possibility of losing their job.

This is a long process and it can take up to 6 months before a new employee finally begins to feel that they have become good sale reps.

3. Increasing engagement and retention.

The biggest problem a sales organization faces is high disengagement and high turnover. When a sales rep is disengaged, he or she just goes through the motions to stay employed. When a sales reps quit, it because they feel so much emotional pain over customer rejection that they are no longer even willing to try again.

The way to increase engagement and decrease turnover is through ongoing coaching.

Coaching should not be confused with training. Training is what happens in the onboarding phase when sales reps learn the knowledge and skills they need to know to sell. Coaching is closing the gap between theory and experience. In training, a sales rep might learn how to close a sale using a particular technique. In coaching, a sales rep reviews with a mentor why their application of a particular sales closing technique did not work in a specific sales situation. With sufficient coaching, sales reps learn how they are not applying the techniques correctly and how to do things better in the future. Coaching can be done in a variety of ways, from job shadowing to a weekly review with a coach to analyze their last few sales.

Optimizing and organizing the sales process is probably one of the most powerful ways to improve the bottom line. It requires certain steps: Using the right technology and onboarding, training, and coaching sales reps to become top performers.

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5 Things Your Business Should Outsource

If you’re a small-business owner, then you’re all too familiar with the lack of sleep and countless hours a day you spend working on your business. And while statistics found by the Small Business Association showing 50 percent of businesses lasting five years and one-third lasting 10 years certainly yield a glimmer of hope as compared to often-repeated horror stats of nine out of 10 businesses closing within ten years, the lifeblood of your small business is anything but a guarantee.

You work hard so that your business, your dream, doesn’t become another statistic. But in the process you surrender your entire life to work, and maybe not even for a positive trade off. It’s time you considered investing in things that can free up your time and pay dividends for the growth of your business.

Help is here

One thing that many small-business owners find hard to believe is that you don’t have to do it all alone or in house. Automated processes and remote assistance can help take a load off you and your business. Many of these services are actually more affordable than handling in house.

Have a look at five things that you should consider outsourcing that will save your business both time and money.

1. Hosting

If you run an online store, you should consider a fully hosted option. Full service enterprise ecommerce platforms such as Shopify Plus take the burden of website development and maintenance off the business. You won’t have to pay a full-time developer or other employees to keep your platform running smoothly. You’ll have all the technical know-how you need a phone call or email away.

Opting for a fully hosted platform means your business lives in the cloud, allowing your business to be more agile and handle a higher volume of customers. If you want to roll out a website change, you don’t need to pay a developer hourly to make it happen, simply consult your service. 

2. Content marketing

The objective of content marketing for businesses is to generate leads. Content marketing, whether it’s in the form of a blog, social media or email blast, helps your business nurture relationships with clients and potential clients. It builds a rapport and makes you a credible authority. If done right, it’ll put you in customers’ future purchasing decisions.

Companies are realizing the importance of content marketing in this digital age. However, many marketers agree that the biggest challenges in content marketing are producing high-quality content in high volumes.

As a small business, you can’t afford to risk providing your audience with poor content. You also can’t afford to waste time on developing content while your business needs managing. It therefore makes sense to outsource content marketing to a freelance writer or agency. This will help ensure that you have high-quality content capable of generating leads and building relationships in the long term, all while saving you money compared to doing it yourself or hiring a team fulltime. 

3. Payroll and taxes

Unless you have training in tax laws and payroll management, outsourcing your payroll and bookkeeping is a no-brainer. Seemingly innocent mistakes on your payroll and in filing taxes can trigger tax audits. These in turn could result in your business losing thousands of dollars in penalties and fines. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) imposed fines amounting to more than $2 billion against small businesses in 2014. These were the result of simple mistakes such as improper filings and omissions.

Tasks such as payroll and bookkeeping don’t have to be done in-house. You don’t have to hire in-house staff and spend a lot of money in salaries every month. You can outsource these tasks to a reliable service. This is affordable and helps you avoid those costly mistakes.

4. Administrative tasks

Multitasking isn’t always a good thing. A recent study showed that $400 billion is lost annually around the world as a result of multitasking. As a small business owner, it will pay more if you focus on the tasks that are core to your business and outsource repetitive tasks that aren’t. Outsourcing administrative tasks such as appointment-setting to a virtual assistant can help you focus on the big picture.

5. Legal assistance

There are various aspects of running a business that require legal assistance. It helps to have legal assistance that you can access on demand for the small issues. This allows you to access legal expertise and avoid having to pay for retaining these services year-round.

There are various other tasks that businesses could do with outsourcing, it all just depends on the type of business you operate and what your in-house capabilities are. As a rule of thumb, outsource tasks that you struggle with. It will almost always cost less than hiring a full-time employee.

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