“Marketers are key strategic assets to any company’s bottom line. But executives and other key players frequently fail to see the connection between marketing and revenue, and oftentimes instead of seeing marketers as true strategic partners, these C-level execs see them just as a tool for building awareness for their products and services. The result? Marketers are underutilized and companies miss out on the maximum ROI from their human capital.”

How do you over come these problems?

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Ever work with a vendor that is so stringent on their policy that they forget who keeps them in business?

A few years ago, my wife wanted a brand new entertainment center (no, not with the big screen). I went to a local furniture store and bought her a unit that I had to assemble. That was okay, because I had a Saturday to do it. I was traveling at the time, so I didn’t really have time to waste, but I could spend a Saturday.

When we bought the entertainment center, we also bought a new freezer, a new couch, a new chair and a new desk… not a small purchase. The entertainment center was just a small part of the “package.”

When I got home with the box and opened it, I found that four of the largest peices were crunched… not dinged, not scuffed, but crunched. There was no way to salvage. I was less than satisfied.
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HR Professionals need to be aware of the needs of their staff- and one great way to understand their staff better is to use personality tests.

While personality tests such as the Color Code, the Enneagram and my favorite, Myers-Briggs, are helpful for understanding how people work and smoothing interaction at work and home, they are not meant to be omnipotent.

People can act in generalized ways that can be categorized. The key word is “can.� People don’t always act in their percieved category. Beyond randomness of choice there are other factors that cannot be ignored- namely physical, emotional, and mental health.
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Recently, I went to the DMV to renew my license. I failed the eye exam and had to get glasses for the first time in my life. Are glasses the only way to see Excel sheet tabs better? There’s no control in Excel that will do it.

That’s why you have to adjust your system settings to do it. Right click on your desktop, select properties, click appearance, and select advanced. You will see a drop-down box labeled item- simply select the scrollbar item and increase it’s size. For some reason unkown to mere mortals, sheet tabs are affected along with the scrollbars in windows- the only trick is to balance how much you increase it, as all scrollbars will also increase in size.

Of all the questions we ask (especially sales people) we often forget the two most important questions.

How much can you spend? How do you want to finance? How many users do you have? What are your goals and aspirations?

Don’t we get a lot of questions on a daily bases? Have you ever asked questions that you don’t seem to get the answer you were hoping for? Have you ever been asked a question that you think really doesn’t matter? Are these enough questions for now?
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All too often in our business communications we forget that it is incumbent on the sender of a message to make sure it is understood by the reciever. We simply write a few lines on an email and hope the tone, flavor, and intent are all understood through our typed communication.
Here are a few tips to assure you are sending email that has a rich tone, and convey’s depth of character.
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When it is time to present something to an audience, do you find yourself teaching them or preaching to them?

It is very hard, sometimes, to draw the distinction, but here is a little unasked for advice.

• If you are talking more than you are asking for input, you are preaching.
• If your audience isn’t taking very many notes or aren’t even nodding their heads, you are preaching.
• If you are having a hard time getting audience response, you are preaching
• If you rely on a PowerPoint presentation too much, you are preaching.

I have sat through countless presentations where there is no discussion, no interaction, no fun. How can anyone survive in business today without understanding the simple dos and don’ts of a simple presentation?
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The old ways of selling are out… our customers expect so much more.

Raintoday.com had developed a short eBook titled The One Piece of Advice You Can’t Sell Without. It is a great book. I think that it is not just aimed at sales professionals. It is a short read and I think that everyone can benefit from it.

You can go to Raintoday.com or download here.

Let me know what you think of it.

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Corey Smith is the Vice President of Innovation at Fisher’s Document Systems where he maintains a blog on business and technology.

Ever use a USB key on a public computer? Be careful…

I found this article at http://www.schneier.com. Your information is not as secure as you might think.

USB Dumper.

Corey Smith is the Vice President of Innovation at Fisher’s Document Systems where he maintains a blog on business and technology.

There is an awful lot of information out there. How in the world do we sort through it all?

Have you ever heard of an RSS feed? RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. Is it really simple?

If you are ever on a site that has this symbol that means that you can get information fed right to you without having to browse all the pages. For example, I have feeds coming to me from InfoWorld and Fox News (to name a few). What I really like is that I don’t have to spend time looking for information. I get about 200 articles a day ready for me to read and if I don’t want to read them, I just ignore them.

How do you get the information to you? Well, you need to have an aggregator. I use Snarfer from http://www.snarfware.com/. You can also get a Google Home Page or a Yahoo Home Page and let them aggregate the information for you for free. It just depends on what you like.

All you have to do is load the software, click on the RSS feed link , and then copy and paste the URL into your aggregator.

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Corey Smith is the Vice President of Innovation at Fisher’s Document Systems where he maintains a blog on business and technology.