Visitor, your DECEMBER FocalPoint Newsletter is here

It makes national headlines with major corporations go under. The death of a small business doesn’t receive similar attention – but they often fail for the same reasons.

In this article we look at the five tell-tale stages of business death and how to turn things around.

A sixth stage might be skipping this article…

When your business is staffed by smart, motivated employees, there’s virtually no limits on your ability to succeed. But fail at hiring motivated individuals and you’ll be fighting an uphill battle that most are fated to losing.

Find the eight strategies you can use right now to make sure you’re bringing motivated men and women on board and leaving the others to work for your competitors.

Between traditional startups and the gig economy, entrepreneurship in Canada is reaching new heights with SMEs creating some 100,000 jobs each year.

But, as we know, many new businesses fail within their first five years.

Any budding entrepreneur who wants to move their enterprise’s future from “iffy” to “dead certain” needs the “Secrets to Successful Entrepreneurship” revealed here.

The sudden phenomenon of the #MeToo movement has sent shockwaves through both the U.S. and Canada.

Not only has it put the spotlight on an important issue, when allegations are handled poorly, reputations have been destroyed and finances ruined. And, because this has happened so quickly, many businesses are completely unprepared.

Don’t let that be your business. Find out now what the risks are and the best strategies for your organization to treat people fairly and provide a safe and productive environment.

One of the toughest things in life is knowing what you don’t know! How’s that for one of the world’s top oxymorons? By definition, we can’t know what we don’t know, can we?

A quick path to discovering the gaps in your knowledge is to find somebody who knows more than you and get help, but that’s not always possible. The next best thing is finding that knowledge in a book.

The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement
by Eliyahu M. Goldratt

Almost unbelievably, this book is written in the format of a novel, and it has sold more than 6 million copies! While occasionally dry and somewhat corny (James Bond it is not), this book will take you on a journey that will have you seeing things differently in almost any business.

Goldratt is an expert in many management theories, but particularly the theory of constraints. A business’s growth can be hampered by many things, some of which we may never think of unless we learn to think differently. For example, the owner thinks sales is the problem, so you improve the sales only to discover that production can’t keep up … Oops! Or production is pumping out blue widgets when the world wants red.

Those are very simplistic examples, but sometimes the problem may be as simple as that. Maybe the business needs to invest in plant workers, not sales. Maybe production is fine, but the business needs more people on the support lines for implementation.

Find your true bottleneck and your business could boom in short order. Fail to identify the correct problem, and you could find yourself looking for a new career in an even shorter timeframe.

Available on Amazon.com

- Recommendation by Ben Pritchett

B2B marketers are still struggling to get targeted prospects to engage, according to Chief Marketers’ 2019 B2B Marketing Outlook. Almost 6 in 10 respondents said this is a challenge for them in generating new leads, on par with last year’s results, when it was also their top lead generation challenge.

Engaging prospects is proving to be a bigger challenge than finding qualified names, which was cited as a challenge by 4 in 10 respondents. Fewer than one-quarter (23%) said that a finite number of qualified prospects is a problem, suggesting that it’s not the pool of potential prospects that’s the problem, but a competitive environment that makes engagement difficult.

Certain channels seem to be more successful than others, per the report. Closely grouped at the top as the largest sources of leads are email, search, and live events, according to the survey’s respondents. Not only do these channels produce the largest volume of leads, but also the leads with the highest ROI.

Email was also the top source of leads in last year’s report, while a more recent study from Demand Gen Report likewise found email and search to be the top channels for driving early-stage engagement. As for events, research indicates that B2B marketers use them primarily to drive sales, educate prospects, and gather leads, confirming their importance as a lead gen channel.

There’s less support for social media as a source of leads. Why might that be? As it turns out, the top challenge B2B marketers are facing with social is… engagement.

Another Top Challenge? Finding Leads That Convert

READ THE FULL REPORT ONLINE>>>

-Courtesy of Marketing Charts