Continuing my post on simple things to make your small business a success….

3. Saying thank you

As previously mentioned, many business owners and employees tend to forget to smile. This is a fatal mistake. You must always smile and make your customers feel at home. Another frequently forgotten thing is to say “thank you” to your customers. Saying a simple “thank you” can add much mileage to your business. Remember that you are running a small business. You have large competitors who can outdo you in many many ways, for example, offering more products for sale, at lower prices. Therefore you must develop the edge in your customer service. Because you are a smaller outfit, you can be more personal and more attentive since there are little or no administrative delays - you are the boss and you can decide now. Make the most use of this advantage

4. Be polite on the phone

Another way that you can help to ensure that your small business is a successful one is to be polite on the phone to all callers. This is common sense, no doubt but common sense can be very uncommon these days. Potential customers may call with questions about store hours or a product at the worst possible time. This may irritate you but you must never show it Stay calm, cool, and collected. If you need to, ask the caller to please hold on for a minute, but try not to keep them on hold for too long. If you have tried contacting a large bank, you will know how polite they are to all their customers. Even if you have wait forever to speak to a customer officer, they are very polite about it. Your actions or the actions of your employees on the phone will have a significant impact on whether or not the caller decides to become a paying customer later on.

As a side note, with the internet age, your small business must somehow be online too. In this case, you can still incorporate the above 4 points into your website by way of a friendly design, interactive features, videos, phone lines, chat lines, customer feed back forms etc.

Whatever it is, the bottom line is courtesy goes a very long way towards making your small business a success. Of course, there are lots of other factors as well, but these 4 good things will give you a good head start.

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If you are a small business owner, you must already know that you have to compete with a large number of other businesses, many of which may be much larger than your business.

And they have lots of money to throw around.

Although size is important in many aspects of life, it doesn’t mean that your small business is at a disadvantage. If you think out of the box, there are a many things you can do to make sure that your small business is a successful, profitable one. Surprisingly, some of these ways actually require little or no work on your part!

Here are 4 simple things you can do which will go a long way towards making your small business a success:-

1. SMILE and the whole world smiles with you

Yes, smiling is one of the best ways to make a success out of your little business. Many people do not realize just how far a smile really goes to helping a business gain reputation. Customers are human beings and therefore they want to feel appreciated or at least like to be noticed. Your customer is always king. Without your customer, you and your small business employees wouldn’t even have jobs. It is a no-brainer that it is important that you and your employees always smile at your customers and always put on a happy front - even if you are having a bad day yourself.

*Note : If your business is totally online, then obviously you can’t smile at your customers (not on today’s technology unless you are using some kind of streaming video). But hey, you can think out of the box and make your website “smile”. Try more friendly words, colors, display, welcome messages - withing pictures of smiling people all around, for example.

2. Small Talk

Small talk is another effective way to make your small business a success. This can be something as simple as asking your customers if they need help finding anything. Or ask them about the weather outside, it helps to break the ice. Small talk is not small at all because it makes your customers feel BIG. Consumers feel good when they know there is assistance available if it is needed, that they are being treated as an important person. Thus it is very important that you and your employees must always try to strike up a conversation with your customers. This small talk is what will likely keep them coming back for more.

*Note : If your business is totally online, then again, you can’t make small talk spontaneously. If that’s the case, you must have some way for your customers to interact with you, like a chatline or email or phone line etc

More on how to make your small business succeed in the next post…

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