Leading at Light Speed is a leadership book by Eric Douglas for businesses, public agencies, and nonprofits revealing the 10 Quantum Leaps to build trust, spark innovation, and create a high-performing organization.

In Chapter 3, Lead Through Others, Eric discusses the merits of using a behavior-based interview process instead of a typical interview.

Behavior-based interviewing is a great tool that helps ensure you find the right people. It starts with writing down the behaviors that are most important for success in a particular job – not the tasks. Managing a team, motivating people, developing under-performers, starting a line of business, engaging people in change – these all might be behaviors you’re looking for. This list becomes your litmus test for selecting the right people.

The corollary of behavior-based interviewing is open-ended recruiting: When a position comes open, you keep searching until you find the right person, even if it means temporary hardship. It’s too important to find the right person for a position to settle for less.

The quest to get the right people means you should always be on the lookout for talent. By definition, after all, the most talented people aren’t the ones looking for work. If you want to build a great company you need to get great people on board, and that may mean using unusual tactics. Good leaders typically spend 25 percent of their time recruiting and developing talent.

The cost of settling for second best can be huge. To begin, there is the price you pay to be certain someone get the proper training. That’s a price you would have to pay in any case. But by settling for second best, you may have to spend more time training them to make sure they don’t make mistakes. Perhaps you must spend a greater amount of time checking on their work. Perhaps you require multiple sign-offs on their choice. Maybe you revise a process to make sure his or her work is reviewed by someone you trust. For the sake of filling the position, you add a little bit more bureaucracy to the organization.

Now you see the higher, hidden costs. The talented people in your organization start to resent the new person. His or her mistakes must be dealt with. Maybe they have to subject themselves to the same bureaucracy. This irritates them at first – then it starts to grate. Morale suffers. Ultimately, the genuinely talented people decide to move on. This ultimately results in a damaging loss of trust. All because you failed to find the right people in the first place.

Here is an example of a typical interview vs. behavior-based interview.

Typical Interview:

Describe your experience in sales.
Have you ever had to manage large accounts?
Describe a time you experienced great success.
How are you best motivated?
Tell me about a time you had to handle a conflict?

Behavior Based Interview:

This position requires a person to make five sales calls a day while traveling in a territory from Minneapolis to Atlanta. How have you managed those kinds of sales logistics in the past.

In this position it’s necessary to manage large accounts with multiple contacts inside the organization who need to be on board to get the sale. Explain your experiences making such a sale. How did you succeed in making them all say “yes”?

We insist on people who are self-motivated. Describe your own motivations for success. Describe examples where you went an extra mile for a client – and for your company?

Tell us how you handled a situation that made you look bad. How did you handle the situation? What did you say? What was the result?

This position means working with an internal R&D team to help revamp our product for a new launch every year. Describe how you’ve successfully managed internal relationships with R&D teams to maximize the success of upgraded products?

Take this free work survey to see if your organization practices the 10 Quantum Leaps of high-performing organizations.

Successful healthcare and dental practice management has to include marketing methods that can get lots of good patients into the door without expensive advertising. Traditional healthcare and dental marketing tends to be restricted by only internal marketing or external advertising.

Yet, it is more and more true that most medical and dental practices that do advertising alone are throwing their hard-earned money out the window. They might increase the total collection but almost never the bottom line.

The reason is clear: advertising is hardly noticed and definitely not believed. The amount of advertising in this and other countries is way up, but for most practice owners it means less profits.

Here are some of the obstacles you will need to overcome while advertising:

1) If your advertising message only mentions the benefits of your services and your experience and your qualifications, you will sound alike with your competitors’ messages. Patients cannot choose easily among services which are similar.

2) You are tooting your own horn. People do not trust what your ads are saying. Your prospects already expect you to say, “We have new technology”, “We are service-orientated”, etc.

3) Ads have little staying power in creating long-lasting impressions. The minute you stop advertising, nobody will remember you. Out-of-sight means out-of-mind fairly swiftly.

4) Your prospects are bombarded by 5000 advertising appeals a day. You are attempting to get your message heard in an overcrowded marketing environment. Thus advertising cost goes up and returns decrease.

Problems of dependence of customer referrals and networking:

1) Many offices depend on word-of-mouth as their primary source of new customers, but depending only on internal marketing alone could not help you to break through income ceilings. Particularly in a bad economy, most offices find their new patient referrals going down or at best staying below a ceiling. Patients are dropping doctors at the drop of a pin due to loss of jobs and insurances.

2) Networking meetings and luncheons to stimulate patient referrals from other doctors and related businesses are time-consuming. You can send your staff to bring gifts to another doctor’s office to thank them for referrals but how many ‘let’s-bring-em-chocolate’ trips can you make to ALL the possible referral sources? This time-consuming and costly ‘gift-giving’ will eventually dead-end for most – due to not enough time for the doctor and for the staff to do. 

What is the solution? ‘Un-Advertising’ handles the problems above.

Un-Advertising is about getting other groups, media, business owners and health care professionals etc in your community to endorse you, instead of you having to promote yourself.

Put your messages onto other organizations’ existing communication channels to their public. It is like hooking onto a high speed train to travel to your destination versus trying to build your own railroad and train!

This strategy builds trust and reputation very quickly in the community without advertising and the best of all, it does not require the budget as in traditional advertising. 

To get your customers to pay attention to you, you need a ‘spark’ – something that makes your prospects noticing you instead of your competitors. Without this first spark, there is no fire that could start – thus no wind can spread this non-existing fire! Advertising is the wind and doing advertising without first establishing a position or perception which was put in people’s minds by other sources than you will be a waste of money.

Your message must be believed, it must build trust, increase patient loyalty and make your practice stand out from your competition, especially in these trying times of economic recession.

Remember: Healthcare and dental advertising can help get new patients and grow your business but if you do not wish to waste money in your healthcare and dental marketing efforts, you must include establishing trust and reputation in a broader and cheaper way. And that method is called ‘Un-advertising’. There are numerous articles on this subject.

1. Make use of lists – Write articles with lists - Men and women love to look over lists. For example “3 things every _____  master should know” or “a few things never to do when ________”.

2. Popular Subjects – Write about present hot subjects that are related to your industry. Keep abreast of what is happening in your industry with Yahoo and google alerts. Register to Google alerts at Google.com/alerts

3. Break News - If ever possible break news in your industry. The blog that breaks news receives immediate notoriety and a lot of particular attention. Pick up trade magazines in your sector and read white papers to keep abreast or breaking news.

4. Do not write about your kids, pets or boyfriend – I am confident your pet is cute, and your little ones are charming and funny … but the fact is no one cares … we all have kids, dogs and cats. It is just not that exciting.

5. Tag your posts – Add keywords to your posts in the tag field when composing your articles. Also add key phrases to your post titles.

6. Include trackbacks - When writing your articles or blog posts include things like trackbacks to similar articles or blog posts in your sector. Similar to blogcomments with a trackback you are leaving a url back to your post on another weblog, bringing you free traffic and back links.

7. Ping your blogposts – Send a “ping” to key ping networks after creating a blog post to your weblog. The much more ping services you ping the more guaranteed traffic you will get. A few ping services rpc.pingomatic.com, ping.myblog.jp, ping.weblogs.se, rpc.newsgator.com

8. Submit your rss feed – Submit your blog’s rss feed to all of the main rss web directories such as feedage.com, feedzilla.com, syndic8.com

9. Bookmark your posts – Bookmark your blog site posts at main bookmarking websites like digg.com, propeller, reddit, stumbleupon, yahoo buzz and del.icio.us.com

10. Post on weekdays – The majority of blog visitors are women and men with jobs, they have a tendency to visit their preferred weblogs at work, on their mobile phones or on their breaks from work … blog post on weekdays during work hours and your posts will get more interest and generate traffic  to your blog site.

Leading at Light Speed is a must-have leadership book by Eric Douglas highlighting the 10 Quantum Leaps to build trust, spark innovation, and create a high-performing organization. Chapter 2 is all about Sharpening the Strategic Focus.

A strategic plan shows how to implement your vision and is divided into three parts: goals, objectives and actions.

Once you’ve defined the vision, you need to define the priorities for the organization in the form of goals and objectives. The desired amount of goals is approximately three or four. Any more than four goals can greatly decreases the probability of reaching them. After the organization has productively accomplished what they sought to with their priorities, they can then introduce more.

Indifferent leaders often aim their focus at too broad a spectrum, forgetting the importance of maintaining one priority at a time. Too many goals and priorities can have a negative impact on the focus and energy of the organization. One CEO had 14 goals for her company. When asked, she remarked: “It’s important to me that we have a goal that reflects everything we do.Sharpening the focus of an organization relies on the establishment of priorities, rather than the satisfaction of everyone’s pet project.

How do you define priorities? Perhaps you hope to expand into new markets. If this is so, try to focus on goals that will help you achieve your vision.. If your vision is to become more vertically integrated in the sources of production, then one goal might be to buy a manufacturing plant. It is greatly important to clarify the priorities. It is important to keep in mind the fact that a priority should stand alone, not alongside other supposed priorities.

Objectives define the initiatives and milestones you need to hit in order to achieve the goals. Actions capture the specific steps, timetables and responsibilities for achieving the objectives.

Senior leaders of an organization should be held more responsible for defining and articulating goals. Leaders need to be held responsible for refining the goals of their department and tieing them together with specific objectives and steps of action. This “cascade” effect enables every manager – and ultimately every employee – to connect what they do to the strategic plan.

Take this free work survey to reveal how your company compares to the 10 consistent practices of high performing organizations.

Leading at Light Speed is a new leadership book by Eric Douglas detailing the 10 Quantum Leaps to build trust, spark innovation, and create a high-performing organization. Workplace Communication is dealt with in Chapter 8.

To begin, you need to know which unified message you want to convey – regardless of the audience. A useful way of thinking about communication is the “message box.You will have one to three key messages that will contain the power and drive of you communication. If you have already dug through the beginning chapters of this book then you already know where to go; that’s right, off to find your purpose, core values, and vision.. Those speak to the impacts and outcomes you’re trying to achieve and should be the heart of your message.

For example, if you want to calm a worried customer let your message Box clearly show that the highest priority is still the “customers and employee’ safety”.” If someone asks you what you’re doing to deal with financial setbacks, the first thing out of your mouth should be “our highest priority is our customers’ and employees’ safety.The Message Box can and should be the base of all the communication. It will be hard to stay in the box. It can sometimes be very repetitive and stifling to ones creativity. But the effort is worth it in terms of the consistency and trust building.

Remember that your message box should contain 1-3 simple messages. These principles are something that everyone in the a for mentioned group should be made aware of. Don’t try to customize your message to fit a specific group. People will always hear different messages, but over time they’ll come to realize how much opportunity your company really offers. If the communications are driven by your company’s purpose, core values, and visions; people cannot but help to notice the level of commitment and integrity.

For example, the message box for a company that specializes in analyzing key indicators of future performance of publicly traded companies might be: “Our vision is to be a world leader in helping investors to realize long-term yields on their investments. We are guided in everything we do, by our core values of innovation and integrity..” It can be that simple.

Take this free work survey to see if your organization practices the 10 Quantum Leaps of high-performing organizations.

In the middle of a good economy or a poor economy all businesses know that customers are key.  However when times turn a bit sour and business is getting sparse that is the time where companies that have made the effort to implement good customer retention strategy can survive, whereas others may fall by the wayside.  As the saying goes “fixing the roof when the sun shines” and so it goes with customer retention.  Focus on keeping them and putting the systems in place to keep them when you may not actually need them. 

Measuring the cost of gaining a new customer is beyond most businesses.  Replacing lost customers is an unneccessary and expensive drain on your business.  But what can be even bigger benefit than reducing costs.  Repeat sales.  A customer that has just purchased from you could if treated the right way have a value many times the value of that initial purchase.  Other benefits of existing customers include that they tend not to be so price sensitive, and often buy higher priced options later on.  Therefore you can see that customer retention is an important strategy and it is never too late to start. 

So where does one begin? 

Know your customers and learn the type of person that becomes a loyal customer.  Not only will that tell you which customers to focus on with your retention strategy but also what sort of demographic to target in your aquisition marketing.  Based on the concept of life time sales for a retained customer it might be the case that 5 new customers of the ‘loyal’ type are worth more to your business than 10 of the ‘disloyal’ type.  These types of customers often are looking for good service as well as a good product.

One simple example of a customer retention tactic is to create a loyalty program .  For example a restaurant should keep a customer database and for the less than regular but potentially more lucrative visitor send a discount voucher or reward card.  But targeting which of those customers might be most lucrative is important.

Once you have your retention tactics in place segmenting your customers is highly important.  Implementing a customer retention strategy will cost your business money so it must be spent wisely.  Therefore it makes obvious sense to target your best strategies to the customers that spend the most with you.  It might not be unusual to find the 80/20 rule at work here with 20% of your customers generating 80% of your revenue.  It may even make sense to totally ignore the unproductive segments of your customers but you must be confident of your numbers.

Once you have identified your high value segment(s) you then spend the majority of your customer retention budget on them.  Due to the value of this segment it can make good business sense to build a personal relationship with them.  With the advent of the internet a lot of customers even high spending ones may only interact with your business via your website.  Build a relationship on the real world.  An excellent way of enforcing the quality of the relationship is to run company or corporate events.  Corporate golf days are good examples of such events and the associated promotional golf gifts and personalised golf items that a business gives out to the invited customers can be branded in a way that resonates with the business’ ideals.   And it is those ideals that the business hopes will keep those customers close to the fold well into the future.

Leading at Light Speed is an excellent leadership book by Eric Douglas showing you step-by-step how to implement 10 Quantum Leaps that build trust, spark innovation, and create a high-performing organization. Chapter 2, titled Sharpen the Focus, illustrates Eric Douglas’ idea of Niche Marketing Strategies.

In my office I have a comic that shows one of many reasons to continually sharpen the focus. The cartoon shows a large fishing net. A very large fish swims on one side of the net. On the other side swim a school of small fish. There is a caption that say: ” “Attention all fish: How to escape being trapped by a net: “Either get so big you can bust the net, or stay small so you can swim right through.” What does this teach us? It’s dangerous to be a medium-sized fish.

Niche and Grow Rich is a book that illustrates how online e-commerce has created an explosion in small, niche businesses. The authors depict an individual who has made an excellent living selling unicycles over the internet. They mention the large number of online jewelry sales- referred to as “digital gypsies.” Whether you have an interest in garden railroads or traveling by barge through France, there’s a niche company (or several of them) to serve you.

1. It can start small and stay small while maintaining an attractive profit margin.
2. Because of its size, it can adapt quickly to changes in the market and offer cutting-edge services and products that a larger competitor cannot.
3. Niche companies can be excellent opportunities for investors who want to combine several niche players, therefore providing the possibility for a handsome financial gain for the founder-owners.

But there are downsides to niche companies, too. Personality conflicts can wreak havoc on small companies. With undefined business processes, finding the right people to sustain the business after the founder leaves can be expensive. Too little objective marketing data can cause a company to become vulnerable to shifts in consumer taste. I’m also struck by the fact that if all you’re doing is selling unicycles, you’d better love unicycling.

Take this free work survey to see if your organization practices the 10 Quantum Leaps of high-performing organizations.

Community relations methods are employed to promote your business interest to obtain the community and also to get prospective users. It is easy to use many community relations tactics to mention your online business into the press and also to establish awareness of one’s brand. A preparing is required to provide achievement to your enterprise together with other ways. You need to be cautious though dealing with and executing the prepare. These systems are an fundamental element in your advertising and marketing with the firm.

This is a great site for finding PR firms

Press Releases

Press releases are utilized to provide details utilizing media. The aim of press discharge should be to publish the details with the enterprise and thereby growing the achieve of this small business towards prospects. Press launch is 1 of crucial systems put to use for communication these kinds of as sending messages or inviting the media to some press conference belonging to the enterprise. The vast majority of the instances, recent happenings also come to be the topic on the press launch.

PR agencies in Baltimore

Go together with media trends

It is easy to connect your business interest and present-day gatherings in information nearly all of the occasions. Should you can obtain any these kinds of happenings or information, it is possible to fax, e-mail or call the information desk to tell them about your products along with the causes for providing material to their viewers. To recognize the ongoing information or situations, you really have to observe neighborhood information and take note of it. Identify the information which can be connected to your business interest. After you possess the concept, it is possible to set up an outline of all of the points with regards to your product. Communicate your thoughts plainly and speak intelligently.

Read about some of the Memphis PR firms here

Publish your enterprise in research engine listings

Once developing an outline from the story of your company, publish it in the world wide web. Certainly not neglect to consist of the internet address within the enterprise. You may get extra exposure once you add even more backlinks on your website. Producing hyperlinks via on the web will make your corporation thriving. If your corporation doesn’t get interest like that of this competitor, then discover how your competitor is creating back links.

Publishing posts

A magazine review reaches additional folks than an advertisement. An review will provide data than an advertisement. Very carefully choose a publication that may fulfill your specific market. For getting improved final results in your promotion of this organization, you may depend on trade publications as these publications are specific to particular target audience you would like to get to. Define your expertise while in the content to attract would-be buyers.

Sustain the contacts

Locate the people today you need to get in touch with and make a list of them. You need to be private by remembering the names of this capability prospects. Clarify your organization details for those that are fascinated.

Purpose sheet

Just after creating a strategy, organize it over a feature sheet which must include the particulars of points being performed. Allot time per event and print it out within the proper order. Verify the progress within your prepare regularly. Provide a completion date per approach.

Community relations practices really should define your objectives obviously. It needs to be properly researched and beneficial to attain online business objectives.

here at  Technology New we love technology, especially web technology. We use it every day and more so at our Ohio website design company.

Technology is changing and evolving at such a fast rate these days.  A lot has changed since my early days online. When I began my adventures in web design the technology was new and exciting.  In fact, back then our vocabulary did not even includes words like “Twitter” and “Facebook. Kinda weird as I think about it.  Just the other day we lost our Internet connection due to an outage. I did not know what to do with myself! The outage lasted one entire day. These days we just can’t live without the web.   How dependent we have become!   What is fun to see is how technology is merging together to create even more creative and useful technology. Now connect your email marketing to you social media tools. Now technology that all used to stand on there own are being brought or connected to bring exciting technology that is new and beneficial to those who use them. It will really be exciting to see where we go from here and what tools we will have to be more productive business owners and web designers. 

Don’t worry, I am getting to my point. I apologize for the long intro.  Today we want to look at some of the strengths of adding social media technology to your new marketing strategy. While some would question the value of such a strategy and to an extent we would agree with some of the criticisms, but we are not ready to throw the baby out the the bath water just yet. There are some great reasons to look to this technology as a new marketing approach and why we think you will be missing the boat if you neglect this technology. If this technology is new to you hopefully this article will shed some light for you. It is worth your time looking into. So here are our list of reasons.

1. It is free

Words we all like to hear!  We all like free. And in the expensive place of advertising we all like to get some advertising for free. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Myspace, and many others are free. All it takes is just a few minutes of your time. Who can pass up free!

2. Really fast results

Search Engine Optimization and getting your website ranked well so that others can find it takes time.  It can take months. Social media provides an instant way to get your brand in front of thousands of people.  Think about the friends you already have on Facebook. That right there is a good starting place. When we signed up for Twitter and made our first couple of Tweets we got followers. Now with Google indexing Tweets in real time that adds even more power.

3. Will bring you more inbound links

As you begin to expand out across all the social media websites you will begin to see more and more links pointing back to your website. These are called “inbound links” and the search engines love seeing these. What this tells the search engines is that your website is popular and relevant. The more inbound links the more relevant your website is and the better the search engines will rank you. We all want to be ranked well. This is how people find us.

4. Choices abound

Options abound!  More and more social media websites pop up everyday. And so many of them are really good and should be utilized.  While the technology is new the sites and options are growing like wildfire. Bookmarking websites, news sites, networking sites, and many others. There are even niche websites out there that may fit right into your product or service offering. 

5. Time is the name of the game

Like all new things it takes time to get up and running and used to all the ins and outs.  Don’t over do it, which can be easy to do as there are so many options out there. You will go crazy!  Choose one or two and get to know those really well and then move on to maybe a couple more once you have a handle on things.  Each social media option will be a little different than the one before. Stay with it though because overall these website are not very hard to figure out and you will be up and running in no time at all. It takes time and effort and you will need to stay devoted to it. But it is worth it.

6. The time commitment is not like you think

More and more these social media websites are becoming more connected. This means that you can post your content on one and it will automatically post to the others. This is a huge time saver. You really don’t need to spend hours each day at this. Just a few minute each day will go a very long way in helping you get the word out about your company or organization.

7. Social is now and the future

Social media technology, while fairly new, is not something to shake your head at. It is growing rapidly. It is the new form of advertising and it is here to stay and grow. If you ignore it you could be loosing out on a lot of free advertising potential. Don’t miss what this technology can and will bring to your marketing success.  

Press releases have done great things for celebrities, new companies, old companies, and even politicians throughout the age of paper and ink. These press releases sent out information in a controlled and positive manner to make the person or company look his best. Many companies are currently using this same strategy in the online universe, and are making great progress with it. I have written this page to give you more details on press releases and how they can bring you more visitors.

A press release is basically an advertisement or announcement letting the world know more about you, your product, your service, or your company. You can write your announcement yourself, or you can have an expert writer put one together for you.

Many professional seo packages will offer to write and distribute a well crafted press release for you. If you do decide to go with the professional route, just make sure you give them some guidance on what you would like promoted. The press release written on the product you are not selling anymore will not help you.

When writing these announcements yourself, make sure you clearly identify what you are trying to accomplish with your press release before starting. Once you’ve identified what you want to gain, it will be much easier to craft your release in a way that captures it.

Seo purposes should be considered when identifying your objectives. You’ll want to decide on 2 or 3 key words to target in your press release. Remember that these releases may end up going to thousands of other sites and RSS feeds. These press releases may also be picked up by other web masters to place on their websites. You’ll want to capitalize on all of this exposure by maximizing your keyword instances on the web.

Next, determine where to submit your press release. You will want to submit it to as many places as you possibly can. The more exposure you get, the better. This can be done through the many free press release sites, through the payed press release sites, or both.

Ensuring that you make use of the correct key words is the most critical part of the release. Sites that do not let you put your link in html form will be a waste of time as far as link building goes. Make sure that you can submit an active link with keyword anchor text. Using keywords will help with your pageranking and search engine optimization strategies.

Press releases can be a very powerful tool in your seo tool box. Ensure that you use them wisely and your sites will benefit tremendously. However, use them foolishly and you will end up wasting time without providing any value to you or your readers.

Thanks for reviewing this page on writing and submitting press releases. I hope this will make the writing process easier for you. If you found this article useful, please book mark this page and link back to it where ever you see fit.