Phone support lines, smoke-free laws, higher cigarette taxes help smokers quit

Phone support lines, smoke-free laws, higher cigarette taxes help smokers quit
ne in five Americans still smoke, but whether they are able to quit may depend on where they live.

Read more on Bradenton Herald

WVU Proves to be Economy Powerhouse, With Help From Taxpayers

WVU Proves to be Economy Powerhouse, With Help From Taxpayers
A study concludes that West Virginia University and its affiliates generate $40 for the state economy for every dollar provided by the state Legislature.

Read more on WSAZ NewsChannel 3 West Virginia

How A VoIP Business Phone System Can Help Your Business Succeed

Business communications are changing all the time and in this article we look at how a VOIP Business Phone System can change your business’ method of communication, not only with clients or customers but also with staff and how this will help your efficiency and bottom line.

Improved Efficiency = A Better Business

Are you finding that you are getting left behind behind other businesses in your field by not having the same level of communications that they have?

Then a VOIP business phone system could be just what you need. A VOIP business phone system will help you overcome many of the communication problems that you might be seeing with your current phone lines or phone communications systems.

You can make phone calls from your computer, or from the internet using VOIP technology and because it will be more efficient than your current system you will soon find that it is an indispensable piece of equipment in your business.

Lets look at how VOIP can help your business

Improve Morale and Lower Costs with an Improved Internal Communication system

With a VOIP Business Phone System you can:

· Link all of your business computers together

· Talk to your employees using your computers whether they are in your office or at a remote location

· Enable phone calls between land line and cell phones ensuring you can always be in touch

· Hold internal business meetings over the internet – no need to all travel to the same location

Increase Business with an Improved Customer Communication System

With a VOIP Business Phone System you can:

· Set up a place for customers to call and allow important clients access both to your business and your employees

· Hold client business meetings over the internet – no need to all travel to the same location

So, you can see how a VOIP Business System will benefit your company with the most up to date communication system there is. There are many different levels of system to choose from and you will be able to find one that suits you and your company.

Outsourced Sales – How an Outsourced Sales Company Can Help your Small Businesses Grow

Hiring an outsourced sales company can be an ideal strategy for small businesses seeking to grow. Many companies today are growing as “virtual corporations”, choosing to outsource many functions within their business including choosing to outsource sales.

From web services to manufacturers, the decision to outsource sales often comes down to four core reasons:

1. Conserve capital

2. Reduce risk

3. Lower management overhead

4. Enjoy your business more

This article examines each of these reasons to explore how you can outsource sales to grow your small business.

Conserve capital

Hiring sales people can be one of the most high-risk and costly experiences for any small business. Recruitment costs, which can be up to 30% of the annual salary package, take a large slice of cash, plus other up-front costs including equipment and company car. For many small businesses, and particularly start-ups, the cost to get into the game can be prohibitive.

Rather than committing large capital sums to hire in-house people, business owners can access an outsourced sales resource through a specialist outsourced sales company.

An outsourced sales consultant will be provided on a flexible contract to fit with your budget, and on a results-focused model that includes commissions. The outsourced sales agent will already have their own vehicle and equipment (as they’re effectively self-employed) and there will be absolutely no recruitment fee.

This means that you can engage an outsourced sales consultant for between 3 to 6 months before you exceed the up-front costs you would have paid to a recruitment agency.

Reduce risk

In addition to saving huge up-front recruitment fees, many small businesses choose to outsource sales to reduce their risk. Getting a sales hire wrong can be a very costly mistake. It’s not just the wasted recruitment fees and employment costs; failure in hiring the right sales person can lose customers and destroy reputations.

By working with an outsourced sales company, you can engage with an outsourced sales consultant on a flexible, pilot basis. This could be a small project to see how things go before you scale up the operations, with the ability to terminate the relationship (without any employer obligations) at short notice.

For a small business, the ability to reduce risk by using an outsourced sales company is a big attraction.

Lower Management Overhead

For business owners without experience of running a sales team, using an outsourced sales company will dramatically lower your management overhead.

Why?

Outsourced sales consultants are not employees, they are self-employed. An outsourced sales company has its focused on delivering results; it’s their business model after all.

Rather than chasing employed sales people to find where they are, developing processes to control their activities, and then wondering why they are not performing – you contract out the entire management overhead to your outsourced sales company.

Your outsourced sales company will have its own reporting systems, CRM, sales processes, etc. They will be experienced at sales operations and bring many years of sales management expertise to the table.

Enjoy your business more

This brings us to the final compelling reason why small business owners choose to outsource their sales.

It may be heretical to state, by not every company wants to be (or can be) a global market leader. Some entrepreneurs want to build a profitable business that enables them to enjoy a particular lifestyle.

Even business owners with greater ambitions want to grow at a pace that they can control or focus on the aspect of their business that they enjoy.

Often, the most attractive reason to partner with an outsourced sales company is that you just don’t want to “do sales”. Even if you enjoy selling, the whole aspect of prospecting and managing the sales process may leave you cold.

If this is the case, finding an outsourced sales company that can take your business and run with it is the best solution. Outsourced sales companies exist to sell. They are run by people who will look at your business and see an opportunity to make money.

Many entrepreneurs find this liberating as they can get back to what they enjoy, be that product design, technical development, or whatever, and leave the sales to someone else.

If you are a small business owner or start-up entrepreneur looking to grow your business without the costs, risk and hassle of hiring your own sales people, partnering with an outsourced sales company can be the answer you are looking for.

Use A Funded Proposal Technique To Help Your Internet Home Business

Getting people to join your network opportunity before you run out of money to promote it can be a tough problem for newbie Internet home business owners. Many find that it costs more to get people to join their systems than they receive in commissions generated by that new affiliate. This is especially the case at the beginning of a network marketer’s career.

What is worse, the initial delight at finding a prospect who joins your program can be dashed when that person does nothing and drops out after just one or two months. It can be very discouraging to have to start to grow and then suddenly shrink.

Many people who try network marketing never get further than this first step. Yet it is a well-known fact that there are others who do successfully build up active sales teams, and earn a very good income on both sales of products, and commissions generated from the activity of their downline.

So what can you do to improve your chances of getting into the successful second group? How can you keep yourself going until your network marketing program starts to generate a large income for you?

Well, for one thing, it is much easier to recruit affiliates to your system when you have already warmed up your prospects and generated an initial sale from them. It is a fact in any field of marketing that the first sale is always the most difficult to get. So it would make sense for network marketers to work out a way to generate an initial sale before they introduce their network marketing business proposal to the prospect.

That is exactly how a “funded proposal” system works. With a funded proposal system, a low-cost but useful product or service is promoted first. The prospect is only introduced to the network marketing business after a purchase of the initial product has been made.

This serves two purposes.

1. It warms up the prospect of the idea that you are a trustworthy product or service provider.

2. It provides you with some upfront income that you can use to fund your main business.

There are many types of funded proposal systems available today. Indeed, a number of very clever Internet marketers have taken the funded proposal concept and turned it into a complete online business system in its own right.

Funded proposal systems offer Internet home business owners a number of business-building services for a low one-time or monthly fee.

When you join a funded proposal system, you will receive a standard website and be able to add your own network marketing or affiliate marketing links to it. Then, instead of promoting your all of your different products and services, you can simply promote the funded proposal system via a single link or splash page.

Now, every time somebody joins through your link you will earn a small commission from the system, and the new member will be introduced to all your links and encouraged to sign up to them so as to be able to promote them on his or her own affiliate funnel system.

A professional affiliate funnel system will always give the customer the choice of adding his or her own links to the system, or simply joining the downline of the affiliate through whose link he or she joined.

Many people have found that it is much easier to work with the funded proposal system to earn some cash on the front end, and sell their main business on the backend to prospects who join the system. It is certainly an intelligent way of promoting any online business as it gives you far more opportunities to make money and a higher probability of making sales as much of your selling is to a warm market.

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