Printed Mouse Mats Help In Achieving Business Objectives

Maintaining business relations with your clients and business associates can take you to success easily. It helps you to grow and expand your business and achieve your business objectives easily. Whether your business objective is related to growth or expansion, or aims at profit maximisation, the printed mouse mats can help you to achieve those aims easily and efficiently.

Use them to advertise your brand and reach out to the target consumers. This would help them to know about the brand and the products or services provided by it. This in turn would attract them to your brand and help you to get good profits. The free promotional mouse mats are one of the most popular promotional items as they are economical and are one of the most practical promotional gifts. Almost everyone owns a personal computer these days and thus, these promotional mouse mats are very useful to everyone.

They can be a part of your advertisement campaigns and can be used as promotional giveaways so that the target consumers are impressed with it. This helps in creating brand awareness also and promotes your brand efficiently. They are quite good for brand retention and remind everyone about your organisation constantly. The brand name, business logo and additional details are given on these printed mouse mats which are visible to all and help in advertising it. They can easily help you to build a good brand reputation and achieve your business objectives.

The promotional mouse mats are the best promotional products that can be used as corporate gifts. You can use these printed mouse mats as special gifts for your clients and business associates. Gift these promotional products on special events and occasions which would please the receivers and get you profitable business deals in the future. These promotional items can help you to achieve your business objectives easily and require very little investment. These promotional gifts can be gifted to your employees also. Whenever they would deal with clients, the client would see these promotional mouse mats and would get a good impression. Such personalised promotional products make your company appear more professional and can build the goodwill of the same.

Use printed mouse mats to suit your brand image. It should remind the users of your brand and then only it would help you to attain your business objectives. The quality of the promotional mouse mats also play a major role in influencing the consumers and in building the goodwill of the company.

Online you can find a massive collection of them that can help you to attain your business objectives efficiently. Log on to the website to select any stylish and attractive mouse mats that can be used as promotional gifts and can be given to the target clients and consumers.

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Aligning Channel Program Goals to Overall Business Objectives

Like a good spring cleaning, an economic downturn presents an excellent opportunity to thoroughly reassess and, if necessary, retool existing channel programs. But be careful! Unlike sorting through items in your basement or garage and placing them in junk or "keeper" piles, judgment calls regarding channel programs and partnerships are more complex than the question "Should I Stay or Should I Go?" posed by The Clash in a popular 1980s tune.

Underperforming distribution channels are a major source of frustration, even though lagging sales during difficult times are slightly easier to understand (but not accept). Before grading your partners' performance, and certainly before you recklessly wield your red pen signifying their failure, take a deep breath and ask yourself the first of many questions: "What was I hoping to achieve through this channel program?"

While the answer(s) may be highly predictable,-such as, attaining steady incremental revenue, increasing geographic coverage, reaching new groups of end users, or simply achieving greater market coverage without hiring additional internal staff-these objective are essential elements to an effective assessment and possible retooling of your channel program.

Don't stop there. You may need to convene an all-inclusive meeting of the minds, encouraging open and frank discussion among the top executives and sales personnel from your own company and your channel partners. Just as importantly, you must poll a full spectrum of end-users, from your best, longest standing customers to fledgling buyers who require nurturing to grow.

Only after everybody weighs in will you be able to accurately and objectively assess original and existing business objectives and determine whether your channel program needs to change-and how. In addition to synergies with your overall business objectives, ask yourself and your partners the following:

o What is the justification for your existing channel program? Has it needlessly deviated from its original intention or goal? Or have changes in your business or the overall economy dictated change?

o Are effective yardsticks in place to gauge your program's success? What changes must you make to achieve more meaningful and accurate measurement?

o Apart from increased product and service sales, what behaviors are you trying to inspire among your channel partners? Are the carrots you provide enticing enough? Or are they snack-sized?

o Is your product and service suite updated and in demand?

o Do you have a channel program execution strategy firmly tied to your overall business objectives?

There's no question your channel program and your partners are the keys to your organization's success. Your encouragement of an open, all-partner dialogue will clear any misconceptions or misunderstandings, providing a level of satisfaction and mutual benefit that far outweigh the temporary good feelings evoked by an uncluttered garage or basement.

What is a Marketing Strategy and Why Your Business Should Have One

In this article I will cover off the basics of developing your marketing strategy and how you can regularly check back on it to make sure you are on track.

Ideally a marketing strategy runs annually but you can start this process at any point in time. Firstly make a realistic set of business objectives based on past performance, budget constraints and competitor analysis. What are you hoping to achieve in the upcoming twelve months. How much can you afford to invest and what resources do you have in place to achieve them.

The best way to get your staff to buy into your strategy is to involve them in developing it. Have a specific time set aside to brainstorm new ways to market to your customers and bring along customer research to the session. It's really important that you are listening to what your customers are saying as they are your business effectively.

Once you have your business objectives try and come up with up to five key strategic objectives. These should be measurable, time bound and ultimately focus on your customers or prospects. For example one business objective might be to increase sales by 10%. One strategy could therefore be to focus more energy on a specific niche which you know is profitable. Another might be to launch a new marketing channel to acquire new customers through. At this point you should not be thinking tactically and trying to implement solutions. Try and think more high level than executing campaigns.

Work through your objectives until you have agreed an overall strategy of how you will achieve them. Bear in mind that this should be a plan to keep you on track so try not to have too many objectives. All your activity going forward should link directly into one of these strategic objectives.

The next stage will be to build a marketing plan which will link into the marketing strategy. The marketing plan lays down the tactical activity which you will carry out in order to achieve the business objectives and that link into the marketing strategy. For example if you have agreed to launch a new sales channel, you need to document the launch date, the marketing mix and budget. It is beneficial to have an annual marketing plan but you can start this at any point in time.

Spend time developing your marketing strategy and build a solid document for everyone to refer to. This way everyone knows what you are trying to achieve as a business and how you are going to achieve it. It should ensure that you innovate and stay in line or ahead of your competition rather than being reactive. Present the marketing strategy to all the staff within your business so they know where you are heading and they can buy into it. Make sure everyone has a copy to refer back to through the year.

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How Do I Implement Business Intelligence? (Part Two - Get to Know the Kitchen)

Characterize the Environment

The following list outlines the items and issues to cover in attempting to characterize the environment within which your challenge is encapsulated.

Characterize the Environment
Organizational Scope
Project Sponsorship
Business Context
Business Objectives
Current Data Landscape
Solution Objectives
Technical Environment
Resources
Funding

The topics outlined above may not all be necessary for some smaller organizations and in any case, it is not recommended to take a heavy approach to most of these items. All that is required is that they be given some thought and be documented if there is any useful information to be captured.

Organizational Scope

It may be that you are launching a BI initiative that is intended to eventually serve the entire organization. Titles like 'Enterprise Data Warehouse' (EDW) and 'Corporate Information Factory' (CIF) have frequently been given to such initiatives.

On the other hand, it may be that only a subset of your organization is the intended user and customer of the product. A division of your company, or possibly even a single department.

An all-too-common practice has been the creation of Data Marts an a virtually ad-hoc basis, resulting in an unknown and uncontrolled proliferation of such entities. It was recently published that Hewlett Packard launched an offensive against such a proliferation when it was discovered that there were more than 750 Data Marts in existence across the organization. This is when Business Intelligence could start to lose its true intended purpose.

Capturing the details of the organizational scope of your BI Initiative will serve to define the limits of the project.

Project Sponsorship

Any project needs to have its sponsors well defined. It is a good strategy to encourage a vibrant relationship between the sponsors and the delivery team. Record who they are and work on that relationship. If you are the sponsor then be prepared to maintain close contact and involvement with the person or team implementing your BI solution.

Business Context

Within the organization that is sponsoring or requesting a BI facility, there may any number of business processes, databases, application systems and sub-organizations. Take time to make a record of those for which the solution is to relevant, either as data sources or expected areas of enhancement.

Business Objectives

Why do we need a BI solution? Someone in the organization came to the conclusion that this would be beneficial. Someone is aware that the solution will meet one or more needs. What are those needs? What does that person or group expect to achieve? In what way will their aspirations be met? They must have a reason, or many reasons, perhaps for going ahead. Those reasons will indicate and help crystallize the objectives of the BI Initiative.

Current Data Landscape

Now that we have organizational scope, project sponsors, a business context and objectives, we should try to define the data sources that need to be leveraged in order to provide the candidate information from which some intelligent business decisions can be derived.

At this level it is sufficient to speak of this in terms of databases or applications or functional areas covered by an application.

Additional information about the data sources should be collected. How easy will it be to learn about the data source? Is it well documented? Are there still people available who developed, maintained or supported the database that can contribute inside knowledge? Is the source 'out-of-bounds'? Can we only obtain data from it under some constraint, such as time, frequency, security policy, etc.?

Solution Objectives

The information gathered so far will help direct your efforts and maintain control over scope, cost and delivery aspects of the project. They may not, however, define everything we might be able to learn about the nature of the target solution. It is possible that corporate or IT policy may also impact the size and scope of the project.

It is possible that technical limitations exist or resource availability limitations exist. There may even be limits on funding that prevent all the business objectives from being pursued all at once.

Sometimes, it makes sense to extend the scope a little because the effort of visiting one or more data sources just to obtain the requested data me be wasting an opportunity to pull more useful (but not yet requested) data, This is a very important consideration because returning to the same source later is far more expensive than picking up data now that may even be in adjacent columns to that which we have come looking for. This is one area where an experienced Dimensional Modeler is able to point to 'easy gains' that could soon satisfy a growing appetite for analytic data.

Technical Environment

It will be much easier to estimate the size of the project if we know something about the challenges it may present. One such challenge is dealing with the issues surrounding the way the data is currently hosted. Is it all in the same kind of database? Is it all in the same location? Are there common standards in place governing naming conventions, data type usage, data structure designs, etc?

Data is not always sitting in a database, nor is it always easily accessible. Sometimes it is necessary to access data that has already been extracted from its original source and stored somewhere else. It may be necessary to reuse the data feed of such a transfer of data from the destination. This can introduce serious issues of data reliability and stability. if the second destination has itself transformed the data or if the data has been summarized to a higher level of granularity or even stored as a periodic snapshot instead of at an atomic level, there will be issues.

Resources

Besides the need for resources on the BI project, there is often the need to call on the help of others outside the project. The lack of such resources, or limitations on their availability can cause problems for the BI Initiative.

Funding

Large companies tend to be able to fund large projects. Conversely, small companies cannot. However, outside of this fact, there is a need to consider whether a large project is actually the most effective approach to BI. Many initiatives have come to grief because the challenges involved, compounded by the inherent difficulty of coordinating large scale projects, leading to massive over-runs and wasted time.

One of the key areas for devastating misjudgments is that in which organizations inexperienced in DW and BI take on projects that are too large and too complex for their relatively inexperienced team.

Regardless of whether funding is easily obtained or not, it is strongly recommended that some kind of 'pilot project' be initiated first, to gain experience and confidence in dealing with the new technologies involved. Then after an initial smaller success, the team (or individual, as is often the case) can move on to take more territory.

Key to success is knowing how much to attempt rather than how much to fund.

Establish a Roadmap

The mode under which the BI Initiative will be conducted is the most important consideration at the start of the project.

Historically, most software application development projects followed a phased plan that was essentially serial in nature. Often referred to as 'waterfall model' processes, these were so named because the product of the first phase 'poured' into the second phase, the second into the third and so on, regardless of the name or purpose of each phase.

Eventually, it became obvious that this approach could be responsible for many of the ills that plagued such projects. The fact that any given phase is dependent entirely on the quality, appropriateness and timeliness of the products of its predecessor meant that any single phase had the potential of setting the limit on the overall project success, of being the weakest link.

Furthermore, the very act of feeding one phase with the documented results of another could introduce defects due to the misunderstandings, ambiguities, lack of clarity, etc., resulting from this form of communication. Surprisingly, the creators of one phase's deliverable were often not available for consultation with the recipients of their efforts in the next phase. Many weaker processes did not mandate a review (or quality gate) at the end of each phase.

Yet another issue with Waterfall models is that the project is not finished until all phases are complete. As this could extend into years, it would be necessary to 'freeze' requirements until the project was complete. Business changes would have to go unattended to because interrupting this process was too disruptive to be tolerated. Also, any error in delivering against the original requirements may not come to light until the very end of the string of phases, when it is then the most expensive to repair.

Evolving the Solution

Avoiding all the above issues is not a trivial task. Splitting the project into 'waves' is sometimes attempted to reduce the work going through the sequence of phases and therefore reducing the time frame of each wave is one, often used approach for very large projects. However, this does not remove the problem-causing imperfections of waterfall models, only 'divides' in order to 'conquer' them.

The approach that often produces the most successful result is that of 'Iterative' development, or prototyping. The main aim in this method is to work as quickly as possible toward a reduced end-product but one which can still be used, or at least, demonstrated.

Its advantages are: a quicker end point at which the product can be evaluated; an opportunity to learn from mistakes, misunderstandings or unseen challenges and the availability of a version of the solution that the sponsors can try out to see if their ideas were sound or in need of refinement. Indeed, the all-round learning process afforded by the first iteration is one of the strongest arguments for the approach. This takes us away from the need to 'get everything absolutely correct, at the first and only attempt.

The virtual impossibility of such an outcome with the waterfall model is certainly what leads to the creation of a 'Phase II' on most projects. Phase II may include new features but it usually includes a lot more in the way of 'rework' of the initial release.

Establishing a road-map for the project involves the decision to use the appropriate style of process and determining what to deliver by way of a prototype.

Dividing the project into two or more iterations offers many advantages if that option is available.

..to be continued in Part Three of 'How do I Implement Business Intelligence?'.

Developing a Plan For Your Home Business Blog

A home business blog can earn you a very good income provided you have taken the time to develop an effective strategy for marketing your business. The blogging business can be very demanding therefore it is essential that you establish your business objectives and marketing strategy early on.

The planning process when creating a blog for income earning purposes is extremely important and can be broken down into 5 simple steps. Let's have a look at the 5 steps you will need to take when planning your money making blog.

Determine Your Objectives

Here is where you 'get the ball rolling' and decide what it is you want to blog about and how you intend to get paid for your efforts. These are two HUGE decisions that could be the basis for several articles alone and should not be taken lightly. You must be sure that whatever you choose to blog about is something that will maintain your interest and enthusiasm while also being something people are willing to pay for.

You will also have several choices as to how you will want to set up your blogging business in order to be compensated for your efforts. You can promote affiliate products, create your own products and/or use AdSense on your site. You can even introduce a combination of any of these strategies. The list grows as to your selection possibilities and seems to be limited anymore only by your own imagination.

Reality Check

After you have established your objectives you will need to take an honest look at your decisions. You must determine if you have got the resources of time, skill, resolve and finances to move comfortably forward with your business objectives as they are.

Theme or Layout

When creating a blog this is probably the most enjoyable aspect for most people. This is where you will create the look and feel of your site. You will want to select an appropriate theme in accordance with your intended content. You will also want to arrange your site in a way that is comfortable to the visitor but yet reflects a certain professionalism for your business.

Content Development Strategy

To be successful in the blogging business you will need to frequently update the content on your site. This is what will attract new visitors to your blog while encouraging current subscribers to return. How will you manage or develop the content you will need to be successful at keeping your blog updated frequently? Will you author all your own content and from where will you get your information? If you intend to outsource this task do you have the reliable means and resources to do this?

What will be the 'tone' of your delivery, or the objective of your content? Do you plan to maintain a consistent 'angle' or perspective when presenting your content or is spontaneity more preferable for your style. These are all questions you will want to ask yourself and plan for ahead of time.

Posting Schedule

Oh yeah, remember that your content is what makes your blog successful and the more you update it the better for you and the readers. You need to decide the frequency of your updates and if you have got the resource of time to maintain the schedule that will be needed. This is very important so be realistic when considering this particular but very important aspect of your blog.

Planning your home business blog requires careful consideration in order to develop an effective strategy for marketing your business. Establishing your business objectives and marketing strategy is essential when creating a blog to give it a clearly defined purpose and direction. By carefully focusing on each of the 5 steps we reviewed above you will be giving yourself a solid foundation upon which to build your money making blog.