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A business advisor once gave me a great piece of advice:

“Any time you read a magazine, newspaper, journal, etc., always ask yourself ‘Who do I know that could benefit from this information?’ Cut out the article and send it along to that person with a little personal note.”

What great advice. Just asking the question “Who could benefit?” puts you in a nurturing mindset. Trust me - your contacts will not soon forget that you thought of them and took the time to send a personal note.

I try to clip an article and send along to a friend at least once per week. It’s really pretty easy to do, and again, it sets you apart. Give it a try for six months and see the results for yourself.

Other great blog posts having to do with nurturing techniques:

John Jantsch Duct Tape Marketing - Add a 2 x 12 to your foundation

Keith Ferrazzi - Finding your Currency

Geof Morris - Thoughts on Never Eat Alone

At Promethius, we’ve done a whole lot of searching for ideas to improve our service and our customers’ experience. After much experimentation and testing, I feel very confident recommending these tools to any business manager:

1. Basecamp - This very intuitive project-management software by 37signals is a very affordable way to immediately gain control over multiple projects and staff members. It even has restricted login functionality for clients as well.
2. Zoho CRM - One of the great stable of products coming out of Zoho. It’s free for up to three users and is quite affordable as you add more users.
3. Netvibes - If you do one thing this quarter, get netvibes and learn how to use it! A savvy manager will make it his browser Home page and will fill it with relevant RSS feeds, bookmarks, gmail and so much more.
4. Omnidrive - This universal web storage platform lets you easily store, access and share files of any size over the web.
5. Google Analytics - Google is at it again with its great web stats tool. Just drop a little code behind each page of your website and you’re off to the races. This tool is especially good if you are running an Adwords campaign.

Why should you worry about bettering your managerial skills? Ron over at Buzzoodle had a great post yesterday about why this should be your number one concern!

Tony

Tony Valle
Promethius Consulting, LLC

If you haven’t guessed the reference, I’m currently reading Seth’s very enjoyable book Purple Cow. He makes the very convincing argument that you have to be absolutely remarkable to gain lasting success in today’s market.

Now I’m seeing everything through purple glasses, which brings me to the real topic of my post:

I made a minor post the other day suggesting Zoho Polls for companies wanting to get feedback from their customers. Almost immediately I received a comment from someone at Zoho thanking me for suggesting their company. That was nice… and kind of unusual.
Then I got to thinking. I had posted to my MySpace blog several months ago a brief comment about my very positive experience with Zoho CRM (which I still use to this day). A Zoho intern politely commented with thanks in that case as well.

What in the world?!?! It seems clear to me now that Zoho at least keeps a very close eye on the “blogosphere” to see what is being said about them, which is surely more that many companies can say. But they apparently go much further than that. They participate promptly in other people’s blogs.

Let’s face it - my blog isn’t anywhere near the top of the charts yet, but the Zoho staff noticed and took action right away. That’s impressive. That’s unique. That might even be purple. It means a lot to a blogger, and I’m sure they understand that.

When is the last time that Microsoft commented on YOUR blog? Don’t hold your breath. What’s sad is it doesn’t have to be that way. They surely have the resources to go the extra mile, probably to the tune of at least 100 support staffers to every 1 Zoho staffer. (Just a guess).

To further test my hypothesis, I looked up some recent blog posts relating to Zoho:

Zoho makes good… (Zoho commented back)

Lightweight project management (Zoho commented back)

Kathy on success and management (Zoho commented back)

To be fair, I did find some blog posts relating to Zoho that didn’t contain replies from the company, but many of them looked to me to be more “formal” reviews of the company. I could imagine that they might be afraid of appearing overanxious with a “serious” review site.

All-in-all these guys are to be commended. I know I wouldn’t be writing this if their software wasn’t fairly exceptional as well, but it just excites me to see that these guys haven’t stopped at just having great products. They appear to me to be attempting to be a great company.

So here is my question to you and to myself: What three things could we be doing today to absolutely set ourselves and our organizations apart from all others?

Every business needs to know how its customers are feeling. It’s always easy to assume that if customers aren’t contacting you to complain, then they aren’t complaining or unhappy. Periodic surveys are an easy way to uncover customer service problems before they get out of hand and cost you dearly.

Clever company ZOHO has a free survey tool that will do the trick. Be up front and tell your clients that their participation helps you provide better service.

If you like their survey tool, check out several other great (and mostly free or very inexpensive) tools by ZOHO.