There has been significant debate on MaineBusiness about cold calling lately. Some are opposed, saying cold calling is a thing of the past and only hurts your chances of making quality sales. Others, however, consider cold calling an active part of a business sales strategy.

After college, I did a short stint as an outbound telephone salesperson selling oxygen regulators. I made nearly 100 calls a day and earned enough commission to live on. In the beginning, 100% of my calls were cold- right out of the iced-over phone book. Cold calling obviously still generates at least some sales, because people are gainfully employed as outbound telephone salespeople all over the world. The questions is, should cold calling be a part of your sales strategy?

While no one was looking, business and western culture in general underwent a paradigm shift. Business operates almost completely differently than it did 15 years ago, and drastically differently than it did even 5 years ago. This is thanks, in part, to the dramatic improvements in connectivity. Web 2.0 is now becoming a thing of the past as people are constantly finding new and better ways to leverage technology to grow business and increase sales.

In addition to the technological advances (and perhaps because of them), generational differences have now come into play. The baby boomers are retiring, while generation X is taking over the world of small business and many high positions in fortune 500 companies. Generation Y is also becoming thoroughly entrenched in the workforce and subtly planning a coup of the Xers. People of the younger generations buy on completely different principles than previous generations.

Finally, a gradual cultural shift to the postmodern era (and perhaps beyond) has caused much of western culture to think and behave differently with regard to business decisions. Now, more than ever, people want to relate to one another on a personal level. Lofty advertisements and product claims no longer work as consumers and businesses seek honesty and relevance.

Because of these shifts, it is necessary for us to evaluate all methods of a marketing strategy, and that includes cold calling. While certain old methods will continue to work for a while, we may soon see the end of marketing staples like television advertising, print advertising, and cold calling. Networks and relationships, like it or not, are taking over every form of push marketing we know and love.

Seth Godin, a leader in marketing in this new era, discourages cold calling, along with any other form of interruption marketing. He has heavily promoted permission marketing.

Jeff Gitomer, a master of sales both cold and warm, is now shifting his focus to making connections before a phone call or a visit.

Personally, I would not discourage anyone from cold calling if they are able to make sales and grow their business. However, I would encourage those same business owners to simultaneously make use of the methods of networking and relationships. As cold calling becomes less effective, increase the use of the other methods instead of clinging to something that is no longer beneficial.

Lastly, if you need business and have run out of contacts, pick up the phone and start dialing numbers. You can and will, at the very least, meet some new people! However you do it, make contact, find common interests, solve a problem for free, provide value, and watch them come to you for business.

Knowing that people around the globe are fighting with their QuickBooks files, I decided to give some help for those who have run into a seemingly insurmountable wall: file corruption. This information is also included in a downloadable article I wrote called, “Nine Things You Never Thought You Could Do With QuickBooks.” For the entire article, simply sign up for our newsletter, and get the link.

Sometimes files become corrupt. At one time or another, all of us have tried to open a file that gives an error that the file has become corrupt and is no longer openable. Some files are more important, and corruption has varying degrees of detriment. For example, if you were to attempt to open your QuickBooks file only to get an error, you will likely go through all five stages of grief. The thought of re-entering data from scratch may even be enough for you to give up on record keeping altogether! Technology has improved, and more things have become openly available to the general public. Data recovery is now a very real option for most corrupt QuickBooks files.

First of all, you may be able to actually get to the file yourself. Sometimes the pesky file wont open and that is really the only error- with no actual corruption present. The following steps will give you a fighter’s chance at getting to your file without even picking up the phone:

Hold down the Cntrl key and double click the “QuickBooks® icon”. This will allow you to open the QuickBooks® program without opening your company file. Next, open the “sample.qbw file”. On the Edit menu, click “preferences.” Go to “Desktop View” (on left), “My Preferences” tab, and then select “Don’t Save Desktop”. Click “OK.” In the Reminders preference, enter “My Preferences” and clear the “show reminders list” check. Click “OK”. On the file menu, choose “close company.” Then choose “open company.” Click your company file once. Then hold down the Alt key and click “OK.” If you have a password, release the alt key, enter your password, then hold down the alt key and click “OK.”

This process should open your company file. You can run verify or rebuild, or delete a
transaction. This may solve your problem.

The above solution doesn’t always work. So let’s move to a worst-case scenario: you haven’t backed up in months and your file will not open at all.

Your QuickBooks® file, the ‘companyname.qbw’ file on your computer, still likely contains most if not all the information it always did. The problem is the file has become corrupt and cannot be opened by conventional means. Someone has to get down to the raw information that the file contains. This type of information is called binary data. If a person is able to get to the binary data, software programs are available to restructure the data so it can be opened once again. Many companies offer this service, and they don’t need to be local. Simply Google® “ QuickBooks ® Data Recovery” to find companies that offer a deal that meets your needs. The going rate for the service is between $300 and $1,000, a seemingly small price to pay compared to the cost of trying to start from scratch using your internal staff or your bookkeeper.

There are many other errors that can be repaired. Errors in installation and upgrading, lost passwords, and other miscellaneous errors all have a solution. Pursue offers QuickBooks® file recovery for a flat fee of $500.

From here on out, though, back up your file frequently onto an external drive. Just to be safe, store a copy of the backup off-site. That way, you can always re-install QuickBooks and open your backup file.

I recently came across a great reminder from “Dan” not to stop sales travel. I have written before about why it is important not to cut your advertising budget during downturns in the economy. By the same token, a business should not cut any form of marketing just because they feel they cannot afford it.

Dan is careful to point out in the blog that businesses should always be cost conscious when it comes to traveling sales people. Lower-cost hotels, discount airfares, economy car rentals and other cost-saving decisions are always a good idea. Just because you are fat with cash doesn’t mean you should stay at a five star resort, and just because you are cash poor doesn’t mean you should cut the whole program.

Dan’s logic is sound, but just like him I hear of businesses large and small doing the same thing. People who are doing sales for your company will understand that money is tight. They may even go the extra mile to attempt to save the company money. No business owner should tie one arm behind the backs of the very people keeping them in business.

While Dan writes mostly about travel around the country and the world, it brings up another point for those businesses that stay fairly local. What is your business trying to cut that has been a part of your overall sales strategy but now you feel you cannot afford?

• Memberships in trade organizations
• Booths at trade shows
• Dinners/lunches with clients
• Client visits

Be careful not to do things just because you have always done them. The point here, though, is that is you have learned some effective marketing and sales techniques for your business, don’t cut them! Cut wherever else you absolutely have to, but not in the marketing of your products and services. Let the big businesses make dumb blanket decisions like “no more sales travel” or “no more free trade organization memberships.” As small businesses, we don’t have to make blanket decisions. We can look at where our money is going and what the return on that money is. Decisions about sales and marketing can and should be made on an individual basis.

Below is a great example of what a “face to face” sales visit can allow you to achieve.

Today is the 15th of the month. If you own a business, your payroll taxes for last month are due today. What I am hearing and seeing now, more than ever, is that not all small business owners will be headed to the bank to make that payment. In fact, some businesses haven’t paid their payroll taxes in many months.

The reason for this is obvious. When money gets tighter and tighter, certain bills are the first to go unpaid. Generally, the bills that go unpaid are those with no immediate consequences. For example, if you failed to pay office rent or a product vendor, serious repercussions would come within days or weeks. With the government, it can take a few months before they start getting aggressive about collections. However, unlike other vendors, the IRS has the power to actually completely shut your business down- the most serious consequence your business will ever face.

Whenever I am in a difficult situation, rather than focusing on how or why it happened or what could/should have been done, I like to say, “here we are.” So, here we are. What can be done?

• First, and absolutely foremost- GET TO THE BANK TODAY TO PAY YOUR CURRENT TAXES DUE! You never know when the IRS is going to come knocking to shut your business down rather than let you fall further behind. From here on out, pay your taxes on the 15th of every month and stay current. The past due taxes will stay in the past for now.
• Second, reorganize your payroll into something you will be able to afford. This may mean cutting yours or some one else’s pay, letting go of an employee, or reducing other benefits. When you consider payroll, include the taxes in your calculations and give yourself some breathing room for when cash flow hits a bump in the road.
• Third, if you have an unreasonably high balance due, you may want to consider consulting with a lawyer and a CPA. They will be able to direct you to see if attempting a settlement is right for your situation. If your balance is not terribly high, simply begin paying it off right away.
• Finally, correct the problem so the government is first to get paid, not last. Because they have the power to shut your business down, and also because your employers are counting on you to pay their income tax withholdings, it is necessary to set up a trusted system. This may mean setting up an additional checking account and paying the account on the day payroll is run. The best solution, however, is to simply outsource your payroll to a third party. In the interest of full disclosure, my company offers a payroll service (only $59/month for up to 10 employees!).

Beyond my shameless promotion however, lie some fundemental advantages to using a payroll service:

• Payments to the government are guaranteed to be on time- or they pay the penalty.
• Less hassle because using a service is typically easier than managing it yourself or having an employee do it.
• More privacy for employees because payroll data will no longer be readily available in the office- giving the business owner more flexibility in pay rates for different employees.

The penalties are far too high to continue to be delinquent on payroll taxes. Do something about it today, and you wont regret it.

You can call the local IRS office (South Portland) at (207) 879-4683. Generally, the IRS will assign your case to your local office.

It’s no secret that small business owners, by and large, love to hate QuickBooks. While 80% of small businesses use Quickbooks over any other bookkeeping software, at any given moment many of those same business owners find themselves at their wit’s end when trying to close out a year’s worth of data. Frazzled, frustrated, and angry, they declare the problem to be QuickBooks itself.

As someone that has been involved in small business bookkeeping for some time, I can see why people say the things they do. What is the point of doing all the work to put your data into QuickBooks if it comes out wrong at the end of the year?

In an effort to set the records straight, I want to clear up some common QuickBooks myths:

1. Any small business owner can get started on QuickBooks. This myth is perpetuated by the Intuit company, maker of QuickBooks. They lead potential customers to believe that using QuickBooks is as simple as online banking. While the day to day use of the software is intended to be user friendly, the set up requires both knowledge of accounting principles and knowledge of the software. An improperly set up QuickBooks file is tantamount to building a lop-sided foundation for a house. It doesn’t matter if the rest is done correctly, the result will always be wrong. Consult a professional to get properly set up and get trained briefly, and your frustrations will be greatly diminished.
2. Most of my problems are because I haven’t upgraded. This is also propaganda straight from the horse’s mouth. The principles of accounting haven’t changed since QuickBooks was invented. It has always operated on debits and credits and always will. An upgrade will provide you with additional features and that is about it. An improperly set up file will still not work properly on the new version of the software. One issue to note, however, is that Intuit always eventually stops supporting older versions of the software, forcing you to upgrade if you want help from them. Since their help is so expense anyway, just call a local pro.
3. If I sign up for the payroll service, most of my issues will go away. Again, an improperly set up company file in QuickBooks will lead to more heartache, frustration, and fees from the federal government. The payroll service is automated; if the base data is wrong, the resulting payroll calculations will be wrong. While any payroll service will make your payroll life easier, you still have to ensure your company file is correct and current.
4. QuickBooks doesn’t work right for my type of business. Quickbooks is based on Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP). These principles are true across the board- construction, service, retail, non profit, partnership, etc. It will keep track of your money provided you enter the data correctly. Certain types of companies are more difficult and time consuming to get set up, but any company can make use of QuickBooks. As stated above, it is imperative that a professional set up the company file and train the user.
5. QuickBooks is my only option. Intuit definitely has the lion’s share of the market in small business accounting, but that doesn’t mean its the only option! FreshBooks and LessAccounting are two web applications that keep things even simpler than QuickBooks. FreshBooks is the simplest, but of course it doesn’t do many of the things that a broader program can do. On the more difficult side, Peachtree is a desktop application that is much more complex than QuickBooks, but can be customized to a much greater degree. It is not for the faint of heart. Additionally, MYOB and Microsoft Office Accounting are desktop based solutions that operate much like QuickBooks. Use the option that best suits you. To discover what features your business will need and what you are capable of doing on your own, consult with a professional.

By clearing up these myths, I hope to encourage people to get the help that is needed early on. Most business owners are capable of entering the day-to-day transactions into accounting software. However, a little direction and set up help will prevent all your good intentions and hard work from going to waste.

Many business owners are reflecting on 2008 and thinking about some improvements for 2009. Once thoughts of recession subside and marketing plans have been drawn up, its usually time to think about financial management. Although the very thought of bookkeeping makes some sick to their stomachs, everyone agrees that good record keeping is the foundation of sound financial management.

One excellent way to improve bookkeeping is to implement a policy of expense reports. Whether you area solo-preneur or there are several people in your office, whether you get reimbursed or you use a company credit card, expense reports can greatly improve your overall process of bookkeeping.

An expense report is a simple document that is filled out with each purchase or group of purchases that your company makes. For example, if you were to go to staples and buy a multi-function printer, some paper, and snacks for your office, instead of putting the receipt on the bookkeeper’s desk or in a folder (or shoebox) somewhere, you would fill out an expense report. On your expense report you would divide out- printer-$300, office supplies- $65. and snacks- $25.

If you were on a client job, a conference, or a sales trip, all the purchases on that trip would be put on the expense report. The mileage for the company or personal vehicle would also be included. All the receipts should be affixed to the report.

For more advanced users desiring to have less paper flying around the office, the user would scan the receipts to an adobe .pdf file. The finished expense report would be printed to a .pdf file, and the two would be combined. The finished file would be emailed to the bookkeeper for entry into the company bookkeeping file.
Things to include on your expense report:

• Type of expense (i.e. job, conference, sales trip, or other)
• Job Code (if available)
• Budget
• Approval Code (if available)
• Description of Purchase
• Amount of Purchase
• Method of Payment

If you don’t want to make your own, go to my website for a free excel expense report template.  The template contains two worksheets.  One for reimbursable expenses and one for purchases made with a company credit (or, God forbid, debit) card.  The ACCT code would be the code from your company’s chart of accounts.

When you do this, you will have successfully eliminated the following small office problems:

• Who made the purchase?
• Why did they buy that?
• Was the purchase for a client?

Don’t make the bookkeeper interpret receipts. They could be wrong! Always make the the one who did the purchasing fill out a report.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention electronic expense reports. There are some excellent web applications available that allow users to submit expense reports from anywhere in the world. Nexonia, and Virtual Time and Expense are two of the top choices. With these, the data can be automatically exported to QuickBooks, eliminating the pesky double-entry.

There are many business owners that read my blog or ask my advice, and immediately reply, “That doesn’t apply to me. My type of business is different.” You may feel that you deal in a commodity, that trying to build a brand and compete on value won’t work. You may feel that there is no possible way to compete with the big brands in your market, and competing on price is not only your best option, its your only option.

I have always felt that it doesn’t really matter what business you are in. Its always the job of the business owner to add value and stay out of the price war. I am not naive enough to think that we never need to adjust prices to win customers, but that should be the exception not the rule.

What could be more commodity driven and mundane than cleaning? Surely there is no way to make cleaning exciting and sell on value! There are good cleaners and bad cleaners- there is nothing else to compete on. If you were thinking those thoughts, think again.

Enter K and L Green Clean, an earth friendly cleaning company based in Lewiston. They are out of the business of selling mundane cleaning services, with a nice, straightforward, exciting niche that everyone can understand. They obviously understand that demand for green services is growing, and people are applying green thinking to all sorts of services and products.

Kudos to K and L Green Clean. It is not as if the good idea alone will suddenly make business easy, but it does help them carve a path that keeps them from competing with every other guy or girl in Lewiston with a mop and a broom. I am quite familiar with the cleaning industry, and let me tell you- price wars in cleaning get down right ugly- prices get bid that no real business can afford to live with.

What can you do with your business to add value?

My blog consists mostly of general business advice. I can write a post on whatever I see across the great series of tubes that is the internet, and attempt to add my two cents to someone else’s thoughts. I try to direct my readers to things that I deem important to running a small business. My posts have covered finance, management, human resources, marketing, and IT. I write about such a variety because, since before college, I have spent my entire career starting, running, and helping small businesses. I have a particular love for a common sense, buzz-word free, realistic approach to running a business.

My first love in business is Marketing. My degrees are in small business marketing and marketing management. You put my common sense approach together with my love for marketing, and its no secret why I’m always writing about Seth Godin. He shares my passion, except his creativity and ideas blow anyone in the field out of the water.

This week, he wrote a quick little post on internet marketing. He explained that for Big Brands, the internet represents a loss in leverage, since it take more work to reach individuals and they already have big budgets. For individuals, the internet represents an increase in leverage, since reaching people, in many cases, doesn’t cost money- it costs time and effort. One person, he says, with a lot of friends and followers online, can reach more people, more quickly, than ever before.

I want to put that in perspective. My business partner (and brother) has over 1,000 followers on twitter. To be sure, 1,000 people don’t read every post Dan writes, but many people do see and respond to things he writes that interest them. Compare that to Pepsi, Coke, Sony, or any other big brand you can think of (@pepsi has 5 followers). By and large, brands are absent on twitter. In addition, brands can’t blog. Individuals blog and “tweet” and connect with other individuals. That puts you on equal ground with any big brand- maybe even better. All you have to do is spend the time to connect and share with others, and you are marketing. No big budget needed.

If you hadn’t noticed lately, the web is partying like its 1999. We are back into the thick of web start-ups and entrepreneurs once again rushing to grab cleverly misspelled domain names in the hopes of being the next big thing on the Internet.

The latest craze is software as a service, called web applications. Although they have been around for a while, they have really taken off in the last 12 months. A web application is software that doesn’t reside on your computer, but is hosted through the Internet. Typically, users log in with a user name and password to access the software. The main advantage is that you have access to your software from any computer, anywhere in the world with an Internet connection. In addition, you don’t have to worry about losing your data, since it’s not on your computer.

The biggest problem people have with web applications is that if the site goes down, you cannot get to your information. In some cases, this rules out using a web application for certain things. For example, if you were doing all your documents and spreadsheets using Google Docs, and Google went down (yes, it’s happened) at a time when you HAD to have those documents, it would be completely out of your control. On the contrary, if you have software on your computer, and your computer breaks, you can borrow one and use a backup file in extremely important circumstances. Although it may be tricky, you will at least feel like you have some control.

That said, many web applications are great. With all these choices available, though, do any of them make the life of a small business owner easier? After sifting through, using, and testing a bunch of different examples, here is a list of my favorites. I think that the following applications can and will make the life of a small business owner easier, eliminate some redundancy, and prevent making big mistakes.

Gmail. Are you still using Outlook? See the light and come to the folderless system of email organization. You can have Gmail access all of your email addresses, and searching for anything takes seconds, not hours like in outlook. Gmail can be accessed with any web-accessible phone or any computer connected to the internet. Their calandar and contacts still need some work, but they are much improved. If you want your email life to be simpler, leave outlook for the stuffy corporations. Use Gmail. In three days, you will wonder how you ever lived without it.

Cost: Free

Jott. You always have your cell phone with you, but taking down a note can be a pain. Especially with Text-messaging challenged folks like my self. Jott allows you to call a number and send notes to your self via their voice recognition software. I have found the system to be much better and simpler than I would have thought. What’s more, is you can put contacts into your Jott account and send them notes. If that wasn’t enough, Jott connects to Twitter, Facebook and more so you can Jott your status updates. Finally, Jott connects to a plethora of other web applications (including Tsheets below) to make your life easier. The basic membership is free, but $4/month will get some good extra features.

Cost: Basic, free; Regular, $4/month; Pro, $13/month

Tsheets- I’ve said this before and I will say it again. Even when you are working on fixed-cost jobs, you should be tracking your time. Knowing precisely how much time you spend on a project will help in a boat-load of financial decisions. Then, of course, there are those clients who insist on being billed for time and materials. You will certainly need accurate time record keeping for them. Tsheets lets you “clock-in” from anywhere in the world using the Internet, text messages, or even calling it in with Jott. Reporting is above reproach and the time can be exported to Quickbooks. (You may need a little help with that, but after the first time, its a snap). Tsheets now works with Freshbooks, described below.

Cost: Basic, free (no reporting); Freelancer, $10/month; Business, $20/month; Platinum, $100/month

Freshbooks- Quickbooks has an online version, but it doesn’t exactly get rave reviews for simplicity. Enter Freshbooks, a new way to approach bookkeeping. It was built around freelancing professionals for easy, accurate invoices. They have improved their offerings, so it provides much more reporting and capabilities. They steer clear of all conventional accounting terms and keep it simple. The point is to make it simple enough that you WANT to keep your books and feel better about managing your business finances.

Cost: Free for “moped”; $39/month for “private jet”; $149/month for “time machine”; other options between.

These are just a few of the many web applications available to the general public. Many of them are free, and others are minimal. Do some exploring and see if there are any innovators in a type of software you need. Let me know what you find!

Mike Freeman
Maine Small Business IT

Much has been made in the blogosphere about using Twitter for business. Twitter, you will recall, is a micro-blogging site that limits your posts to 140 characters. People use it for anything from telling everyone what they ate for lunch to asking for advice to pointing people to interesting websites. Rich Brooks and Lynelle Wilson, both fellow MaineBusiness bloggers, have both written extensively on the topic.

I admit it. On this, I was a slow adopter. I just started using twitter a couple of weeks ago, even though I signed up long before that. I just didn’t get it. Why would anyone want to constantly update everyone on themselves? Sounded a bit too narcissistic to me. My brother and business partner jumped into twitter with both feet in August. When we started getting customers as a direct result, I finally figured it out. We were in the midst of another paradigm shift in internet marketing.

This article in Wired Magazine says that blogs are ’so 2004.’ That’s because back in 2004, blogs were an even playing field. Anyone could write one, and your content could be found by the search engines fairly easily. Nowadays, professional blogging sites like Huffington post have pushed aside the little guy. Their content is updated many times per day, snuffing out those little once-a-week posters. This concept is true across blogging types- personal, political, and business. Twitter, with its 140 character limit, once again puts everyone on an even playing field.

John Jantsch, a respected marketing blogger, wrote a blog (and subsequent ebook) about internet marketing. In the article, he uses Maslow’s Hierarchy of human nature and puts in a business’ “internet marketing” needs. On the bottom of the triangle is blogging, while micro-blogging, like twitter, is placed at the top. He claims that it wont make sense to use social sites unless you are blogging, and that mirco-blogging will only make sense to the most advanced social-media small business owners.

With respect to John’s accomplishments in internet marketing, he is wrong on this. This restaurant in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, doesn’t blog or anything- they don’t even have a website- but they have successfully used twitter to market themselves on the Internet. The beauty of the shift to micro-blogging is that you don’t need to know how to do anything else. Internet Marketing cannot be compared to a triangle. It is circular, and how much of the circle you use for any given avenue of exposure will depend on your social media strategy.

I’m not ready to give up blogging just yet. I enjoy writing, and I still like to produce valuable, varied content for visitors to my website. But I do intend to increase my usage on twitter, and have a more focused social media strategy.