Team Building|An Exercise in People Management

One thing you need to have any business “go” is people. Customers, and employees alike are people, and both are necessary for any business transactions to happen. Duh. We know.

The hard part about this is defining both styles and sets of people. Is my customer someone who is going to be buying a lot of what I have or only a few things? Do I want to target someone who is going to be a repeat customer, or is possibly going to draw in their friends and hopefully increase my market share? Do I need a large or small market share, and which groups can I gear my ads and product appeals to for this?

There are millions of questions we need to ask ourselves before we do anything regarding our product outside of understanding what it is.

We need to understand our product before we can sell it. If you don’t believe in it, or understand it, you are only setting yourself up for future failure. (It may work in the beginning not knowing everything about your product, but in the end get ready to grab your ankles, because it’s going to be a rough ride, with you in the gunners seat.)

Not only do we need to understand our consumers though you need to understand and trust your employees (if any besides yourself) and you need to make sure they will come through in the clutch of things.

Right now, I’m building my database of possibly employees for my Advertising business.

Current Assets and Employees; My Laptop. Me.

Start your engines.

Things to Measure - Defining the Stick

Today I dedicated to mostly figuring out things to actually measure to get a sense of ad effectiveness.

Now I am sure every company has it’s on measures, but I am curious what would work best for any situation. I know there is definitely not one universal one size fits all measure, and if you try and make it cookie cutter, or one size fits all, I think you have another thing coming. Here are the measures I came up with today, and some possible applications;

Attendance - An annual function measures attendance and reports a significant (i.e. noticeable) spike in their yearly attendance the year after the ad campaign is instated (or rather the year the ad campaign is targeted for).

Sales  of Services - A service sales company sees a spike in the amount of sales they have of their services.

Sales of Goods - A goods company sees a spike in the amount of sales they have of their product

Revenue Increase (NET) - After the growth of sales, that growth is not only measured in quantity of the sales but in the economic quality and benefit for your client.

Public Opinion Polls - A positive increase (better than a previous poll which needs to be taken) in the overall emotional appeal/idea that someone gets in their head when they see or recognize your brand.

There are more to come, but It’s 11:37 pm, and it’s time for me to close up the books and get into the sack. Until the sun rises again… in 8 hours.