Are today’s yuppies trying too hard to market and sell whatever it is they’re required to do? I ask this question because I always encounter the same faces at the street corner handing out colorful brochures, catalogs or flyers of a condominium up for pre-selling; and every day, I’m still asked to accept those flyers despite repeatedly telling them I’m not interested or not in the market.

I once interviewed one of them and was surprised to find out her daily quota for getting people to sign-up and give their full contact information is sixty. It was already past sunset when she approached me and as I began talking to her, you could see the sadness and desperation on her face – she was just shy of 30 contacts. How on earth is she going to meet her quota? “And why do you have a quota?” I asked, knowing that real estate selling is not a daily activity but a plus-and-minus numbers game spread across a month or more. It turns out she receives a monthly compensation on top of a sizeable commission if she closes a contract; somebody can dictate ridiculous quotas anytime and she can’t do anything about that. And why stand at that corner every day, or the mall booth? A friend of mine once told me that out of the corner-street and mall-booth flyering activities he did in a given period, giving away thousands of those back-to-back, sometimes-glossy sales paraphernalia, only three people became hot prospects; no one bought. Go figure!

In a recent “Social Media for the Workplace” training that I conducted, one question that came up involved customer complaints; and in that query, I was asked my opinion if it was better to disable posting on the wall of their Facebook Page for fear that others will read any complaints or nasty remarks. I revved up back to my years of dealing with customer service – the sound and practical principles behind it, not the call center function – and told the audience my most favorite customer service slogan: a complaint is a gift.* A short eulogy about that phrase just started coming out of my head and my mouth, emphasizing that I’d rather have someone tell me what’s wrong than keeping quiet yet stabbing me at the back (so to speak). Don’t dread complaints. Treat them as gifts you have a bigger chance of winning a forever-loyal customer. Customer service is not about the actual complaint. The true meaning of customer service is “a promise to deliver,” whatever it is you need to deliver to your customer, be it an answer, a solution to a problem, information, a replacement product or an additional service.

Recently, I had coffee with my young friend, probably three years in his working life, who started off as a sales rep of a technology company and for the past year has gone into the real estate business. He asked to meet so he could get counsel from me on the many things I do in social media. Our talk turned the other way, outside the intended topic. I hardly touched on social media marketing and networking because I realized from our discussion that my friend missed the primary step in marketing and selling: define your market first.

I was once consulting for an online newsmagazine company, whose general market was the overseas and migrant Filipinos, and that’s precisely where I began my work with them. “Who really is your market?” By that question I expected a long story describing a person, not a statistical narration with marketing graphs and lingos only Mr. Spock can understand. We ended up with a female named Maria and everyone came up with as much detailed information as possible, from the basics of age, marital status, kids, job, birth place and all, to lifestyle routines and habits, including aspirations and dreams. When we finished the detailed narrative, we had a three-page, single-spaced essay about Maria which we immediately relayed to every writer, graphics artist and photographer through a verbal, story-telling manner. What suddenly changed was a more focused effort from everyone to deliver content specific only to the likes and whims of Maria; anyone else reading the content was icing on the cake. In a few months, everyone saw the hits increasing, with RSS subscriptions, Facebook Page likes, and Twitter followers all rising. What we actually wanted besides these everyday web statistics was the amount of comments per story or article to increase, too; and it did! We didn’t need fancy marketing science but just a common sense understanding of what we wanted to achieve.

Going back to my young friend in the real estate business, I asked him what kind of market he was tapping into. He replied, “young families.” I asked why and he quickly quipped that the leisure place he was representing, which is at the outskirts of the city, provided a peaceful and private sanctuary for the parents and the kids to bond. “Say what?” was something I surprisingly silently uttered, being careful not criticize. “You mean to say these parents with kids ages five and seven and who are making ends meet should buy an expensive real estate property in your private leisure place of four hours driving distance so they can go there every weekend to bond?” Uh-oh.

If companies hire fresh graduates to represent them in the real world, isn’t it their unspoken duty to equip these young, new professionals with the wisdom, and not only skills, to know how to market and sell on a practical, real-life scenario? I remember the strategy that SGV and Company, an auditing firm, used when they hired fresh graduates: everyone was contracted to stay with and work for them for a minimum of two years at rock-bottom rates. However, the return of investing two years with SGV were tons upon tons of training that according to a friend of my Dad, only a trickle really leaves the company before the contract ends. After the contract is up, these yuppie accountants and auditors can opt to stay for the small salary and work their way up the partner level, or venture out into the job market and get a higher-paying job. So, for the latter types, they became accountants and analysts of non-accounting firms and companies. But here’s where the opportunity to SGV lies: these young professionals left SGV in high spirits, silently thanking their first alma mater for all the great training they received, in the classroom and out on the field. Guess who they are going to recommend to their new employers when external audits are needed?

If you are heading a sales or marketing department, or a head honcho of a small, mid-sized or large corporation, you need to go down to your ranks today and find out why things are not working the way they’re suppose to be. Chances are, your young professionals who are armed with enthusiasm and passion to start making a dent in the world are not being given ample, practical, common-sense training they should be receiving. The business world around you is full of people who have a decade or two of real-world experiences, both successes and failures, which can provide better counsel than just selling tips and techniques or team building exercises taken out of context of what you really do. A two-hour session from a two-decades-plus business veteran is not expensive but it can already do wonders for creative planning on what-to-do and how-to-do-it, and a half-an-hour, informal session is not a time-waster. Your front liners are bleeding to death, and they need your help now, before it’s too late. Pretty soon, they will realize it isn’t worth it and they’ll jump ship faster than you can spell Mississippi!

Though Sales is a world filled with people in love with making money, your young, eager professionals still have a lot of the idealism in them, wanting to be recognized as a success and, even better, a hero. By the time they get older, the need for making money catches up on the need for recognition; but then, if they started on the right foot, making money would just be a natural result of things.

Think about it!

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* I actually met Janelle Barlow in 1997 when TMI, her company, was asked to conduct its customer service training to the executives of a company I used to work with. After that session, it just made practical sense to preach all around the company that indeed “a complaint is a gift.”

Sources: Janelle Barlow Video | NuWire Investor | philjcking.com

Title photo by goang at Flickr.com

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Besides all the books, e-books and whitepapers on how to make gazillions of cash through the internet, first understand what it is and why it works for others. And to understand why, you have go back to the basic nature of what the internet is.

Over and over, I kept reading the book “The Cluetrain Manifesto” as if it were my bible to understanding why the internet works and how it could work for me and others. Simply saying, I mimicked this blog unto a mirror of the most obvious message of this book: The internet is all about conversations.

And so, after seeing more organizations and businesses falter into their self-interest and idealism that the web belongs to them, I’ve decided to write by paraphrasing the book that is the only bible-construct to understanding how to make the internet work.

“A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter — and getting smarter faster than most companies.”

I will keep paraphrasing the book of which I have repeatedly read because it still intrigues and puzzles me why many businesses still consider the internet, the web sites and pages, as mere catalogs. Where the telephone broke geographical barriers as a medium to communicate to anyone in the world, the internet, then and now, provides the visual means to communicate it even more. The only difference is the telephone is owned and controlled by corporations whereas the internet isn’t. The World Wide Web is a public forum of visual means open to all who would like to access it.

“It’s got to be free, fast and forever.” I’m not too sure of the last word but the World Wide Web was born out of the intention that it should be given away for free to the world. DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) created the internet and Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, both of which never looked at making a single cent to their inventions though DARPA may have sought the benefits of technology for war. Marc Andreessen gave away the most popular web browser (not necessarily the first) called Netscape, precursor to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Mozilla’s Firefox, while Jerry Yang allowed free access to his lists of websites that spawned the ever-popular Yahoo!

“Most corporations, on the other hand, only know how to talk in the soothing, humorless monotone of the mission statement, marketing brochure, and your-call-is-important-to-us busy signal. Same old tone, same old lies. No wonder networked markets have no respect for companies unable or unwilling to speak as they do.”

“But learning to speak in a human voice is not some trick, nor will corporations convince us they are human with lip service about “listening to customers.” They will only sound human when they empower real human beings to speak on their behalf.”

Have businesses understood what the internet and the World Wide Web is all about? Surf around many corporate sites and you will encounter endless headaches looking for that small, iconic link to allow you to respond back to them. Sometimes, it doesn’t even exist. “How the heck can I communicate with this company?” If businesses empower people to speak on their behalf, having the freedom to do so and make choices free of constraints, then that website will become more powerful and enticing to create networks upon networks of members, customers and the like.

“These markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking. Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can’t be faked.”

What the internet today has done is unify many mediums of communication, most popular of it all is voice through VoIP – Voice Over the Internet Protocol. I believe this iteration is a coming-of-age requirement for something born a few decades ago and it’s time it grew up to acquire more knowledge and skills. Without your knowledge, telecommunications companies have already been using VOIP to bridge your overseas calls and the days of subterranean copper wires have long been replaced by faster yet cheaper fiber optics. And so, the written conversations have now transcended into voice capabilities using the internet.

Wikipedia describes a conversation as “…interactive, more-or-less spontaneous, communication between two or more conversants. Interactivity occurs because contributions to a conversation are response reactions to what has previously been said. Spontaneity occurs because a conversation must proceed, to some extent, and in some way, unpredictably.”

“Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice. Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived. People recognize each other as such from the sound of this voice.”

Is it enough that we get information through web portals, social media sites or plain-vanilla websites? Is instant messaging enough to satisfy our need for information? Though still popular, does e-mail seal the deal on buying or trading? Even if “markets are getting smarter, more informed, more organized, participation in a networked market changes people fundamentally.” And participation through conversations conducted in a human voice harnesses engagement, trust and consequential trade. History proves that sustaining information and trade to oneself or one tribe minimizes innovation and decreases trade and wealth. The freedom and abundance, however, reverses that threat.

UNDERSTAND, THEN DO

In blinding speeds, the Internet and the World Wide Web has knocked down heirarchy, created new languages within networked communities of ordinary people, and that these networked markets can change and reverse loyalty to a brand or company overnight. “Respect for hands-on knowledge wins over respect for abstract authority” and “paranoia kills conversation.”

Businesses must understand to untangle themselves out of the old-world, traditional rut they’ve dug themselves into and quickly join “human communities (that) are based on discourse — on human speech about human concerns.”

“The community of discourse is the market. Companies that do not belong to a community of discourse will die.”

Don’t build intranets – benefit from the freedom of social discourse inside and outside your organization, lest you are hiding something so secretive from your market.

Don’t create hindrances and challenges for the market to communicate with you inside those firewalls.

Don’t be too busy to answer each of the 10,000 e-mails a day that you will receive, or the 20,000 Facebook wall posts pondering on what you’re going to do with their problem. If you are, you’ll lose the market.

People are already so immune to advertising. The Internet and the World Wide Web has been creating communities through the years and most of what’s successful have little or no advertising at all.

If your market is busy being your “target market,” always think they are still people; and people would rather be talking to other people online like friends and relatives than watching the day go by, remembering to mention your name (brand or company) which makes better advertising money than a very expensive web site.

And lastly, please use the phone; use VOIP. Human contact is still the precursor to long-term loyalty and satisfaction than automated e-mail responses. Other than the hinderlands where cellular sites have not yet been introduced, people have mobile phones – call them!

One of the new things I recently did that’s been in existence for some time now is to get a USA telephone number, particularly a particular New York area code, so that my Mom can call me anytime using local toll charges. It took me about ten minutes to do it, only because it was the first time I did so. Now, people who probably wanted to talk to me from the United States can now do so without thinking out loud how much it would cost them to call me long distance. The hesitation to talk to me is gone!

Social Media is a great tool to market yourself to the global community. From LinkedIn to Facebook and Twitter, to name a few, it’s easy to use but not so easy to master. “Mastering” social media isn’t about the keystrokes, clicks and web pages you need to know to use; it’s knowing how to use it, sort of a “rules of engagement” kind of dos and don’ts in the social media realm. Examples would be the limit of Tweets or messages you post periodically (daily and weekly), the type of status messages and links you share, and so on goes the list. Before you embark on your social media spree, ask yourself this question: who do I want to be in the social media sphere?

Be yourself. First rule of social media is not to hide who you are – it’s to enhance the positive attributes about yourself. No one’s perfect in the world but if you lock your positive attributes to someone else, chances are there’s bound to be some compatible traits. LinkedIn allows you to create your professional credentials that permit people to conclude if you’re worth the employee or the business partner they’re looking for. It’s very easy to create a long and wonderful list that may eventually bore the reader; or using terms and descriptions that nobody really understands and, thus, not easily searchable. It becomes more difficult to create your persona on a medium such as Facebook because it is a very social channel rather than boasting your professional triumphs. Then, there’s LinkedIn Group, Facebook Pages and a whole caboodle of things to create. Read my “Social Media – If You Build It, They Will Come!” post to learn more about building your social media profile correctly.

After all the building and marketing in social media, what happens next? People usually search you out and begin the conversation with a message – or vice versa if the messaging begins with you. Here’s the clincher to a successful sale – stop the messaging! People are (generally) by nature devout conversationalists who seek verbal words over written ones. Our history is filled with stories of (flea) markets as the center of sales and marketing that necessitates conversations over written messages. The Cluetrain Manifesto describes it best: these markets are conversations. There are those who just can’t seem to express their thoughts and ideas on paper (digital or otherwise) and a verbal conversation becomes the key essence to striking a deal.

People will not even search the net to find out how much will it cost to call you long distance. The second best approach to a conversation is to call the person in his (or her) country of origin. The best is to establish a local telephone number in that country. As I mentioned above, I use Skype to lease a New York area code telephone number (called Skype Online Number). You can get metered charging from Skype for every call you make or every call made to you, or get an unlimited call package – that’s up to you and the volume of calls you might be doing. If I use my Skype to call a US number, my New York number becomes my caller ID, which is now an easy way for anyone to call me back. This scenario is a one-is-to-one means of using the “cloud” to create conversations to develop a business relationship.

But how about your business that needs a calling platform for your entire office, not necessarily called a call center, but a VOIP-based PBX system that’s also cloud-based and can be leased on a monthly basis? Easier said and easier done. Cloud-based customer contact solutions such as Kunnect have been giving both contact centers and non-call center companies – vertical markets as they are often called – the ability to manage incoming and outgoing calls from anywhere in the world – with the ease and convenience of the web. From intelligent routing of calls, interactive voice responses and auto-attendants, fully recording all calls, monitoring everything from the ease of a notebook while sipping Mai Tais on the beach, providing other cloud-based solutions that help manage your workforce to become better productive – the list goes on and on. So, instead of buying hardware and software that need years of return (on investment) for a business that caters to seasonal sales, marketing, service and support campaigns, it’s best to start with a leasing solution, a pure operational expense answer to your customer contact needs.

The point of all these is your ability to make it very easy for your customer, prospect or existing, to start having a conversation with you. Then, you need to make it very easy for your customer to continue the business relationship. The end of it all is to make it very easy for your customer to earn or gain from all these. The key to succeeding is to engage the conversation all throughout. So, stop those useless messaging; not everyone can write and express themselves in words like you – let them talk to you. “Talk is Cheap!” has been my battle cry slogan since I started using the cloud as a means to create conversations globally. Nothing that generates profit is free; you have to spend a little to earn a little, or more.

“The internet is all about conversations” and to begin the conversation means allowing your target market to have that one-click-fits-all method of calling you anytime, in his own sweet time, and his waking hours, not yours. Create the conversation immediately, not just for you but for your entire workforce, be they sales, marketing, finance, HR or a host of other work they do for your business, department or group. Because if you continue to dabble on pure messaging, someone else will already be talking to your customers. Don’t miss out on it.

In 1999, Thomas Friedman came out with a book entitled “The Lexus and the Olive Tree” where he postulated that the world is currently undergoing two struggles:

• The drive for prosperity and development, and
• The desire to retain identity and traditions.

In the same book, he came up with a famous theory, the Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention, where it stated: “No two countries that both had McDonald’s had fought a war against each other since each got its McDonald’s.”

Though some small businesses (in the Philippines) try to mimic the western world in its style and manner of selling globally, it fails to consider one of the important postulates of Friedman: retaining one’s identity and traditions. That cultural difference makes the business stand above the rest, especially coming from a developing country. Even as you find the fastest and most cost-effective route to market and sell your products and services, who you are make a huge difference.

The micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSME) in the Philippines employ 70 percent of the country’s workforce, with a large concentration in the domestic sector, i.e. wholesale and retail trade, manufacturing, and hotels and restaurants, with 50 percent alone in the wholesale and retail trade. Of 1,000 firms currently exporting abroad, 70 percent are SMEs. The entire MSME community accounts for 25 percent of the country’s total export revenue, mainly through subcontracting arrangements with larger firms or as suppliers to export companies. (1)

But why is it that many MSMEs feel a huge challenge to exporting their products and services? The Global Facilitation Partnership for Trade and Transport (2005) lists fourteen barriers to internationalizing small and medium-sized business:

1. Lack of entrepreneurial, managerial and marketing skills;
2. Bureaucracy;
3. Difficulty in accessing information and knowledge;
4. Difficulty in accessing financial resources / a lack of capital;
5. Lack of access to investment (technology, equipment and knowhow);
6. Nonconformity in standardization, a lack of quality awareness and a lack of mutual recognition schemes;
7. Product and service range, and usage differences;
8. Language barriers and cultural differences;
9. Risks in selling abroad;
10. Competition from indigenous SMEs in foreign markets;
11. Unfair behavior of multinational companies against domestic SMEs / a lack of government supply-support programs;
12. Complexity of trade documentation;
13. A lack of government incentives for internationalization of SMEs; and
14. Inadequate intellectual property protection.

Today’s times call for more creative ways of marketing your business, whether you’re direct selling for a conglomerate or running your own small business. People nowadays mention Facebook and Twitter as if it were already part of the dictionary. To wit, ever notice that writing the word “Facebook” in your Facebook wall-post results in a red-underlined, misspelled word? Yes, totally “Duh?”

But, as a small business owner, how do you market your product or service today? What medium should you use to generate the most of “value for money?” What’s better – online or offline marketing? Let me write my discourse in small business marketing through a series of questions that have been asked by many small business owners and their peers. Before I start, let me also offer my disclaimer: “Please note I am not a famous author of marketing books nor am I a coveted marketing guru consulting for industrial giants. Like you, I am a small business owner who has street-smart knowledge of marketing a business with a few books read on the subject matter.” Just making sure you know where I’m coming from.

Where Do I Begin?

Let it be known that I began my story with the theme song from a classic, all-time favorite movie. LOL! Continue the lyrics to the song for the next four words and you’ll get the hint of what I’m about to explain as one of the most vital component to marketing your small business.

Besides the fancy business plan and long-thought strategies, first things are always first: you’ve got to draw and describe the person that buys your product or service. Creating a generic description of your market that you guess will purchase it is not the best way, even if you’ve read 1,500-page text books about guerilla marketing and the like. You have to describe a very specific person, not a community of people. The moment you’ve consumed everything from your brain (and that of others) to describe this person, immerse this person into your business vision, mission, values and goals, and see if it fits. If not, you’ve got to rehash things with your sales, marketing, service, support and overall customer strategies to fit this person into everything that you do for your product, service and company.

I remember consulting for Planet Philippines, an entertainment and lifestyle, tabloid-sized newspaper that’s circulated to migrant and overseas Filipinos in 10 countries once-to-twice per month, for free (it derives revenue purely from advertising.) Planet Philippines is not a single corporate entity that prints and exports newspapers; rather, it is a franchised business where the owner of the brand provides content to its global franchisees, the latter of which locally prints and distributes the finished product within its community or city. Continuing on, I ventured to describe for Planet Philippines who exactly the reader of the newsmagazine is and came up with “Maria.”

Being female, Maria is 32 years old, married with two young children, ages 10 and 12, respectively, and living in the United States, specifically the city of Fontana in California. Both Maria and her husband are regular employees of their specific profession – Maria is a retail clerk at Walmart and her husband works as an X-ray technician at Kaiser Permanente. The daily work schedules of Maria and her husband is always different from each other so that one can bring the kids to school and the other one picks them up – Maria’s husband takes the early morning shift, ending at 3:00 PM, while she take the late shift, starting at 11:00 AM and ending at 7:00 PM. Maria and her family migrated to the U.S. when her kids were still very young, and they have been living in the U.S. for the past seven years.

Through the years, they’ve assimilated the culture of their new community but remained to have the heart of a Filipina and that of a Filipino family. They continued to speak in Pilipino (or Tagalog) in their rented house with their kids understanding what they’re saying but having difficulty uttering complete sentences. They met other Filipinos through their church and kids’ school, and expanded their network of other Filipino-American families as the years went by. Maria, typical of the Filipino mother, has always been busy multitasking for her family, from doing groceries to attending to the medical needs of her family and even making their weekend and vacation plans. The husband takes care of their cars, repairs of the house, and other “manly tasks” as Maria often quips.

Maria knows when Planet Philippines is available at the nearest mall and picking up a copy is part of her twice-a-month routine. She actually gets two copies and gives the other to her neighbor and best friend, also a Filipina-American but who never gets chance to grab a copy because of her off-hours work schedule as a nurse. Maria loves to read a printed copy rather than go to the internet, surf and read. For Maria, the internet is usually just for e-mail messaging with her relatives and friends in the Philippines, and for Facebook updates. She also subscribes to TFC only because of Wowowee (and that’s another story now that Willie is doing it in another channel). Maria and her husband can only afford to visit the Philippines every four years or so; with the other summer breaks her kids have, they try to tour some of the cities in the U.S. where they have relatives and can get free lodging from them.

Maria’s social conversations with other Filipino-American spouses are always about celebrity news and major events in the Philippines. Community news comes second, American entertainment news next in line, while sports and politics, regardless of country, always fall last. However, her husband loves to keep tabs of Philippine sports news and events, especially his school and college sports accolades, and Planet Philippines makes sure there an item or two about sports and politics in its content.

I can go on forever in describing Maria as the ideal customer of Planet Philippines but I won’t. The point is, this detailed description of Maria makes sure the newsmagazine’s content is focused on Maria and her family’s information needs; also, all the succeeding marketing efforts are always geared towards that description. Anyone reading the newsmagazine other than Maria is gravy. If there is a story that doesn’t really conform to Maria’s personality or her family but is interestingly popular, Planet Philippines makes its earnest decision to print it or not. If the newsmagazine has a new applicant for a franchised publisher, it evaluates the applicant’s city and its population, and interviews him on the merit of his intent why he would like to distribute Planet Philippines in his community. Everything that Planet Philippines does, it does so on the merit of Maria’s needs. In five years or so, it will have to decide whether to recreate Maria as the same 32-year old migrant Filipina-American or continue on with Maria’s life; or create a new newsmagazine for another Maria while continuing on with old Maria as she ages.

It is inevitable that you create the ideal buyer of your product or service and hone your efforts to effectively market and sell your product or service to this specific buyer. It is not the other way around. In my case, I market and sell a hosted call center solution in the Philippines from Kunnect.com. I don’t attend conferences and events where the big players of my industry go to because they are not my ideal Maria. I know very well that Kunnect in the Philippines is more relevant and meaningful to the small business call center – my Maria – the less-than-100-seats of voice-based outsourced call center companies. Paying large sums of money just to attract the big players will never be Kunnect’s cup of tea; just gravy. But I still touch base with the big call center companies through direct yet informal means only because they are still the pillars of my chosen industry; however, dreaming of many big, closed sales coming from this “large business” market is, well, a dream. Kunnect can’t deliver complex after-sale services that large enterprises require of an expensive purchase (i.e. 24×7 onsite support). It can, however, deliver simple, 24×7 “remote” after-sale services, much like many of the SaaS-oriented (software-as-a-service) and cloud computing providers out there. Though I am the official in-country sales and marketing rep of Kunnect, I can’t be all over the country physically presenting Kunnect to every prospect while managing a cadre of support engineers that can be whisked to a client’s site in less than an hour. Again, that’s too expensive to do. That’s why I developed my own simple website to be able to present Kunnect directly to my Maria in the Philippines (and Asia), the small business call center, without onsite intervention. The phone and the web are my best friends. I provide the “product + service” combination to my Maria at dirt-cheap, affordable rates but with a stable, simple-to-use product that doesn’t need too much client hand-holding during its set up and implementation, and has a good help desk system that’s remote, not onsite.

I also think of my alma mater, Avon. Direct selling for Avon means thousands of people starting out as independent, non-salaried dealers during the time they do not have much cash, and ending up to become successful millionaires. Avon sells its products through its network of dealers and distributors, not by way of retail malls and superstores. Though they attempted retail in the early nineties, it wasn’t a successful endeavor and they knew it wouldn’t be. The retail attempt was (and still is) a way to glamorize their products, not really make tons of money selling it there. Its marketing and advertising strategies may look affluent but that is its intention, being an “aspiration” than being direct to the market. That kind of marketing helps their dealer-network push their products to the latter’s customers beyond their social class and helps create more buyers. From Tweety de Leon to Lea Salonga and Angel Locsin, the celebrity-laden endorsers are all aspirational users of the Avon products that reflects what the customers of their direct selling network is. But inside the Avon company in the Philippines is a huge sales support structure very much knowledgeable of its direct selling network – what it wants and what it needs.

Do I Develop a Brand or a Product?

“Isn’t a product a brand?” Well, the soothsayers and naysayers will all have their book-length descriptions of product and brand, and both groups are still correct in their own thesis. However, for the non-advertising geeks of the world like us, product (or service) is the thing we manufacture and perfect while brand is the label we put in the product. Nike built a product first before it became a brand; Coca-cola did the same. Almost every large, successful entity today with a global brand started out perfecting a great product. Even Microsoft, at one point in their product-oriented life, built then marketed a stable MS-DOS operating system (the granddaddy of today’s Windows 7) long before it started its pooh-pooh “market then build” business way or so fashionably called “vaporware” – software that were not yet finished but were already being marketed as if it already existed.

Everyone wants to be popular but immediate popularity for a small business means lots of cash to gamble. Instead, as a small business owner, you should develop and perfect your product while marketing it directly to your Maria. Geographically, isn’t it more cost-effective to find Maria within your community or city before you attempt to go outside of it? I remember a few small business entities I joined that over-reached the limits of their marketing efforts to far flung places of outside the scope of service convenience – totally wasted money. For the few that were open-minded, we got back to basics and told ourselves, “Hey! We should first be the best supplier at our own community before we even trek outside it.” If you hold office in Manila, you should first saturate and own the City of Manila, so to speak, before you start spending valuable money marketing outside it.

One of the best examples of a large company in the Philippines that does this is BayanTel. You can easily subscribe to BayanTel’s internet plans within Quezon City and get better internet connection than getting it from their competitors. In fact, they can install your E1 line (a full 2Mbps bandwidth usually subscribed by multiple user companies) within 3 days, way faster than their nearest competitor’s timeline of 30 days. Go outside Quezon City and internet connection with BayanTel’s competitors (probably) becomes better, say Globe within the Makati CBD. The point is even if BayanTel doesn’t taunt the idea, they know they provide the best product with the fastest service within Quezon City.

Here’s a bit of trivia before I end this section. Did you know that Phil Knight, founder of Nike, and his merry band of offbeat co-founders used to buy and sell the Tiger brand of rubber shoes in the United States, exclusively manufactured by Onitsuka of Japan? They only sold rubber shoes solely for track and field sport and its (then) new lifestyle equivalent, jogging. Eventually, they came up with the Nike brand and Swoosh logo but still relied on Japanese technology to produce their new branded rubber shoes, still only for track and field, and jogging. Maria, to them and then, was a track and field, and jogging enthusiast! The rest, as they say, is history.

Do I Market Online or Offline?

I’m going to assume you’ve got your product and service strategies perfected to a tee with the perfect description of your Maria, and you have all the internal processes needed to continue to enhance your “product + service” combination all through the life of your corporate entity. If you are dependent on someone else to manufacture and service the product you are selling, let’s assume they are doing the same thing with their product that you’re reselling. If not, better look for another product, lest you fail because despite your creative marketing prowess, your product still, well, “sucks.”

Many online soothsayers of the small business industry say that being on the web puts you at level with the large enterprises – everyone has the same footing in terms of marketing messages and graphics. But despite that, it still boils down to how conveniently accessible is your product to Maria. Can Maria call, order and have it delivered within the hour? Can Maria find it in her favorite mall? Can Maria surf the internet, find your website, and buy online? Online marketing may be the cheapest way to market your product but beware of cheap activities – they also tend to deliver cheap results. Think about the online matchmaking sites. If it’s free, you get lots of obtrusive flack; if you have to pay, you get nearer to the right partner you’re looking for. The more you pay, the better the kind of person you’re matched to. I know of a friend who found the love of her life at Match.com and, after a year of courtship, have recently married each other, not for money, but for real love. The thing is, they both paid for the service.

Let’s talk about the world. If Maria is a person who lives outside the Philippines (or your country for that matter), marketing your product in the World Wide Web will be more cost-effective than having to go through tri-media means (published media, television and radio) in foreign soil. But also consider the limitations of internet marketing and social media networking and marketing. Single-digit-percentage results from the numerous online “hits” you have is something common when you advertise with Facebook or Google. (An exception is being geographically located in a First World country like the United States.) Online advertising is not a one-time deal; there is a learning process you have to develop, especially the first time you use it, and you have to tweak your ad copy until you develop more prospects out of the hits. For example, when your Facebook ad is clicked, will you get better results when your prospect goes to your website, blog or Facebook Fan Page? Again, personify Maria and see how she reacts to either three. But then, social media marketing is not a one-time thing – it’s an ongoing, daily activity planned out in the beginning and adjusted through the period of execution. There is no start-and-stop activity to social media marketing, not unlike telephone marketing campaigns that run for a month or so then you evaluate and proceed with next-steps activities. Social media marketing also has its business partner – social media networking, a daily, continuous activity done not only by a few of your marketing reps but your entire organization, even your lowly accounting clerk.

If your product is for local consumption, say the Philippines, rethink your online marketing strategy. Though internet penetration in the household has gone up over the years, still, many people access the internet in their workplace or the internet cafés. The affordability of buying and leasing an internet system for the home – computer plus ISP connection – still rests in the middle-to-upper class of the country’s social spectrum. Even if there are about 18 million Filipino users in Facebook, overall activity is still not that high compared to First World subscribers. Traditional media, mobile text-messaging and the telephone are still the popular means of prospecting in the Philippines. Even if you consider the social class of Maria, you will eventually need to conduct a combination of offline and online marketing for your product – you will still need to bridge the gap between the traditional and social media.

For online marketing, there is web marketing and there is social media marketing. Web marketing simply takes your corporate or product-oriented website to the mainstream of the World Wide Web while you devour search engines and news sites for footprint presence, paid or otherwise. This is where SEO activities (search engine optimization) comes into the picture, a pursuit that’s not a one-time endeavor but altogether an ongoing web activity of competitive comparisons and website tweaking. If your product is more global than local, then the effort to conduct yourself in the web becomes bigger. For local presence, the smaller the type of market, the smaller your effort for web marketing becomes. A sari-sari store (a home-based, very small, over-the-counter retail store by the street in the Philippines) is simply an offline market than online. A door-to-door delivery of your product is more open to online marketing.

Social media marketing, on the other hand, becomes more content and conversation driven than web marketing, though sometimes web and social media marketing overlap especially in a pure online business venture. You connect, network and socialize with your chosen web networking sites, like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, in the guise of marketing your product. In my humble experience doing the above, I’ve concluded that many of my prospects were not my friends in these social media websites I actively participate. It is the network of friends and acquaintances of my friends, sometimes leaping two hops or more that become my Maria. This meant I should market my product to my friends in Facebook or the like in a very subtle way than being face-to-face direct.

But which social media website do each of us choose to use to effectively market our product to our Maria? Let’s take my chosen industry as an example – the almost half-a-million call center workforce in the country. Their online presence began with the height of Friendster as a popular social media for the young and yuppies-at-heart (I had to use that term to include myself – LOL!) If you think Facebook is their primary means of social media activity today, think again. Mom and Dad actually invaded Facebook earlier than they did, or the parents were more active than the kids. Also, many Friendster-savvy call center agents still cling on to their first social media love simply because it’s too darn difficult and time-consuming (or totally blind as a bat) to transfer their photos and profile, and begin anew with links, testimonials and a host of other features that Facebook may have. For Maria being a call center agent in the Philippines, if I had to choose just one social media website to market my product that’s most appealing to call center agents in the country, I’d prefer Friendster over Facebook. It’s not about the popularity of the social media website – it’s where Maria actually spends more time.

If Maria likes to read interesting content in the web or at social media sites, then “interesting” also has to be “meaningful” and “relevant” to her lifestyle, be it work or personal. You can’t push your product to the face of Maria – she’ll eventually snub you on day-one. Rather, write or blog the generic equivalent of your product while placing it at the sidelines of your blog. I call this MGB – Marketing in the Guise of a Blog (okay, so I invented the acronym – we all do it all the time.) The same goes for Facebook; rather than label your Fan Page “The Best All-in-one Glorious Toothbrush,” name it as “My Toothbrush, My Teeth” or anything that describes it as a special interest group who adorns their teeth and the toothbrush that most appeals to them than a bunch of people who will (future tense) love to use your new yet publicly unknown “Glorious Toothbrush” product. The more generic the phrase or title, the bigger the possibility of people joining your Facebook Fan Page without even directly marketing the existence of your page to them. But remember the time your Maria has with the internet – it’s not as if she’ll be online all day long. Go back to how you described the personality of your Maria down to her daily schedule of activities in life. That schedule becomes your embedded routine when you interact you’re your Maria.

In the End, a Conversation Still Wins Over Messaging

My personal website – this blog – is plastered with the word “conversations” between the title, sub-title and most of my posts. That’s because I am a strong believer that no matter how the internet was invented and is used today, the winning formula for online success will always be the site that provides a more convenient means of developing real conversations with its community of visitors, loyal readers or members.

If you Tweet something, be prepared to respond back to every direct message (called “DM”), especially a simple “thanks” for re-Tweeting (labeled “RT”) your Tweet. If someone comments on your Facebook post, comment back all the time. In Facebook, you’ll notice that the more comments you have, the bigger the chance of that post appearing in the “Top News” stream of your member’s wall, the default wall when one opens his or her Facebook for the first time. The same goes for Friendster testimonials, LinkedIn comments, Plaxo replies and a host of many other social media websites. The conversation you create with a single person becomes more meaningful and relevant to him because he knows that the next time he comments, he expects a reply from you. People are still people even with their online self. When they say something to someone like you, it means well for them to receive a reply.

But why stop at just writing messages, comments and replies? If you can create a face-to-face conversation, won’t you grab that opportunity? Last year, I experimented upon messaging and responding to those who commented on my posts at LinkedIn by asking fifteen minutes of their time to meet me at the Starbucks nearest to their workplace. Half responded positively, and then half of these I actually met for coffee (see my story why I chose Starbucks as the best venue for meeting). I usually offered a my service to them, to find out if I could re-market their product for free on my blog or become an independent reseller paid only by commission when I close a sale (or as an affiliate marketer.) During the face-to-face conversation, I of course introduced what I was doing as a freelance entrepreneur, including a show-and-tell of my product.

Many of these fifteen minute conversations turned out to be half- or one-hour discussions. I included a “who am I” story-telling section so that my new acquaintance gets to know me better, expanding from the web profile they read. I made sure I presented only one core competence, say networking marketing, and one product, like Kunnect, the hosted call center solution I’ve been marketing in the country, that I valued more than the others. Choosing one or two competences and products made it easier for them to remember me; presenting a mother load of capabilities will make them forget me – “what the heck does he do again?” Quaint chances of messaging each other in the social media websites after that meeting made them good referrers and reference people to their own network – they always knew what I was all about. Even my high school batch mates relate my name to the term “call center”; when in need of advise regarding the industry, “talk to Raffy Pekson.” Awesome!

Your online conversations, multiple instances of comments and replies on several topics, have to be transformed to a face-to-face meeting. Only then will your social media acquaintance be transformed into a real transaction. Marketing’s overall goal is to generate sales. Marketing without the intent of a sale is an expensive hobby and not reality. Somewhere along the way, there is always an opportunity to monetize what you market.

If my social media acquaintance is not in the country, I call them up. I balance the cost to call overseas versus the benefits I derive from it, be it a short-term advantage or a long-term gain. For example, I’ve had an online acquaintance that started back in 2002 when the term “social media” didn’t even exist and kept my using my BMW (another acronym? Click here to find out what BMW means) to make sure I was abreast at what we were both doing in life. I kept in touch with him at least twice each year. In 2006, I e-mailed him to introduce what I was doing – setting up an 80-seat call center in the Philippines. Lo and behold, that e-mail message turned into a telephone conversation which led me to get Reed Business Information (or RBI), the largest trade publication company in the United States, as my most prestigious client for the call center. As it turned out, the VP for Operations of RBI was his good friend. Whodathunk? Yes, who would think that a casual acquaintance through the web and very rare telephone conversations turned out to be a huge transaction four years later.

Turn your social media conversations into real, face-to-face or verbal conversations. Gut feelings and intuitions always come in to play when two people are talking to each other, and those factors tremendously add to the emergence of a viable transaction – the introduction of your Maria to you by your acquaintance. Whether it does or not, that person will be glad to have talked to you directly and, in earnest, he or she will keep you in mind when an opportunity for your product falls on his lap or even just passes him by. The personal and professional “you” always do mix all the time, even way back before the advent of social media networking and marketing. Even your primary education classmates may now be primed up to be your customers, or their friends, thereof, only if you kept in touch with them and they know what you do.

Thank goodness for Tim Berners-Lee, Steve Wozniak, Mark Andreseen, Jerry Yang, eGroups.com, Plaxo, Ryze.com and a host of others who became first in their fields so that we now have MacBooks, FireFox, Google, Yahoo! Groups, Facebook and LinkedIn in the internet and the World Wide Web.

In the continuing legacy of the internet, it is and will always be about conversations. The better conversation is verbal. The best is face-to-face.

Photo above is a studio shot of the (funny?) sales and operations managers of Group C of Avon in the Philippines, headed then by Connie Arboleda (holding the teddy bear).

My former colleague, mentor and past country manager of Avon in the Philippines, Malu Dy Buncio, now Chief Business Development Strategist at Mansmith and Fielders, Inc., recently popped an image-poster announcing her two-day pubic seminar on the dynamics of direct selling. For those who are thinking of entering the wonderful world of direct selling, I urge you to spend a little cash and time for this two-day seminar. Malu will not only thrill you and drive you nuts about direct selling (oh, how I miss listening to her); she’ll make sure you walk your way out of the seminar with a real, no nonsense plan. For more information, please go to the Mansmith web page of “The Dynamics of Direct Selling” or click on the poster below.

Anyway, this announcement from Malu got me thinking of my glory days working for the number one direct selling company in the Philippines (do you have to guess?) where I discovered the finer lines of managing thousands of independent dealers, not to mention learning to remove pride and ego by singing and dancing in front of everyone during sales rallies and assemblies. I mean, when do you get the chance to sing “Rapper’s Delight” in front of 800 people at The Music Museum? LOL! Those days have gone and passed but Avon was the pinnacle of my experience in the art of managing a direct selling organization and I owe many subsequent successes I’ve had to the people I worked with in direct selling. The fact is many of the things I will mention in my story came from pronouncements of Malu during her long tenure in Avon, not to mention also being the precursor to Avon in the Philippines – Beautifont.

In the interest of my love for the small business, I’d like to put this story in the same perspective that any new direct selling endeavor often starts as a small business and ends being a huge success, sometimes beyond your wildest dreams. All you need to do is “begin.”

Why I made my way into Direct Selling

I was first and foremost an I.T. geek or nerd long before anyone even heard the phrase “information technology.” It used to be called EDP (electronic data processing) and then transitioned itself to a more sexy term, MIS (management information systems). I spent seven years holed up in an office facing humongous CRT screens of “green fonts over black background” and programming my time away using Cobol, Basic, Pascal, C and xBase. Then, a blinding glimpse of the obvious struck me: I have never heard of an EDP or MIS guy become general manager of a company – any kind of company. This was the era long before the internet crept into the common household and Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. Come to think of it, we were already excited just using Bulletin Board Systems (or BBS).

I pondered the thought some more and saw general managers coming from three usual places in corporate Philippines: finance, marketing or sales. Geez! Me do finance? I’d have to go back to school to do that plus pass the CPA exams and have a decade or so of grudging experience. I also quipped, “What the heck is marketing?” And so, the inevitable was obvious – find a job in sales.

I was the head of MIS in the Philippine licensee company of Jockey International which created other business units inside the company. During this time, Jockey Philippines recruited and convened a small team of experienced managers to plan, set up and operate a direct selling division. Being the top IT guy of the company, I became part of the planning team which included Millicent “Joy” Isaac and Naomi “Omi” Diaz. We eventually launched the direct selling unit and set up the first branch with myself handling automation and operations management. In a year or so, Omi left and the Operations Manager position in the direct selling unit became vacant, and I was asked to fill it in on a temporary basis while the owners looked for a replacement. After a week of its daily grind, I asked that I stay on a permanent basis. That started my direct selling career.

Two years in Jockey Philippines’ direct selling unit was great but my quest for learning more, especially on the sales side of the business, grew beyond what the company could provide me. So, I sought the help of two headhunters to find me a job inside the country’s number one direct selling company, Avon Cosmetics Inc. I moved into Avon in a lower rank, from National Operations Manager in Jockey to the Branch Manager of Avon’s Shaw (boulevard) Branch, with almost the same salary. That’s okay – the point is I’m in the best corporate university to get me a degree in direct selling, so to speak. I managed the third largest branch of Avon in the Philippines which, in two years, became number two in the country (Avon then had 21 branches nationwide), thanks to my able branch teammates in the likes of Arlene Nolasco, Tente Alday (now Country Manager of Mary Kay Philippines), Ria dela Vina and, of course, the original Big Brother when the TV show didn’t even exist, Jimmy Gatdula. We also had our mentor and the best group manager, Connie Arboleda, always patiently supporting our needs and our very diverse branch management team. After two years of grassroots experience dealing directly with the independent dealers and franchise managers of Avon, I moved to its head office to set up and manage the newly formed Customer Service Department, headed by another great mentor Tonet Rivera, now the Global-Regional top guy for Bristol-Myers Squibb and a budding pilot who writes about flying, together with his son, in their blog, Flying in Crosswinds.

But during my next two years as head of a new department in Avon, politics crept in, a good way in hindsight but not something I wanted for my career path. There was a new computer system being developed and implemented, and I was asked from the highest management realms to be part of the users group, the team that brought the practical ways of managing and operating direct selling branches. The history of automation in Avon always pulled good, experienced people from branch and support-unit levels, and involved them in the IT project. However, such projects usually lasted for a year or two, and by the time it ended, those branch sales and operations people already lost the original job they once had, not to mention a career path they started out with. Avon is a very good employer and in that respect, it usually created new positions to adopt these jobless champions of automation. Having that perspective in mind, I thought my carefully planned career path in Avon was gone. Then, a good friend recommended me to Personal Collection a.k.a. LTS Philippines, a competitor of Avon in the direct selling field, to head national operations. I took no longer than a week to decide, resigned my post in the IT project and immediately jumped into my new job. It only lasted a year to which the reason would need more paragraphs to relate; so, I won’t. After a total of seven years in direct selling, I spent two jobless months contemplating what to do before I eventually joined Mega Magazine as its General Manager. The rest is history.

The Beauty of Direct Selling

Mind you, I’ve never had the opportunity to be the moniker of the “Electrolux Man” gloriously singing, “I’m gonna knock on your door, ring on your bell, tap on your window, too…” But I invited myself to join two area saturation activities conducted by my Avon franchise managers to actually conduct the literal “knocking on the doors” activity: introducing myself as a representative of Avon (I couldn’t imagine calling myself an “Avon Lady”) and selling make-up and brassieres. On occasion, I would tag along in other area saturation drives but just observe than conduct the face-to-face cold-calling process.

After seven years inside the wonderful world of direct selling, I came to realize good things (and some not-so-good) about it. The most basic description and analogy to direct selling was that it was about personal selling: everything was face-to-face; 80 percent of the entire selling conversation was banter; relationships and camaraderie mattered more than today’s “business as usual” consumerism principles; it was a 9-to-9 job, especially on weekends; there was always an inviting commotion happening in our world almost every day – if not, our dealers would have left us; you learn the real “art of the sale” in direct selling and not from Donald Trump’s books; it was always “fun” almost every day; and it was also exhausting at times.

Despite all these things about direct selling, and running and managing a small or large organization of sales and operations people, one thing was very glaring – it was all about money. If money is not you cup of tea for a lifelong career, then direct selling isn’t for you. I remember my former IT boss telling me: “There are only three loves in the world which correspond to who you eventually become. For love of country, you become a teacher; for love of pride, you become a computer programmer or scientist; for love of money, you go into sales.” That’s what direct selling is all about for the millions of people who join the many companies in the industry – it’s all about money. It may be called “income opportunity” or any highfalutin description the creative marketer can coin, but the simplest, one-word term for it is still “money.”

“RITA” will help you succeed

To earn money in direct selling, you don’t pin yourself to area saturation drives and knocking on doors for the rest of your life. You must recruit people, commonly termed as your “down line.” In time, your down lines also mimic your success by recruiting their own network of people; and so the cycle continues. The larger your network of down lines, the better your income if the direct selling company you belong to acknowledges your down lines’ success to you. But things change and life for some down lines take a 180-degree turn, and so you lose some of these people along the way. To replace those who have left your network, you keep recruiting more people into your network. The famous moniker in direct selling happens to be the name of a woman – R.I.T.A. Simply put, it means “Recruitment Is The Answer.”

It’s like the job of the recruitment officer in a company, and you’ll never know when your best employee will decide to leave you. The recruitment officer continues to cull the labor pool for people with the right skills and competence, and puts them in an active file. For direct selling, RITA must not be in an active file – these new recruits must immediately join your network and you start teaching them how to sell great. RITA is a daily job, not a seasonal one. You don’t stop recruiting until you stop direct selling. It’s just part your job.

One of the most important acronyms I learned – R.T.D.M.S.

Okay, here come the acronyms again; but this is important. This time, it describes you entire role with your network and your direct selling business. In sequence, RTDMS simply means “Recruit, Train, Develop, Motivate and Sell.” These are the pinnacles of your work in your direct selling job. It is a cycle that you do every day. It is the process by which you become successful in your direct selling career. It is inevitable that you do all these, not just one.

We’ve touched on RITA as a means to continue growing your network while others inside it may falter and leave. “Training” your network, new recruits or otherwise, is an ongoing function. Many of your down lines cannot afford formal study about sales and many of them may not have gotten a college degree; and so you must fill-in that hole in order to better themselves. Training can be one-on-one coaching or group sessions. It can be short, one-hour bursts or whole-day, out-of-town sessions. However it is done, your content has got to be meaningful to them. From selling tips to effective on-time collections to recruitment blitzes and developing a growing network, it’s your job to teach them all these. The best method is obviously based on your experience of becoming a successful direct seller. Ask the help of someone who can assist in creating simple Powerpoint presentations or just talking points. Don’t create a written speech of the entire session – speak from your heart and experience, and with gusto! Sometimes, you need to attend good public or private training sessions – do so at your expense. What you pay for at these public training courses will return back to you in multiple folds if you apply it and teach it.

Photo by ericoebanda at Flickr-com

Developing your network means finding those rare down lines who can one day become great leaders like you. You have to be observant in finding these future leaders and give them more of your time than usual. You have to pull and convince them of your intention to groom them as a future leader of their network (under your network). Like a teacher, you have to create a simple syllabus of their development so there is a guide for both of you to follow. Some of your future leaders cannot be groomed – that’s okay. This means don’t just choose one – choose a few good ones. Besides money and pride of success, the basic thing we usually leave our children, network of friends, and work colleagues is education. The additional gratification for developing future leaders is their admission that you were responsible for their success, even if the direct selling company you work with does not financially recognize the leaders elevated from your network.

Motivation and inspiration may be intertwined but the point is to make the heart as energized as the mind. The psychology of successful people is always bred inside the heart and soul – the unconscious part of a being – that propels him or her to do great using his conscious mind. It is a daily role you play while you crisscross the many people in your network. Be it done on stage or a small group session, motivational speeches are usually impromptu. I used to buy those corny “Chicken Soup” books and other similar titles, and would index-card them according to title or theme. I made sure I wrote down the group to which I told my motivational story in each index card so that I don’t repeat myself the next time I’m called to talk. However you do things, you have to carry many stories with you and be careful not to repeat them else you start hearing snickering and pun smiles from your audience.

Selling does not stop because you have a network doing that for you. There are always people who will demand to buy only from you, especially your personal customers to which you have been selling to when you started your direct selling career. They may even recommend you, not your down line, to sell to their friends. Whatever the reason may be, your selling job is never over. Even while sitting in a restaurant you open your Avon catalog and glance at the neighboring table looking at you and your catalog, heck! Offer to show them the catalog and sell them. You’ll never know – they may become your top seller in the future. Like any good teacher training your down lines, keep your selling skills intact by practicing what you preach all the time. These instances are also good stories to tell your down lines during your motivational speeches.

Alone is not the answer to Direct Selling success

If you browse publications that show the successes of people in the direct selling field, you’ll notice that most of them are always married couples. Why is that? Simple: you can’t do all things successful, alone. “No man is an island” is alive and well in direct selling. You have to have a partner to help you achieve your success.

A partner doesn’t really have to be your husband or wife; it can be your cousin, brother, sister, parents or even your friend. At most, it’s always been a relative in the Philippines. But a spouse is usually best. The way it works is that both of you divide the many things involved in your direct selling business. For one, face-to-face activities such as recruitment, training and motivation are primarily in your alley. Back-office work like inventory management, credit and collection, computerization or automation, and a host of others belong to your partner who is usually not the type who can talk in front of hundreds of people, if not just a dozen, and can sell themselves about your direct selling business. Sometimes, these partners are also your drivers, collectors, distributors, coordinators, personal assistant, etc. Don’t put them down because of the type of job they do for you – they are as every bit important as what you do. Together, you bring totality in your direct selling business and make it even more successful because of your diversity in character and the division of labor you’ve both agreed to undertake. In the end, always reward your partner, whether with your time or money, because without them, you will greatly lose out and fail.

There are many upcoming direct selling businesspeople who think doing it alone is better than having to manage a husband or wife to help them with their business. History has been repeating itself that couples are the best type of business partners that make an endeavor succeed faster than you would think. If you are focused on your job, knowing the other always has your back, the chance of success becomes limitless.

Will your children willingly inherit your Direct Selling business?

Here’s one glaring thing that I have noticed in the great direct selling businesses in the Philippines – no matter how hard the parents try, the children are always never interested in inheriting and pursuing their parents’ direct selling business. For most, the children’s interest lies elsewhere. Why is that?

Think about it – when parents are financially good, their natural tendency is to educate their children in the best schools money can buy. These children grow up hob-knobbing with the children of other successful parents who live in posh residences and mingle only with the upper echelons of society. Well, generally speaking. If that or anything similar is the scenario with the kids, they will eventually develop interests that’s probably contrary to your direct selling business like a professional career in the medical or legal fields, hi-technology work involving computers and the internet, or other career paths.

Photo by rochell at Flickr-com

Direct selling in the Philippines caters to the middle-to-lower strata of social classes. This is where the ambition of wealth is more desirable in direct selling than asking the successful ones to abandon what they’re doing and join in. Children who have been bred and educated in expensive private schools tend to shun away from dealing with the masses of direct selling. The mere idea of speaking in the jargon that the masses can understand is already a feared activity, not to mention having to do everything that mom and dad have been doing during their growing-up years. There is a disconnect in terms of social breeding, education and ambition to be someone; if it were a life of corporate boardrooms where titans meet other titans of industry, that would be most appealing to the children. But a direct selling business isn’t anywhere in that spectrum. Though even more successful than many struggling corporate giants, the allure of neckties and chic corporate suits just doesn’t match the loose, very informal setting of direct selling. In the end, the parents end up giving their successful network to someone who has no blood relations to them – anyone they trust the most in their down lines.

This is a challenge to many direct selling companies managing successful and thriving networks – there is no succession plan within one network. The inevitable is that when the successful couple retires or is too old to work, the network is in chaos and immediately divides itself into many smaller pockets, and the former glory of the parent network withers away. I once attempted to convince Avon that employing automation as an incentive to lure the Yuppie kids of successful direct selling moms and dads is a gateway, not the only solution, for the kids to enter the direct selling domain. Once inside the business, it becomes easier for mom and dad to story-tell what they’re doing and slowly introduce the children to their day-to-day activities. They may set up a small office for the children where they can dress up in suits and chic corporate attires, but they eventually become personally involved in the business. In time, they realize the income potential, imbibe the work styles, assimilate the character of mom or dad, and continue the business when the parents retire. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way, my proposals fell through the cracks of the mighty direct selling giant. “That’s how the cookie crumbles?”

In summary

Hey! For every story or article, there’s got to be a summary, right? So, let me jump right into it and rewrite everything in outline form:

• Much like any kind of job you do, you do it because you love it. Period. The moment you fall out of love, forget it. No matter how hard you try, you’re just dragging yourself into something you think is worth it but in hindsight you don’t give a crap about it. In the end, you’re bound to fail.
• Direct selling is personal selling as opposed to today’s mix of online and offline selling in the corporate sense. Think of it as social media selling – it’s always more a social encounter than business as usual. If you can’t socialize, you’re a dead duck in Direct Selling.
• Direct Selling, like any kind of sales job, is primarily about money before anything else. “Ewww! Money? Not for me.” Then don’t.
• “Recruitment Is The Answer” (or RITA) is only one answer to make it big. There are lots more I didn’t discuss.
• RTDMS is another “answer” of making it big in Direct Selling.
• “No man is an island” in Direct Selling success means you have to have your partner doing full-time work, too. Doing it alone is just too hard, creates too much anxiety and not worth the cake. Find the right partner, synergize and do it together, forever!
• Provide the best education for your children that your Direct Selling money can buy. But if you want them to inherit your Direct Selling business, you’ve got to start planning a way to entice them to join you. Forcing them to do so at a more adult age won’t make the grade. Create a succession plan – ask help from others if you need to – but make a plan, any workable plan.

My Mom and I in Miami

Today, I am what I am thanks to my seven years of in-depth and hands-on experience in the three direct selling companies I worked for, the longest and best of which belongs to Avon. From a geek who often replied in single words, I can now express and describe a single word in multiple paragraphs and have no qualms speaking to large groups of people; besides the awesome “people and sales management” skills I learned. If you intend to be general manager one day, you’ve got to make “sales” part of your career itinerary because it simply goes a long way in molding you to the right future head of a company, large or otherwise. Direct selling is here to stay; you can’t discount the fact that it offers the lowly poor an invitation to succeed if he or she puts their heart and mind into it. It’s the fastest way to make money – for everyone!

If there’s a book entitled “Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff,” someone ought to write “Don’t Sweat the Direct Selling Stuff.” Direct selling may be part of your destiny – today! So, find out if it so.

Ending this, I leave you with my favorite ten, two-letter words that make up a great, inspirational sentence. “If it is to be, it is up to me.” Awesome indeed!

Referenced websites:

Dynamics of Direct Selling
http://www.mansmith.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=177&catid=27&Itemid=17

Mansmith and Fielders, Inc.
http://www.mansmith.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1&Itemid=35

Tim Berners-Lee
http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/

World Wide Web
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web

Jockey International
http://www.jockey.com/

Jockey Philippines
http://gtvl.com/

Avon Cosmetics, Inc.
http://www.avon.com.ph/PRSuite/home_page.page

Flying in Crosswinds
http://tonetcarlo.wordpress.com/

Bristol-Myers Squibb
www.bms.com/

Personal Collection a.k.a. LTS Philippines
http://www.philippinecompanies.com/companyprofile/36840/lts-phils-corp-personal-collection-

The Electrolux Man and Other Stories
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Electrolux-Man-Other-Stories/dp/0947062149

Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal
http://www.amazon.com/Trump-Art-Deal-Donald-J/dp/0446353256

Mary Kay Philippines
http://www.marykay.com.ph/mkpweb08/home.asp

Mega Magazine
http://www.mega-magazine.com/

Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff
http://www.amazon.com/Sweat-Small-Stuff-small-stuff/dp/0786881852

Photo of WorldLink88 call center I managed

Many people have asked me for advise on setting up and operating a small business call center. That’s been my niche – always the small business advocate even with call centers. The industry has many descriptions of how many seats a small call center has to have. In my personal opinion based on experience, small means no greater than 100 seats. It’s a number that’s easy to manage even by yourself. Beyond that, I call it mid-sized all the way up to 999 seats where you now start setting up a more formal management team.

From the various informal Q&A sessions I’ve conducted over the past years, I decided to write down some of them in short snippets as my young and agile mind could recall.

Q: How much does it take to set up a call center?

This is always the first question asked when I’m with a group of entrepreneurs interested in operating a call center. There are two ways of setting up a small business call center: (1) buy, build and operate, and (2) lease everything and operate. The major difference is the amount of money you need to shell out. It’s like buying a house to live in and furnishing it with the fixtures you like; or renting one fully-furnished and making-do with what you have. So, if you have the cash to stay in business for more than year despite the usual income cycles of a startup business, then go for the “build and operate” model; this way, you spread your ROI which doesn’t force you to generate a high revenue. However, if you are not 100 percent sure of being in business for more than year, lease as much as everything you can. You can plan to move out in a year’s time to your newly built call center after accumulating enough cash from your income.

The frugal set up cost is about $1,500 per seat (or workstation), inclusive of every machine, furniture, fixture, painting, construction, etc. It costs more if you decide to use expensive but aesthetically good-looking materials. For leasing, expect to spend about $200 per seat, per month, but this not only includes everything you need to set up a seat but also operating expenses like rent and all utilities.

Q: How many seats should I set up or begin with?

Many people think that starting small and building or getting more seats later on is the ideal way to operate a call center. In fact, the magic number I’ve heard is five seats. This is actually unproductive and may pin down your hopes of growing in the long run. Many foreign clients want to outsource part of their business operations with no less than 10 seats. If you only had 5 or 10 seats, how would you determine if a new, prospective client’s program or campaign is better than the one you’re currently running? However, if you had 20 seats and was looking into a new campaign that required an initial requirement of 10 seats, you could test the new campaign with, say, 3 or 5 seats for a few days or a week to see if it fits the skill-set of your workforce and your revenue projections; and you can do this without any major effect on your existing client’s campaign. After a week, if the new campaign proves to be a whole lot better than the existing one, you’ve got a great problem: which do you choose? That scenario differs a lot if you only had 5 seats. With that little, it won’t make you grow – you might just get stuck where you are because you have no room to test and in effect grow your income stream to build or lease more seats.

The other opportunity when having the capacity to add more seats that in about 2 or 3 years time you’ve accumulated hundreds of seats performing beautifully, there’s a bigger chance for a foreign player to buy you out at a substantial amount. Many mid-sized call centers have been bought out in the past not only because of the operating size but the skill-set of the workforce and the types of campaigns and clients you maintain fit well into the foreign buyer’s business model.

Q: What kind of program or campaign should I get?

Most small business call centers run performance-based telemarketing campaigns. Though people always think that fixed-income, inbound-oriented campaigns like customer service and technical support are better, the reality is you have a better chance of making more money in performance-based campaigns. What people don’t realize is that inbound-oriented campaigns have more metrics that the call center must achieve; if you don’t hit your client’s metrics, you actually don’t get paid for those failures. Therefore, inbound-oriented campaigns are also performance-based. The major difference with inbound-orietned campaigns is you don’t get more money if you do better than the metrics. For telemarketing-oriented campaigns, the more you perform (i.e. selling a product), the more you earn. Whether the campaigns are easy lead generation or a full cycle, cold-calling up to closing the sale type, managing a call center that’s running sales-oriented campaigns is akin to operating a direct selling agency or group – it’s fun, involves lots of cheerleading and sales activities, employee tenure is based on pure numbers (no subjective evaluations required), and so on. And ordinary business-people and entrepreneurs understand selling a whole lot better than the intracies of inbound campaigns (what the heck is an AHT?)

Q: Where do I get campaigns?

One of your roles as a small business call center owner, delegated or done by yourself, is to keep looking for campaigns even if you’re happy running the current one – on a daily basis. Call center clients and campaigns come and go, much like any kind of business client who will favor you today but not for eternity. You have to be ready for that inevitable time when your client suddenly bolts out for varying good or bad reasons. So, business development is an ongoing, 54-week job for you; and the internet is aswarm with brokers and direct clients always looking for the right call centers to run their campaigns. A huge number of them cater to the outbound-base, sales-oriented campaigns.

When you find a prospect in the internet, establish the initial e-mail correspondence but find a way to talk to each other. Don’t e-mail each other to death. Verbal communication is always a great way of getting your gut to tell you “This is great!” or “Something’s wrong here.” You can find prospective clients and brokers in social networks like LinkedIn and its many industry-related groups, Yahoo! Groups, Google-ing specific clients and making the pitch, and so on. Like a good salesperson, ask your happy clients if they can refer you to their peers without sounding like it’s going to affect your current business relationship with them. Also market the past campaign experiences of your workforce even if they’re newly hired – these kinds of information give you tremendous weight in the type of campaigns you can get your hands on. For past and current clients, ask their permission to post their company names, logos and short testimonials on your website (yes, you definitely need one.) Alliances such as technology providers are also a good public relations items to post in your website, i.e. Dell for your computers, Cisco for your network, Microsoft for your O/S, etc. Whatever it takes to build credibility as immediate as possible for your startup call center.

Q: How do I recruit good people for my startup call center?

The fastest way to recruit is by advertising in the dailies but that’s way too expensive to do for a small business call center. Online job boards like Jobstreet.com and JobsDB.com provide less expensive ways (the last I paid for Jobstreet.com’s service was 5,000 Pesos per position). However, one online place I go to to recruit experienced agents, team leaders and supervisors is Friendster.com, not Facebook.com. Friendster.com allows me to search specific call center companies written in user profiles and message each of these people invidivually using Friendster.com’s messaging system. However, before you attempt to do this, make sure you complete your Friendster.com profile as expansive and detailed as possible because your recruits will first look at your Friendster.com profile before they answer you back. Don’t recruit blindly – place your full name, company name, full addrress, landline and mobile phone numbers, and e-mail address (for the latter, get a company domain name – only costs $11/year at GoDaddy.com and getting GMail to host your @domain.com e-mail account is free). There are hardly any agent in LinkedIn.com and way too many managers and expats who you don’t need for a small business call center. Facebook.com isn’t recruitment-friendly. Some Yahoo! Groups where call center agents congregate can also help you recruit good people.

Q: How much should I pay my new recruits?

I’ve managed telemarketing-oriented call centers and here’s my commonsense answer to this question. For me, the reason I pay someone a basic salary is for that person to hit his or her quota or functional objectives. Anything beyond that is commissionable, so to say. Now, remember that the Filipino culture has always been employee-oriented and fixed-income salary-based. So, the higher the basic pay, the more enticing you are to them. Match your breakeven levels and margins to the basic pay of your workforce. For example, if a basic pay of 13,000 Pesos equates to $30 per day, per seat, a breakeven level that includes everything from leases and amortization, up to the salaries of your supervisors and manager, add no less than 50% margin or $45 per day, per seat, that’s not bad considering that many telemarketing campaigns pay a lot more commissions than $45 on a per sale basis of their products and services. Your agents might think P 13,000 is low but the amount of sales they need to generate is also pretty low. Then, incentivize their pay with commissions beyond their quota. I usually reserve no less than 25% of margins above my $45 mark for workforce commissions; giving more becomes enticing for them. If you can show them exactly what you’re talking about on paper during the final interview of your selected few, I’m pretty sure you’ll be a great call center to work with. The bottom-line is not to be greedy and your workforce will reward you for doing so.

Now, if your call center is in the boondocks far away from the nearest 711 convenience store and accessible public transportation, you have to increase your basic pay to entice experienced people to come join you despite the location. To arrive at how much should higher pay be, go back to the equation above and determine your breakeven level, margins and the rest of the projections.

Q: Should I set up beside existing call centers or somewhere where I am the only call center in that area?

There are two things you need to consider when choosing your location: (1) available internet bandwidth, and (2) access to experienced people. For the second part, I think I’ve answered the solution to that if you are locating yourself away from major thoroughfares of public transportation (see “How much should I pay my new recruits?”) In addition, I made sure to write “experienced” because you will not have the time, money and patience to teach newbies how to sell. For the first consideration, you need to make sure that your internet service provider (ISP) in that area can bring you to the internet cloud in the smallest amount of hops as possible and in the most stable way it can. Try testing your ISP’s connectivity by using SpeedTest.net and connecting to a server in Los Angeles. If you have access to a VisualRoute software or a similar solution, the better for you to determine everything you need for your voice-oriented internet connectivity. Lastly, it’s inevitable that you provide the expected basic amenities of a call center office: unlimited hot and cold drinking water, microwave oven, a place to wash and store their eating utensils, clean restrooms, bright lighting, comfortable workstations, and a host of many minor things that make a difference.

So, location is dependent on internet access and access to experienced employees. Everything else is replaceable with something similar.

Q: What kind of technology should I get?

Technology here means the kind of tools your workforce will be using when calling or receiving calls. It is what makes your entire call center productive or otherwise. It only means that besides the skills of your workforce and the nice campaigns you’re able to get, technology is the third important piece of the trilogy of major factors that will make or break your small business call center.

Here’s where I become biased. I’ve experienced hands-on installation, implementation and operation of enterprise call center solutions, those that physically resides inside your call center network (also called “premise-based),” and I’ve used hosted call center solutions or technologies that are not residing inside your network but are accessible through the web. For a startup small business call center, I recommend going for the hosted solution because it is subscription-based – you lease the service rather than having to buy the software (which is usually expensive) and the required server-hardware (also expensive) plus the telecommunications costs of calling landline and mobile phones in the country to which you are subcontracted to call. As you work your way up to the comfort level of the day-to-day grind of call center operations, you begin to realize what it takes to make it successful and falling in love with what you do – or not. Leasing is an easy get-away solution just in case your call center operations withers away due to many reasons. Buying software and hardware is like buying a car – only after a few months, the purchase price depreciates plus the next buyer has to acquire the same maintenance agreement with the software and hardware providers you bought them from without any discounts.

Between the few players I’ve encountered in the market like Five-9, Drishti, Touchstar and many others, I’ve found Kunnect to be the most cost-effective solution that gives me about 80% to 90% of what I want (and need). Kunnect is also very user-friendly, meaning I didn’t have to hire expensive IT experts or engineers to manage it (like VicciDial and other Linux-based systems which are usually free but takes several IT people to manage it; and you can’t afford these people to be late or absent – so, you hire more as idle backup). It takes a 3-hour remote training session to learn administration and 5-minutes for the agents to understand it. With Kunnect, I was able to hire home-based Quality Assurance (QA) analysts; that’s less seats to pay for. I didn’t need a report analyst to generate half-day, end-of-day, end-of-week (and so on) reports I’m required to submit to my clients. Because Kunnect was simple to use, I sat down with my team leaders and supervisors for an hour and taught them how to manage the dialer and create the Excel-based client reports on a daily basis. If I was sick at home or vacationing in Boracay, all I need is internet access to monitor the call center, because it’s web-based. I can go on and on – the point is, it fit my bill. After 3 years of using it, Kunnect offered me to represent them in the Philippines and Asia. I accepted only because I knew how effective it was for a small business call center, I knew how to use it (even knew the shortcuts on an operational standpoint) and I just loved their solution. So, there – that’s why I wrote “Here’s where I become biased.”

If you have any further questions related to this post, please go to my Contact Page to write down your thoughts and I will try to answer it as soon as I can.

How can the small business owner compete with large, multinational enterprises in the same market without having to spend so much money in setting up and maintaining a “customer conversation” infrastructure? People say “Talk is Cheap!” but simply said, it’s either complex, expensive or both. Beyond social media activities, the small business has to talk more to its customers in the most direct manner possible – verbally. The cost-effective way for the small business owner is to look for web-based solutions and rent it cheap. This article attempts to explain that “way” in simple, non-technical terms the small business owner himself (or herself) can plan, implement and succeed.

In today’s wired world, the dreams of online marketing, social media networking and social media marketing don’t necessarily amount to high revenues and low expenses, which ideally equals to great profits. Many large companies spend thousands, if not millions, trying to use the World Wide Web in the most imaginative ways; and in some of those ways, their web activities become controversial or, worse, provocative. But even if they result in negative publicity or results, these corporate giants still have enormous cash to dispense – all they need to do is juggle money between departmental budgets. This is not the case for the small business owner.

Online, Offline or Both?

Here are some questions to ask the small-office, home-office (SOHO) businessperson or small business owner with little cash to spend:

• Is the effort to market your products or services on the web way too much?
• Are you getting just a trickle of interested customers rather than higher as you projected?
• Is your market not responding to your message blasts – e-mail, text, content, articles, blogs, tweets and the like?
• Heck! Does online marketing and social media activities even work? (See also “Bridging the Social Media Generation Gap in the Workplace”).

Here’s another question I always ask small business owners when they start talking about imaginative or über-ly creative online campaigns:

“Don’t you think the simplest customer campaign is to just talk to your customers?”

When I wrote the word “talk” above, I meant a verbal exchange of words, not message-blasting your customers to nirvana. Don’t messaging them and expect so many enthusiastic replies back. It’s not about great copywriting or blogging and assuming everyone will click “Contact Us” right away. The world as history writes about it depends on conversations, “the oral exchange of sentiments, observations, opinions, or ideas” (as defined by Merriam-Webster), to improve or enrich society.

A Customer List is a Goldmine

Your online world is already ripe with many telephone numbers you can use to establish a one-on-one relationship with existing and prospective customers. The telephone directory has hundreds of thousands of contact information you can import based on area codes, zip or postal codes, cities and so on. You can also buy customer lists in a variety of digital formats from many providers like directory companies and list providers. Getting a customer list of your market today is so much easier than the heydays of rotary-dial telephone systems. The web is already a golden place to search for list providers.

Implement Bite-sized, Chewable Customer Conversation Campaigns

Your sales, marketing, service and support campaigns do not have to be so complicated only experienced employees knowledgeable in telemarketing, service and support, and sophisticated technologies are able to provide the right result. Chopping a large, maybe complex customer program into bite-sized pieces is the best and fastest way to implement it because even the inexperienced employee can perform wonderfully if given the chance. This is something many corporate entities have been doing, like creating levels of sales pitches between the frontline people and the sales closers, or escalating service and support from simple Q&A short sessions to expert-based long discussions. What you need to do is establish the groundwork for multiple yet simple tasks according to the level of expertise of each of your existing employees – or yourself. Going beyond the present capabilities of your workforce only means hiring very experienced and expensive professionals to do it for you. For starters, that’s not prudent. You and your team will eventually develop the skills to be able to drive more complicated customer conversation campaigns over a given duration. For now, keep it simple and develop from experience.

Find a Workforce You can Afford Or Use Your Existing Ones

Manpower is not as difficult as it seems to get – just make sure you’re not looking for someone who’s got a decade of sales or engineering experience and paying them minimum wage. Even if you “up” the ante on sales or performance commissions, employment-driven people still make it a point to get the best fixed monthly income. There are a lot of people out there without a job who can deliver customer service, telemarketing and up-selling with good, not mediocre results. Chances are, some of them may develop the knack for it over time and can become your best asset in the long term. Given the right tools, direction and support, you’ll be surprised how much value they will bring given that one-time chance.

Don’t even dream of creating a home-based group of telemarketing reps because it (still) doesn’t work in the Philippines or many places in Asia. Culturally, the average Filipino in his humble abode is an undisciplined person. He (or she) is way too comfortable in his house that it’s distracting to be doing telecommuting work productively. The efficiency of running a good team is still dependent on the traditional office environment. In fact, many experienced call center agents (you can tap into) welcome going back to daytime work even if it means lower pay. In my 26 years of work experience, I can state for a fact that the overall work environment is (generally) still a better come-on than higher pay.

The Right Office Tool is the Least Expensive One

The right tool for a productive employee conducting your sales, marketing, service and support customer conversation campaign is simply composed of an office table or cubicle, a PC with broadband internet and a USB headset – that’s it! This setup alone already gives so much productive power to your sales and marketing rep. Broadband internet would mean giving each PC at least 100 kbps of uninterrupted internet connection – uninterrupted because the main use of the PC is to call and receive calls (voice), not surf the web (data). If there is an interruption of connectivity in data streams, the web browser program simply retries connecting to the website. In the case of a voice-over-the-internet (VoIP), one second of disconnection means one full second of a blank conversation – there is no retry. With regards to the USB headset, it’s far more superior than buying a headset that connects directly to the PC’S sound card.

Setting up a local area network (LAN) is optional. The easiest thing to do is connect all your computers to the digital subscriber line (DSL) or internet modem provided by your internet service provider (ISP). In a common setup, you need to buy a multiple-port router so that your employees’ computers can directly be connected to the ISP’S modem. How many ports should the machine have is up to you. Now, if you want to set up a LAN, you need to confer with someone who’s adept and experienced in setting up these office networks. Consider maintenance of your LAN especially when things go haywire inside your network.

Wi-fi connectivity is not suitable for uninterrupted VoIP conversations. Wi-fi has a more complex job of connecting your computer to the internet using radio frequency; once there is interference from electronic machines and appliances, you will encounter those one-second gaps in repeated or multiple times. Surfing the web using wi-fi connections is fine, but not for VoIP.

The Power of the Automated Dialing Solution

VoIP, the wonder technology that today allows people to verbally communicate with each other through computers just like a telephone call. There are free and not-free solutions on the web which allows you not only to contact a person between computers but also call them on their fixed line or mobile phones. From the old-world DialPad.com of the late 90′s to today’s Skype, Yahoo Messenger and Google Talk, these free and not-so-free web solutions provide a simple, manual-dialing platform for your small business to start talking to your market. However, if employee productivity and efficiency is a key factor to the success of your sales and marketing customer conversation campaign, sophistication in function and use has to be the norm.

Normally, a small business buys a public broadcast exchange (PBX) machine that’s physically connected to its fixed lines. This allows employees to call and receive calls by way of traditional phone lines. Of course, you can connect multiple telephone units to the PBX machine even if the number of fixed lines (from the telephone company) doesn’t match the number of employees. But PBX machines provide little efficiency that doesn’t allow owners and managers to analyze employee productivity for a given campaign. That’s where the sophistication of an automated dialing solution comes into the picture.

But sophisticated solutions are usually expensive if you buy everything and set it up as if you’re going to use it 24×7 for a decade. For a small business owner, that’s not frugal, not even practical. Many small businesses need to run short-term sales and marketing customer conversation campaigns that provides an interim leeway to compete with large enterprises without incurring excessive expenditure. What the small business owner needs is a “call center solution” that he can rent, not own; a solution he can use but only when he needs it, and not pay for a long-term contract when in some months that solution is vacant or unused; and a solution that’s cheap.

There is an available subset of “call center solutions” that is web-based where the small business can conduct sales, marketing, service and support calls with its customers. Usually called a “hosted” solution, it is also part of those web applications categorized as “cloud computing” and “software-as-a-service or SaaS.” However, many hosted solutions are based in First World and developed countries and access to local, Third World telecommunications infrastructure (local landlines and mobile phones) are expensive.

Enter Kunnect, a hosted call center solution that’s capable of providing small businesses with a web-based solution and access to local incoming and outgoing calls at inexpensive rates. It is able to commit small businesses to conduct automated-dialing telemarketing activities to Philippine-based landline and mobile phones, including calling about any telephone number in the world. It can manage all incoming calls from any country in the world; it can also manage all incoming local calls within the Philippines for free (meaning no per-minute charges) because the small business already leases several landlines it can reuse – it just needs an intermediary machine to route the incoming analog calls to Kunnect’s digitally-oriented VoIP servers. This hosted call center solution now provides the small business owner all the power that large call center (and non-call center) companies use, such as but not limited to automated-dialing (also called predictive dialing), automatic call distribution (ACD), interactive voice response (IVR), 100% recording of all types of calls, live statistics and reports, pop-up scripts per type of campaign, integrated customer relationship management (CRM) modules, and much more. In fact, because it’s web-based, the small business owner can monitor, control and manage all his sales, marketing, service and support customer conversation campaigns from any place in the world that has internet access – at home, in the beach, in a hotel, and so on.

The last piece of benefit in using a hosted solution like Kunnect is the type of contract it provides the small business owner – no long-term contracts. If many technology providers continue to force the small business in a long-term contract with pre-termination penalties, Kunnect eliminates all that because it knows the practicality of the business – customer conversation campaigns are usually short-term. In fact, customer conversation campaigns don’t happen one after the other; there’s usually a gap in between campaigns to allow the small business owner time to respond, analyze, evaluate and tweak his customer conversation campaign for the next type to come. Kunnect provides the small business owner the ability of a “start and stop anytime” because that’s just the practical way for the small business to conduct business – a “win-win” scenario in all fairness of the business world.

In Summary

The small business owner now has power to conduct simultaneous sales, marketing, service and support customer conversation campaigns mimicking the likes of Citibank, huge real estate companies and an arsenal of other industry giants. It does not need to spend so much in setting up a complex infrastructure; it can rely on what computers and internet access it has today with a few minor adjustments. It doesn’t need to spend so much to maintain something it sometimes doesn’t need to use – start and stop anytime is the best service offer for the small business entity. It doesn’t have to hire experienced yet expensive people if it can simplify the operational context of the campaign into chewable bits and pieces together with a web solution that allows one to do so. It doesn’t have to hire a battalion of technical experts to manage and maintain the solution – it’s simple to use, understand and manage.

The world is getting smaller because of the internet and especially due to social media networking and social media marketing websites and tools. But, at the end of it all, any business still needs to verbally talk to its customer before it can deliver its products and services to their doorsteps. Telecommunications rates are not just the only factor to decide what kind of solution to get – the overall efficiency of the entire campaign, including the productivity of the people involved and the tools it uses are what matters most; because without that kind of efficiency, no matter how cheap the rates are, chances are the entire customer conversation campaign will never generate the right results – results being the magic formula of Revenue – Expenses = Profit.

“Talk is Cheap!” That has got to be your new mantra today.

I’m not an economics major nor have ever been in the financial profession. I do read books and articles on the subject matter but only if it’s simple enough to digest – as my friend Randell Tiongson would often say, learning a new subject matter should not result in a “nosebleed!” If the average “Juan dela Cruz” can understand it, so can I.

In my humble belief, there are just a few major economic measures or indexes that move and shake a country’s economy. Agriculture (or the production of foods, fibers and byproducts from plant crops and animals), manufacturing (or the production of finished goods), importation (or bringing in goods and services from foreign suppliers), exportation (or shipping goods and services out to foreign buyers and users), and consumption (or the final purchase of goods and services by individuals inside the country). I think terms such as “trade deficits” or “trade imbalances” happen when we import too much and don’t produce enough. Of course, I can’t discount the value of the local currency, foreign direct investments and other financial mechanisms pitted against the global market but these are other subject matters which will definitely make my nose bleed; so, I’m not about to run a 100-page discourse on those.

Why am I writing this? Personal web logs – or “Blogs” (didn’t you know what it really meant?) – are expression of one’s thought in writing printed in the medium of the World Wide Web. So, while I want to express my appreciation for Philippine President Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III’s initial efforts to stifle corruption and endorse the Philippines on the free market arena, let me also offer my two Centavos worth of ideas and suggestions on what he can do to revitalize the economy of the country. For this intent, I will only focus on one aspect in national governance: taxes .

I believe the policies of government taxation in the country has a large psychological effect on how people will buy, sell, work, consume, plan, live and most importantly conduct business in the country. I say this because I hear about it all the time. Mind you, when I write the term “people” I mean both its citizens and the outside world interested in doing business with and inside the Philippines. My simple observation is this: If people think taxes are too high, there is little effort in the general public and global market to even look into or start conducting business with and inside the Philippines; if there is little or no tax at all, even without blinking an eye on operating forecasts and financial risks, people dive into it. So, does that mean “taxation” and the amount a person spends on it (to conduct business with and inside the country) has a major effect in driving the economy up or down?

Recalling my averageman’s knowledge of finance and economics, will it be simple to manage the way the new Philippine government implements taxes on every nook and cranny of demand and supply economics in the country? If it is indeed that simple, isn’t there also a simple equation (to solve the country’s economic worries) on taxation that results in driving up the economy of the Philippines, such as:

 
• Increase taxes on imported manufactured goods;
• Increase taxes when exporting raw materials;
• Decrease taxes on locally manufactured goods consumed or used locally;
• Remove taxes on locally manufactured goods being exported.

 

Personal income tax is another matter to discuss because it directly pays for the social services of the government to its citizens. Hence, I will not pursue digesting this topic into bite-size chunks for Juan dela Cruz to chew. I’ll let my RFP friend Randell handle that (LOL!)

I am an advocate of the small business industry or sector which, in reality, tries its best to go around the government tax system of the country in order to save what little Peso and Centavo it can to survive competing with big businesses. I am not anti-free market; in fact, if we can only open our doors more to foreign companies but enforce both domestic and foreign entities to follow the same tax rules in the country, I don’t think the small business owner will raise hell about it. Unfortunately, though semi-open to foreign investment (at least 60-percent of any company must be owned by a Filipino), the previous and current administrations of the Philippine government continues to favor eliminating taxes for the privileged foreign, multinational companies while the small business owner pays more taxes than ever before.

Take the case of the Philippine Economic Zone Authority (PEZA) rule in establishing call centers, where it grants a five year tax holiday on call center companies certified by PEZA. Unfortunately, as a call center owner, one of the requirements is you need to show proof that you will spend thousands of Pesos building and equipping one single call center agent workstation. The foreign call center company can easily create financial wizardry inside their corporate P&L system to adjust for the high cost of building one workstation because of the huge benefits of cheap, educated and culturally-sound working population plus the tax holiday, all outweighing the set up cost in the long run; but the small business entrepreneur building a call center of, say, twenty seats will have to pay the all the usual taxes because he cannot afford to create an expensive call center to enjoy the same tax holiday benefits as the foreign call center owner. After building the call center, when both types of owners start operating, the small business entrepreneur is again at a disadvantage because he pays the normal corporate taxes (as all businesses in other types of industries do) while the foreign call center company enjoys its five year tax holiday plus other incentives. In reality, the government is penalizing the small business owner while it seeks out more foreign companies; however, when push comes to shove, the foreign entity can easily just pack-up and leave (as the case with manufacturing giants Johnson & Johnson and Philips) while the small business owner can do no such thing except try to operate his business as best he can – in good times and in bad.

Many small business owners I know penny-pinch on so many operational matters that quality suffers and thus demand for the product or service is deeply affected – all because they have to pay a high amount of tax while their counterpart foreign multinational companies win it out, hands down! To paraphrase my daughter’s favorite moniker – “Oh-em-gee!” So, guess what happens next? “Brain-drain.” Our brilliant would-be entrepreneurs and small business owners would just rather migrate to another country and use both their talents and extra cash to conduct business in their new but alienated world in return for fairness, decency and good social services for their families. Where is the logic in this?

U.S. President Barak Obama recently signed a $30 billion small business lending bill into law. “It (The law) sets up a lending fund for small businesses and includes an additional $12 billion in tax breaks for small companies,” according to a report by Reuters. Can’t the Philippine President Noynoy Aquino III favor a similar law granting incentives, subsidizing expenses and lowering and eliminating certain taxes for the small business owner in the country? Is it that complex and difficult to do? Or is it political suicide?

“Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen.
Nobody knows but Jesus.”
- Louis Armstrong

A long time ago not too far away, everything had a price tag because there were not much options available. If something was given away for free, it was more of a privilege than the norm. “Buy One Get One Free” and other big sales promotions were never much of a big deal as life was good, simple and easy.

Today, when something free is offered, everyone goes out of their way to get into the action. A “Big Sale” event is enough reason to change one’s daily routine or make a snap decision to drop everything and tell your spouse, “let’s go – now!” That’s exactly what happened when I spent the day at the Bonifacio High Street commercial area inside The Fort after attending a BCBP fellowship breakfast. My good friend and I hopped from one retail outlet to another window shopping and ended up at Starbucks for more banter before calling it a night. When we left the café at around 7:30 PM, we were surprised to see hundreds of people loitering around the two-block area. I realized they were all waiting for a free view of the scheduled Pyro Olympics. Unfortunately, many of them didn’t know that that Saturday’s show has already been rescheduled and moved to January 2010 because of the previous Saturday’s fireworks competition between China and Germany turning out to be a rainy night and thus spoiled the show.

Starbucks inside Fully Booked at the Bonifacio High Street, The Fort

I’m an ardent fan of anything free. In fact, my moniker for this is “free, fast and forever” – the three F’s of things that are must haves for anything that being offered for free. When “free” fails the two remaining F’s, it’s not enticing to continue the service.

However, some things will never come for free. There was a long go internet site that offered free phone calls to any US number (I couldn’t put my finger in it but it started with the letter “S”) but eventually stopped giving its service for free because (probably) of the cost of providing it for free was just too much. So, in the spirit of “free,” I’ve compiled a short list of things I use for my business matters that’s “free, fast and (hopefully) forever.”

Skype – still the best free PC-to-PC voice service

Skype is still the best-in-quality, VOIP-based, chat-and-talk, web-based solution

Skype is the best peer-to-peer voice platform using the internet that’s been around for free and has maintained the quality of service I expect a voice provider to do. Yahoo Messenger et al also provides the same service but their voice quality isn’t as good as Skype. Though I chat with friends, I try not to do this with my North American clients. In fact, many of the latter don’t even maintain a chat account because they’d rather speak than type. I would e-mail clients asking for a good date and time to speak to each other using Skype because in my experience, business transactions are done better by talking to each other. Through the e-mail message, I ask my prospective client if he has a Skype account and schedule a date and time to discuss doing business with each other. One thing I will never do is discusss a business opportunity using e-mail, which many Asians like Filipinos try to do. North Americans and Europeans actually prefer talking than writing. Filipinos love doing the reverse; why do you think text messaging is a huge success in the country?

The Inexpensive Philippine Long Distance Telephone Solutions

Globe TipIDD prepaid card allows you to call North America for 2.50 Pesos per minute

If your client does not have a Skype account, immediately offer to call him instead – don’t even think about asking him to create a Skype account. Please. Also, this is a business opportunity for you so don’t make the mistake of assuming he will call you in the Philippines. In today’s telecommunications world, it’s actually cheaper to call North America from the Philippines than the reverse. There are inexpensive ways I call my North American clients. I can buy a Globe TipIDD card for my Globe landline which gives me 40 minutes of talk time to the US or Canada for 100 Pesos, or the PLDT Budget Card that gives me 30 minutes for 100 Pesos or 60 minutes for 200 Pesos. If I’m not around a landline, I can use my Globe mobile phone and dial 12800, the country code, area code and telephone number, and get charged about 7 to 10 Pesos per minute, half of the regular 20 Pesos per minute cost. You can also buy the popular Magic Jack product that allows you unlimited calls in the US which retails for about 4,000 Pesos. However, before you complain how lousy the service is, remember that the weakest link to an internet-based telephone system is your internet bandwidth. Using a poor DSL connection will definitely make the quality of service bad. In technical terms, traditional VOIP-based services require 64 kbps of simultaneous upload and download speed. DSL connections don’t have any bandwidth commitment so even if you have a 2 Mbps DSL connection, it can drop to zero in a second or two, then climb up back to its subscribed speed, drop down and up again. That’s why call centers in the Philippines pay thousands of Dollars to subscribe to internet lines that maintain the required simultaneous upload-download speeds.

You can buy prepaid minutes from Global Access anytime.

You can also buy prepaid minutes from a service provider they call a “termination service provider,” one who sets up VOIP lines and terminates your VOIP call to a North American telephone number. If you prepay and buy around 2,000 minutes at a high price of $0.03 per minute, that’s about 2,760 Pesos worth but valued only at about 1.38 Pesos per minute, still lower than the prepaid card landline providers Globe and PLDT. All you need is to download a freeware called “X-Lite”, configure the user ID, password and domain IP address and you’re set to call North America at cheap rates. I’ve used www.globalaccesscomm.com before for this kind of service. I bought 20,000 minutes worth at $0.015 per minute rate. They are located at the 21st floor of Prestige Building along F.Ortigas Jr. Ave. (formerly Emerald Ave.) where you can pay by check or Peso or Dollar cash in person.

Get a Corporate E-mail Address for $10 a year

In today’s wired world, many in business continue to use free e-mail services like Yahoo, G-Mail, Hotmail and the like. That’s great for personal e-mails and the like. However, you must professionalize your corporate image by using an e-mail address that depicts your business, e.g. myname@company.com You normally have to buy an e-mail hosting solution that will cost about $50 to $100 a year. I did it the cheaper way but let me explain below.

GoDaddy.com is a popular domain and hosting provider with good phone support, even from the Philippines

First, I bought a domain name from GoDaddy.com for about $10 a year – it’s cheaper if you purchase the two or three year subscription. I know of only two very popular free e-mail hosting sites that offer hosting your organization’s domain for free – that’s Hotmail/Live.com and Gmail.com. I’m sure there are hundreds of others out there but I stuck it out with an e-mail hosting site that I’m already used to the graphical user interface (“GUI”). You can use Google Apps Standard Edition (go to http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/group/index.html) to set up your corporate e-mail account for free, including Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Site. I can’t find the link to Live.com’s version but I’m sure the free e-mail hosting feature is still there. If you’d like to use other free e-mail hosting service, that’s okay, too. Whichever you use, your e-mail hosting provider should give you easy-to-understand instructions to point your domain’s e-mail IP address to the new email hosting platform you’re going to use. If what you’re reading still sounds too Greek, copy or print all the instructions of your free e-mail hosting provider and call GoDaddy.com. in about 10 minutes, they’ll have your domain settings changed and pointed to your free e-mail hosting provider for you. C’mon! 10 minutes of a long-distance telephone call to a US number is peanuts compared to the anxiety of having a domain name you can’t even use. Trust me when I say e-mail will not work right away – the tendency is to keep bouncing e-mails between your domain provider and yourself until the former clearly understands what it is you’re in need of help for.

Blogging as a Corporate Website

Wordpress offers everything FREE - free blog hosting or download their entire blogging program for free

Today’s corporate websites now copy the format or actually use free blog sites like Blogger/Blogspot and WordPress. I’m a WordPress user but other blogging sites are just as easy to use. However, WordPress.com also offers their entire blogging software free to download at WordPress.org. This entire software is something you can use and alter when you have your own web hosting space. But start with the free blog hosting site like WordPress.com before attempting to buy a hosting package and use the WordPress.org program. I bought a personal domain name in April and pointed it to my WordPress.com site, i.e. www.company.com points to company.wordpress.com. After six months of using the free WordPress.com blog space and getting a good feel about WordPress and the activity of blogging, it was time for me to buy a hosting package. Before I did, I looked for a free but better looking WordPress theme (like the themes of your mobile phone) that would now professionalize (or personalize) the look and feel of my original blog. I bought a $50 per year hosting package from GoDaddy.com that’s WordPress-ready. When I found the free WordPress theme that I liked, I downloaded it into my new WordPress hosting package.

Blogging is now the new method of providing content to web visitors besides media publication or communications companies. Even CNN uses the free WordPress.org program in their website. Now that people are so used to reading blogs, the old-world way of creating a catalog-looking website is passé. Your corporate site now needs to be updated, at least, on a weekly basis; otherwise, people will visit you twice and never return because nothing changed in your site or nothing interesting exists. Content is now king – either you develop your own content or hire the services of other people to develop content for you. You can become an employer at oDesk.com to have freelance content writers bid for your project or get your relative, friend or acquaintance to help – besides hiring someone the traditional way.

Conference Calling the United States for Free

Freeconference.com is by far an established multi-party telephone conference solution that FREE to use.

When I need a three-party conference call that involves a North American entity, I always use www.freeconference.com to set up the bridge conference telephone number. This simply means everyone must call a US telephone number, enter the PIN code and start talking to each other. If it involves a Philippine company calling the US number, I always give my two-cents of suggestions on the inexpensive ways to call the US as I described above. Freeconference.com allows you to set up as many participants as you want and up to four hours of talk time without paying a single cent. It also allows you to auto-email all the participants with an attached Outlook-formatted calendar file. Recording the conference used to be free but is now a paid service. However, I don’t usually need to record conference calls as all of my telephone meetings are exploratory and discussion-based – writing out my notes using pen and paper has always been easier than being lazy and just recording the conversation. After the telephone meeting, I always create and e-mail everyone an after-conference report to document everything and allow the other participants to review and even add their comments or things that I missed jotting down. I’ve been using Freeconference.com since 2005.

Here’s a realization: most countries’ long-distance calling rates to the United States is cheaper than two Third World countries calling each other. So, if I have that situation, it actually becomes more cost-effective to call a U.S. bridge conferencing telephone number, like Freeconference.com, than calling each other long distance. For example, I’m currently dealing with a call center in Guyana. Initially, I started a Freeconference.com US-based telephone number until we became more familiar with each other and relied on Skype in our following conversations.

Online Address Books with Birthday Reminders

Plaxo.com has been around for a long time. I use it for being reminded of birthdays and sending Plaxo e-Cards to e-mail addresses.

For address books, I used to use Plaxo.com because it provided free use of its “export to file” feature; today, you have to pay for that. However, I still rely on it to remind me of birthdays and so I continue to update it every time I receive a new business card. It automatically invites my new contact to check and revise my entries even without forcing my new contact to join Plaxo. This is good because some systems force you to join their online service before allowing you to update or change detailed information. One field that’s always there is the birthday field. Birthdays are important for me in business because it is the most important event for a person without having to know his nationality or religion. Remembering someone’s birthday is a great relationship-building activity you can do to someone who many not give you business today but may do so in an unforeseen future. A great example is an e-mail acquaintance of mine from Toronto (I’ll call him Martin). We met in a Yahoo Group because we both worked for the call center industry in 2002. I kept tabs with him every year when I greeted him on his birthday and we’d continue to exchange a few more e-mails right after greeting him until the conversation dies down and I greet him the following year. Four years later, when I greeted him on his birthday, I also told him I was setting up a call center and wondered if he could help point me to a good campaign. Lo and behold he pointed me to his good friend (who I’ll call Cathy) who worked for the largest trade publication company in the world. Because Martin was a good friend of Cathy, she obliged to conference call with me. In the end, I won the hearts of Cathy and her team to be one of the outsourced call centers for their business.

Hotspots as My Office

Coffee Bean reestablished itself as a telecommuting-friendly cafe with FREE wi-fi. But it still lacks the electrical outlets power-users look for.

For some years, I’ve been a street-side businessman, always out meeting with people, marketing and selling myself and my products or services outside the workplace. Because I’m very much involved in internet-based networking, correspondences and communications, I rely on hotspots to do my business. Though there were enticing options to get a serviced office workstation or e-office, I declined knowing I would probably spend only an hour in the office and get out doing my work in coffee shops that have wi-fi access. Today, Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf offers the best and notebook-friendly free wi-fi hotspot in Manila. I bought a “Swirl Card” that gives me rewards points plus the WEP key or password to access their wi-fi system. A funny story about Coffee Bean’s internet is a recent experience with a prospective client. As a Country Representative of Kunnect.com, I conduct on-the-spot demo of the Software-as-a-Service (“SaaS”) besides my traditional presentation. Once, I did this at New World Renaissance Hotel. It had terrible internet with lots of timeouts. When I told the prospect if he wouldn’t mind walking to the Coffee Bean branch at Greenbelt 3, he was surprised how fast the internet was at the cafe compared with the hotel. The most quiet branch of Coffee Bean I’ve been to is at the ground floor of the Greenbelt Residences condominium, right across Greenbelt 2. It’s a lot smaller than that of Greenbelt 3 or Robinson’s Galleria mall. By the way, all Coffee Bean branches are hotspots.

A quiet, telecommuter-friendly, FREE wi-fi cafe.

Besides Coffee Bean, I also choose Blenz, the Canadian coffee shop that only has two branches: at Solaris One Building along dela Rosa street in Makati City and another one at SM Megamall. It’s got a good ambience, quiet, not much people so it isn’t noisy and lots of electrical outlets in case your laptop runs out of battery power. However, Blenz is not that easy to find as the shop isn’t a street-view cafe and not everyone knows where Solaris One building is. It’s got free wi-fi with any amount of purchase.

Other hotspots I go to conduct meetings are Chili’s in Greenbelt 5, Bubba Gump at Greenbelt 3 (they have an airconditioned smoking area, just like Coffee Bean at the Robinson’s Galleria mall) and TGI Fridays at Glorietta 3. Now, here’s a tip: Globe DSL has been installing their wi-fi routers to new subscribers, including businesses such as restaurants. The funny thing they do is that the default WEP key or password is “aabbccddee” using the SSID “aztech”. So, if you’re in an area where you see the same SSID or even “linksys”, try to see if they have the same password. Chili’s obviously uses Globe because when I asked for the WEP key, the server replied “aabbccddee”.

I use Globe Visibility because I'm usually at an Ayala-owned place.

However, when I’m stuck in a place without free wi-fi, I always have my Globe Visibility USB-based internet dongle (this is the predecessor of the Globe Tattoo). Why did I choose Globe? Well, I usually conduct my meetings in Ayala malls and Globe is an Ayala company; so, naturally, Globe’s signal would be far better in Ayala malls than competing products like SmartBro and Sun cellular. If you’re the type who always goes to the province, I think SmartBro would be better because Smart’s provincial coverage is better than Globe. For someone who’s always in a Robinsons mall, go for the Sun Cellular version. For a prepaid internet dongle, it costs about 20 Pesos per hour for internet access that can ideally reach 3 Mbps but about a maximum of 2 Mbps for HSDPA access in a 3G environment.

In Summary

I’m sure there are many other things that you do that would benefit you if some provider offered it for free or at a very reduced price, like text messaging (I used Globe’s Immortal Text; for 10 Pesos, I get 50 free text messages to other Globe or Touch Mobile subscribers plus 10 free text messages to people using other networks without an expiration date). But for this literary piece, I’ll stick to these basic items I mentioned that continues to be my source of free or inexpensive ways of doing business in our very competitive world. I do hope some of these tips and experiences can help you with your work as it has done with me. If you’re using a whole lot more that can help the readers, please share us your tips on “free, fast and forever.”