There’s a great new article on MSN Money, ‘What sells in a recession?’, spotlighting products and industries which are actually seeing significant growth in the current economic climate - it’s well worth a read. Here’s a taste:

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  Caravans are hot (apparently). Fewer of us are indulging in exotic foreign holidays this year, instead we’re holidaying in the UK in caravans. One manufacturer of camper vans featured on a local news programme last week is struggling to keep up with demand and is taking on new staff.


• Chocolate - when times get tough we turn to chocolate treats. Similarly with the cinema - attendances are up.


• Old-fashioned skills like sewing and mending are making a comeback as we fix and alter rather than rush out for a new designer item. So sales of buttons, patches and other haberdashery items are all on the up.

Other items increasing in popularity and sales include:

• Baked beans


• Lipstick


• Home-cooking


• Exotic lingerie -as we have less disposable income to hand we’re finding other ways to entertain ourselves…….

Related posts: Why starting a business in a recession isn’t foolish

Source: Microsoft Small Business

Guest post from Emma Jones, founder of the home business website Enterprise Nation (http://www.enterprisenation.com/) and author of ‘Spare Room Start Up - how to start a business from home’.

This is a perfect time to spruce up your business development and pursue opportunities that will mean new work from existing customers and new work from new customers. Here are three things you can do to keep the contracts coming in.

More work from existing customers

Make contact - start with your existing customers by contacting them to check they are happy with your service and products. Offer to conduct a review of their requirements and ask if there is anything more you can be doing for them. Do they expect their needs to change over the next six months and are there new ideas you can take to them that will mean an improved service for them and new business for you? You can find out all this - and more - through scheduled catch-up calls with your most long-standing customers.

Refer a Friend - develop a promotion that invites customers to refer their friends and family to you. Can you offer a discount or incentive to make this happen?  

New work from new customers

It’s more expensive to attract new customers but they cannot be ignored - there could be a whole new marketplace out there, waiting for you to arrive!

New markets - have you ever thought about selling to the public sector? It’s a sector that’s still spending and the criteria to apply for projects are not as onerous as you might think. There is a useful feature on this topic on the Enterprise Nation site  [link to ] that refers to sites where you can search for contracts and tenders - they are http://www.supply2.gov.uk/ and http://www.competefor.com/.

New products - partner with other companies to offer a new range or bundle of products and services. If you are a web designer, how about partnering up with a print designer so you can offer an online and offline service. You reap the benefits of doubling up on business development effort and the client wins as they receive a full and complete service.

New work from all customers

An effective way to generate new sales leads - and goodwill - is to bring your customers together and make introductions. Bonding your customers to each other at an event or gathering will bond them ever closer to you. Everyone wins; you secure new work and deeper relationships and your customers have the opportunity to do their own bit of business development too!

Related posts: How to find and keep customers; Top 10 predictions for home enterprise in 2009

Source: Microsoft Small Business

Using Microsoft Office Groove 2007 and other collaborative technologies has enabled a virtual office services business to grow and expand.

After working as a PA and administrator for 20 years, Anna Isaacs decided to use her experience to set up a virtual office services business. She duly launched Office Lifeline in January 2007 to offer clients her organisational and PA skills virtually - from her home office.

“I had recognised for some time that there were lots of small companies and individuals out there who could benefit from my experience and expertise as a PA,” says Anna. “The issue was that those people didn’t necessarily require my help full-time. A flexible, ad hoc service that would cut their overheads seemed to me a much more attractive and affordable proposition. The real challenge was how to service such a wide variety of secretarial needs remotely across so many different kinds of client.”

“Thanks to Groove, if a UK client comes to us at the end of the working day with a document to be typed, our VA in Canada can type it up while we’re all asleep and have it ready for the client first thing next morning - that’s quite a feature that our competitors can’t offer!

“The online database available in Groove also allows us to keep good client records and timesheets and provide accurate invoices. That in turn reduces the amount of paper we use, which clearly makes us more environmentally friendly.”

Since starting up two years ago, Anna‘s revenue has more than doubled and she now has several VAs serving a variety of high flying business clients. Her operation is continually developing and becoming more efficient by keeping abreast of new technology, all of which allows her to take on more clients.

In time, she plans to franchise Office Lifeline, as she’s confident many PAs and secretaries seeking to work from home will be interested in the virtual PA and admin support concept. “Our services are not limited to UK-based businesses. Whilst we already have clients abroad, with the help of technology, I believe we can expand further into the international market,” she says.

Office Lifeline is a shining example of how collaborative technologies, like Groove, can help a business evolve into something no-one would have dreamt of a decade ago. In the current economy, it’s also a model that’s helping small businesses not just survive, but reach new customers on a global stage. Today Warwickshire, tomorrow the world!

Read the Office Lifeline case study in full.

Source: Microsoft Small Business

This generally comes top of the priority list for every business - large or small - which is why we’ve put together a new section on the Microsoft Small Business website. Take a look at our Finding and Keeping customers section, which includes pages on how to build a professional website, how to build customer relationships and sales, developing and enhancing your website and how you can promote sites through search engine optimisation and marketing. We’ll be developing the whole Business Goals section over the next few months too, incorporating more resources on being competitive and how to increase profitability.

Related posts: Office Live comes to the rescue of the car boot sale

Source: Microsoft Small Business

Social networking, relationship marketing, LinkedIn, Facebook, Bebo, and now Twitter. As the traditional forms of advertising are in rapid decline (in the news today is the 1,000 job cut at The Daily Mail group) so new ways of promoting your business are appearing. According to an article in Computer Weekly last week, SMEs are using Twitter to cut costs.  

An O2 survey suggests that more than 700,000 small and medium businesses are using Twitter to save on marketing and recruitment costs. “O2 estimated Twitter users were saving up to £5,000 on marketing and recruitment costs. Cost saving was mentioned by 62% of respondents as the main benefit, the firm said. More than one in ten (16%) said they had saved up to £5,000 since signing up to the service. Nearly a third have saved up to £1,000.”

This is interesting stuff – using new technologies to adapt and survive is a tactic for all businesses – large and small, which is why you’ll see that Microsoft Small Business has also joined the network – find us here http://twitter.com/MicrosoftSb - and follow! We’ll be pointing out news and resources for SMEs in just 140 characters – quite a challenge but great when you’re pressed for time.

Source: Microsoft Small Business

Guest blog from Cedric Chambaz, Marketing Manager for Micrsoft adCenter

 As a small or medium business owner you are probably too familiar with the dichotomy ‘how to grow your business’ and ‘how to be productive with days that are only 24 hours long’. Microsoft can’t do much to add a 25^th hour (no matter how hard we try), but we can certainly help you make the most of the available time. We endeavour to help you be productive so you can focus on the topics that really matter to you and your business, like growing your sales activity.

Back in December I explained why pay-per-click advertising was so critical to SMB. As independent digital marketer Dixon Jones puts it in a recent interview, this is a valuable lead generator that SMBs should leverage to get through the current recession. It’s an affordable, scalable and simple-to-manage channel that drives highly qualified leads to your website. When it comes to search marketing, the ad copy and the keywords you choose are very important to your success. You may think that selecting wisely will take up too much of your precious time to get right.

This is where we can help.

Microsoft adCenter continuously innovates for you to productively benefit from the best converting search traffic in the UK*. You need a practical and cost-effective solution to help you ride out the global economic slowdown. We’ve got a new tool that will help you to save you time and money: The adCenter Desktop.

It’s an easy-to-use application that runs on your local computer, so you can work on your pay-per-click campaigns offline until you’re ready to publish them online without being reliant on your internet connection.

You can bulk edit multiple keyword campaigns, bid prices, destination URLs, geo-targeting, and instantly upload changes to your account when it’s convenient to you.

Best yet, this tool is absolutely free for download right now!

In an upcoming article I will share with you another fantastic tool soon be available for the UK market: a free solution that turns Microsoft Office Excel into a keyword generator.

Imagine you enter the web address of your website and automatically get a selection of keywords, statistics on who is searching for these terms and, of course, how much you should expect to pay to be well positioned in the search engine… All that again for free, helping you save precious time in decision making, allowing your time to be better spent while the sales come rolling in!

While I am talking about freebies, remember that you can still benefit from our Pay-Per-Click trial offer by visiting tryadcenternow.co.uk, and claim a free £30 credit to get started on us.

Kind Regards

Cedric Chambaz | Marketing Manager | Microsoft adCenter

*Nielsen NetRatings – Oct-Dec 2008: Microsoft adCenter offers great conversion rates and increased ROI from our high quality Live Search audience. In fact Live Searchers are 61% more likely to convert than Google searchers and twice as likely to convert as the average UK searcher.

Source: Microsoft Small Business

 Guest blogger Emma Jones

There is no finer talent for a business owner to possess than the skill of making a sale. As the business grows you may decide to outsource the sales function but at the beginning, making a sale is on your ‘to do’ list. Here are six simple steps that will turn prospects into clients and leads into revenue.

1. Listen - the King of the Jungle and the first rule in the sales book. Start the meeting with light banter but as soon as you can, encourage your potential client to talk. Ask questions. Then ask more questions. Listen as if listening was going out of fashion. The more you know about your potential client, the more you’ll know about their needs and how your product/service can help. Only once you understand their position are you ready to talk about what you do.  

2. Mirror - not in movement, but in manner. I’m not suggesting you copy the other person’s every move (this can seem contrived), it’s more a case of taking into account their manner and reflecting this in your own. If the person you’re meeting is softly spoken, best not to shout. If they are gregarious, let your own personality shine.

3. Affirm - play back what your potential client has said. This will ensure you have properly understood their needs and will demonstrate that you have listened.

4. Confirm - with a clear understanding of requirements, confirm how you are able to help. Do this with clarity and confidence. Show how your offer will plug gaps, deliver return and meet objectives.

5. Depart - if the client is happy with what you’re suggesting and signs up to a sale, then bring the meeting to an end. Resist the temptation to outstay your welcome! 

6. Deliver - now it’s time to deliver on what’s been promised. Send a courtesy note to thank the new client for their time, confirm in writing what was agreed and start work.

With a solid first contract under your belt, there will be time to develop the relationship; building chemistry and finding common connections. This will encourage customer loyalty and you’ll ideally be in the position of never having to feel like you’re ‘selling’ to that client again!  

Emma Jones is Founder of Enterprise Nation [www.enterprisenation.com] and author of ‘Spare Room Start Up - how to start a business from home’

Source: Microsoft Small Business

There’s a great story on the BBC website today on a list of banned jargon, compiled by council leaders. The list includes:

·         Predictors of beaconicity

·         Re-baselining

·         Coterminous stakeholder engagement

·         Coterminosity

·         Mainstreaming

Now I’m on fairly safe ground I think in admitting that here at Microsoft we are guilty of using jargon when we could actually just say it straight. Acronyms are a huge minefield here as well, partly because of the number of products and also because a lot of the product names are very long. It’s a habit that’s easy to fall into and it does actually cut corners because internally at least, people know what you mean. However, coterminous stakeholder engagement is really just a talking to people. So why don’t we just say it?

When everyone is talking the same language it’s fine, but when you’re talking to people outside that specific community we all need to remember to just talk ‘normally’, otherwise it can be alienating, patronising and a real turn-off for potential customers. (Note to self: maybe I need to send this article to one or two people I know….)

Btw – the article doesn’t actually explain what a predictor of beaconicity is….  any suggestions for a translation?!

Source: Microsoft Small Business

Guest post from BusinessWings, a business resource for budding entrepreneurs, and where, in their own words, you can ”find useful business articles providing advice, tips and guides, and read recent posts on real life business issues such as running a small business, buying a franchise, financial advice, tips on recruitment and guidance on starting a new business.” 

It’s difficult to know where to put your money right now. Hitherto reliable stocks and shares have been tumbling over the past 18 months. Bricks and mortar is no longer the cast-iron investment many of us assumed it always would be.

Even accruing interest in a savings account is futile, as swingeing interest rate cuts, combined with the billions of pounds pumped into the economy by the Bank of England, mean your money will likely devalue in real terms.

Starting a business hardly seems like a safer option. You’re hardly guaranteed success if you start one at the best of times, so isn’t it a folly to start one in the depths of recession?

Not at all. Believe it or not, if you saved some cash in the good times - and you will need more up-front capital post-credit crunch - there are several compelling reasons:

• You’ll scrutinise your idea more closely and devise your business plan more carefully. Banks used to lend generously even sometimes to entrepreneurs with a lack of market research and the flimsiest of business plans. A bad idea, poorly thought through, will fail even if it’s backed up by substantial capital in benign economic times.


• Staff, raw materials and office space are all cheaper during lean times.


• Forced to be frugal at the outset, you’ll learn vital discipline when managing costs.


• The need to keep costs down also drives innovation.


• Fireproofed by recession, both you and the business will emerge stronger, more durable and less susceptible to complacency than would otherwise have been the case. Next time a recession comes round, you and the business will be ready to face it.


• It’s easier to recruit quality staff, as rising unemployment ensures a deeper and broader pool of candidates.


• And if you buy in a recession-proof sector, such as food retail, healthcare or maintenance services, you can negate many of the recession’s worst effects.

Read more about starting a small business in a recession.  

Source: Microsoft Small Business

It’s no secret that there is a shortage of female employees in the fields of science, maths and engineering - despite the fact that apparently more girls than boys achieve the top grades in subjects in school. Last year five times more men than women achieveved a degree in engineering and women make up just 18.7 per cent of the overall SET (science, engineering and technology) workforce. (See BBC story on Putting brakes on engineering shortage.)

Various official bodies are addressing this in different ways - some lucky girls got to visit the F1 Williams HQ recently - who wouldn’t want a trip like that? (The F1 season starts again in Australia on Sunday 29^th  btw,  - on BBC 1 this time.) I believe this is the first day of BST and the race (or coverge) starts at 7am - but don’t quote me on that.

In a similar story on the female worker shortage in science and technology, Michelle Medhat, director of strategic development for the New Engineering Foundation (NEF), the UK technology sectors are in desperate need of talented women to offer their expertise.

“The debate about whether men or women are predisposed to particular skills rumbles on, but in the meantime what is undeniably true is that a sector where women are unrepresented simply because they are women is a sector that is missing out on a great deal of potential excellence.”

For more stories on women in business visit the Small Business News archive on women in business.

Source: Microsoft Small Business