SigmaWay Blog

Communication is one of the most important skills required in almost all fields, especially in the field of business. To be a successful communicator one needs to have ability to listen to the other party. A good communicator should always take the time to practice listening. Learning about the nonverbal communication also adds to the skills of an efficient communicator. As we all know that humans have an attention span of a goldfish, so keeping the audience involved is another skill a good communicator needs to have.

To know more visit at: https://www.business2community.com/communications/how-to-significantly-improve-your-communication-skills-02096026

By rude mails, I don’t mean the blatantly rude mails, but those mails which keep annoying in one way or the other. The incivility in mails has created much wider problem than anticipated, which indeed have a ripple effect. Although mails are one of the most emerging work stressors, it is so ingrained in our work life that it would be impossible to totally get away with it. 

To know more visit at: https://www.business2community.com/communications/rude-emails-have-a-wide-impact-02094741

It has been more than a year since the biggest and the most comprehensive indirect tax reform, Goods and Service Tax (GST) has come into effect in India from 1 July 2017. This phenomenal task of shifting to the new digital regime of taxation is aimed at streamlining and consolidating indirect taxes in order to unify the market. This transition accounts for changes in all areas of business, tax rates and tax payment schedule, logistics, delivery, marketing and sales and so on. In this context let’s look at the few ways by which organizations can make the best use of GST.

·         Understanding and assessing the impact of GST on each aspect of the business.

·         Taking advantage of the integrated and unified system of taxes to streamline operations and rationalize prices.

·         By taking advantage of the single registration and seamless tax-credit flow mechanism, businesses can expand to other states/parts of the country.

·         Reaping out the benefits from increased at par competitiveness under unified GST which has replaced multiple tax systems levied by different authorities.

·         Increasing profit margins and reducing operational costs by ensuring all expenses where ITC can be claimed.

       Read more at: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/308667

Advanced technology has certainly come a long way in managing our lives and guiding our buying processes. When it comes to beauty industry, applications of artificial intelligence are giving brands the power to create an intelligent, sophisticated and authentic ‘robot’ which would enable the customers to find a product that not only feels good on their skin but also doesn’t cost them much. These chatbots will improve a particular company’s customer service and overall customer experience. They can be trained to answer specific questions and give the customers a personalized experience according to their skin type, needs and price range, and certainly reduce all the hurdles that customers have to face when trying to buy products online. Innovative beauty brands, with the help of augmented reality have shown their customers how easy it can be by asking the right questions, showing them the results and even incorporating suggestions into their bots. With the advancements cropping in more, chatbots will no longer be required to be trained by the employees and would become more intelligent from the information they will learn gradually.

Read more at: https://www.clickatell.com/articles/customer-relationship-management/chatbots-customer-experience-beauty/

The ultimate goal of any customer-facing department is to provide an advanced, instant and trouble free customer support. This real time customer support wasn’t as possible as it is today. With the advent of innovative chatbots, businesses can now offer their clienteles a convenient and self service solution. They have not only cut down on the long periods of time when customers had to wait both physically and virtually to have their queries addressed but also have cut down on the necessity of speaking with humans for the same. The question that arises in this context is that whether buyers are really comfortable in interacting with chatbots. Yes, it is true that many people found it pretty strange to speak to a bot initially, but as more people learned about the benefits of the artificial tools, the more convenient it appeared to them to communicate with chatbots. Chatbots can collect data based on recent interactions and respond to a message or a solution that directly suits the needs and preferences of the customers. The combination of humans and chatbots have always been successful in providing a results driven and around-the-clock hassle free service thus enabling them to increase productivity and customer satisfaction.

Read more at: https://www.clickatell.com/articles/customer-relationship-management/consumers-chatbots-customer-support/

The social media platforms are proving to have immense potentiality and opportunity for the businesses to focus on their marketing strategies by targeting their audience on such platforms. However, given the fact that social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are mostly used for mainly two intentions: to get informed and to have fun, it’s not easy to generate sales through them. Some tips to tackle these types of challenges are listed below.

1.       Focus should be on Creating a Community- Before using social media as a marketing strategy, first it is necessary to understand the inherent self-explanatory motive of the audience for using it. People use social media to connect with like-minded people and not necessarily with businesses. Hence creating a social media group or a community can help promote the company’s brand and keep the audience cognizant of the latest stocks and provide a platform where the members can actively share their thoughts about the products.

2.       Being a Go-To Page- Having people come to a company’s page with questions and addressing their queries in the comments is a good way to kick-start sales when the audience will start making purchases without having to invite them in taking an action. However having a large scale authority as business is not easy and would require the following dimensions:

·         Content- An integrated high quality content blog is required to be published at the website that would provide solutions

·         Paying attention to the description of the blog posts and promoting them so that engagement is triggered after reading them.

A lot of effort and patience coupled with the right strategies can indeed help to generate sales of a company from the social media audience.

Read more at: https://digitalagencynetwork.com/how-to-generate-sales-leads-through-social-media/ 

busi

Data is very valuable for any business. It can help in decision making, planning, and more. Here, Business Intelligence comes into action. BI uses various softwares, applications, tools and services that enables access to and analysis of data. This improves and optimizes decisions and performances. Using Business Intelligence can help you to get more value by improving customer service, employee productivity, and more.

Following are the few ways one could get more value from Business Intelligence:

1. Build real-time BI into your customer-facing services
2. Improve employee performance through BI
3. Improve Customer Service
4. Predict new revenue streams
5. Automate budgeting and forecasting
6. Shift the emphasis to analysis
7. Embed BI into other platforms
8. Cut time wasted on data gruntwork
9. Bring unstructured data on board

Read more about them at: https://www.cio.com/article/3254646/business-intelligence/9-ways-to-get-more-value-from-business-intelligence.html

Slowly and steadily we are moving towards digital transformation and its has become one of the important tasks for businesses. With the evolving technology, businesses are also growing and evolving. Here are the top 12 tech trends that we need to look for in year 2018 :

1. Computer Vision
2. Deep Learning
3. Natural Language Generation
4. Businesswide Networking Fabric
5. Distributed Ledger Technology
6. Edge Computing
7. Quantum Computing
8. Serverless Computing
9. Augmented, Virtual and Mixed Reality
10. Digital Twin
11. Additive Manufacturing
12. Nanotechnology

It is believed that to stay in the competition of business, one should welcome new forms of technology and implement them helping business to grow. This will bring the needed digital transformation and help in decision making and planning strategies. 

Read more at https://www.techrepublic.com/article/here-are-the-12-tech-trends-that-will-dominate-business-in-2018/

After Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, the next most emerging field in todays world is the field of Data Science. It is said to be the cousins of AI and ML and mainly deals with data. It intakes data, uses processes, algorithms and scientific methods to extract knowledge and valuable data from large data sets. This field is need of each and every type of organization. Whether it be business or an IT firm, every organization needs data for improvement. Thus, outcomes from the processing of data are further used for decision making and for improving current functioning.

People often gets confused between Data Science, Data Analytics and Big Data. The key difference between them is that Data Analytics and Big Data are components of Data Science. Data Science extract values from the output of Data Analytics and Big Data to solve problems.
The goal of Data Science is to extract business-focused insights from business. This could help organizations in many ways.

Read more about this topic at: https://www.cio.com/article/3285108/data-science/what-is-data-science-a-method-for-turning-data-into-value.html

A very common misconception is too much of practice is going to result in a bad presentation. Enough practice helps us in knowing our lines better, giving us enough confidence so that we don’t have to struggle for the words. Also with the proper knowledge of the pitch we can have enough control and get back to the point that we want to make. The point is not to memorize the pitch word for word, which might work for some people, but the key point is to memorize the specific key lines and transition points. The first line, the first line of every slide or topic, the transition line, the last line of the presentation is of great importance in a presentation.

To know more visit at: https://www.business2community.com/communications/you-dont-have-to-memorize-your-entire-presentation-just-these-5-things-02082423

Authentic branding has become the new essence, which every organization is taking up to increase their demand in the market. Generic branding in today’s market can cause a dearth of reputation of the company. Hence, branding should be such which is an ensemble of business, culture and reputation. Branding should align with the career progression, professional development and personal development.

To know more visit at: https://www.business2community.com/branding/5-features-to-include-in-your-employer-brand-02072256

A Business owner wishes to know more about his/her customers, wants them to keep visiting the business more, and increase the purchases. To achieve such goals, loyalty programs are created. So basically marketing strategies involve in getting the customers and getting them to return. Loyalty programs are structured marketing strategies. It is designed to encourage customers to shop at or use the services of businesses again and again.

To know more visit at: https://www.business2community.com/loyalty-marketing/do-loyalty-programs-really-create-loyalty-02049183

The marketing mix model has four key elements- product, place, price and promotion, which constitutes the four Ps. The four Ps need to work together. The only way a marketing plan can succeed if the four Ps are aligned and are worked in unison. Their role is to implement the strategic direction the top management has chosen.  However if one of the four Ps is not in sync with the others, then the entire plan becomes compromised.  All four Ps must be integrated and directed in the same direction; otherwise a company’s competitive model wouldn’t succeed. The four Ps shouldn’t be applied in a static way either. There will be times when one changes. The four Ps can be readjusted and need to be readjusted when one of its Ps’ changes.

To know more visit at: https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newSTR_94.htm

Networking plays a vital role in any business owner’s marketing plan. Networking is the medium through which we come across people who help in expanding our brand or bring something to our business. But somehow networking seems to be a bad word, a word which is void of emotions. So even if networking seems to be a negative word, it is a very important part of business strategy. A good networker is the one, who asks questions, engages himself in the conversation, and listens sincerely to the other person.  Also attending large networking events is also the other best way of networking. Networking can turn out to be extremely fun and helpful for the business.

To know more visit at: https://www.business2community.com/communications/three-things-good-networkers-have-in-common-02075854

Words used should have the capacity to grab and keep the user’s attention. As they say, humans now have the attention span of a goldfish; some of the tips should be remembered before writing or publishing any content. Unnecessary uncommon words should not be used in any web content; it does not allow the audience to resonate, alienating them from the content. So instead of throwing bombastic words, stories should be told as to how to use the products and services and how it improves their life and work.  Writing in clear short sentences help give us the best chance to keep the attention of the readers intact.

To know more visit at: https://www.business2community.com/communications/6-writing-tricks-to-combat-short-attention-spans-02084934

If in any case, our corporate reputation has been broken, crushed or damaged, it needs rebuilding. The first and the foremost thing that needs to be done is to start somewhere. The long history of failures and scandals are the examples by looking at which we can learn what works and what doesn’t. There’s a lot that take in rebuilding a company’s reputation. We need to analyze the depth and extent of the damage done by the fallout. The second important step is to research on the customers’ comments. The customer base helps us sensing how many of them have left the brand. Reconnecting with the investors and stakeholders and resolving the issues is another important step for recovering from the damage done. Rebuilding a damaged company’s reputation is not an easy task, it might end up in taking a lot of time but with the right amount of efforts put, there’s a possibility.

To know more visit at: https://www.business2community.com/crisis-management/how-to-rebuild-a-damaged-corporate-reputation-02055252

B2B or the Business-to-business marketing involves the sale of one company’s products or services to another company. B2B marketing refers to the techniques and best practices used by the companies to sell their products and services to other businesses. Finding new and innovative ways to increase relationships through social media is currently a hot topic in the B2B marketing world. New buzz-words and acronyms are popping out each day, in such an evolving marketing landscape.  A B2B marketer should be accustomed with certain terms and definitions.

To know more visit at: https://www.business2community.com/b2b-marketing/the-b2b-marketers-dictionary-terms-and-definitions-you-need-to-know-02088378

More customers mean higher profits but at the same time it gets difficult to keep contact with each one of them individually. On everyday basis, interactions take place between the sales manager a huge number of existing and potential clients. The information about them is stored in different files and it might get really confusing for them and lose a customer as a result.  The solution to this problem is the Customer Relation Management.  The CRM method is an automated method of sales management.  Human memory is not perfect, but with the CRM system any information will always be on hand. CRM allows to be always in touch with the customers, hence resulting in higher profits.

To know more visit at: https://www.business2community.com/b2b-marketing/4-reasons-why-crm-is-essential-for-sales-and-marketing-teams-02086135

As many of us will agree that public speaking and presentation is not easy by any stretch of imagination. It requires a lot of practice and effort. It happens that only a very few people enjoy speaking in public or look forward to it. 73 percent of us consider it to be significant challenge, as suggested by the National Social Anxiety Centre. The most important question we need to ask ourselves before giving any presentation or during any public speaking is ‘Why’. Every presenter needs to have a clear idea why their presentation matters, how it will impact the audience. This reasoning of ‘Why’ is very important to instill confidence in the presenter.

To know more visit at: https://www.business2community.com/communications/the-most-important-word-in-public-speaking-and-presenting-is-w-why-02084805

There is a certain level of expectation that our leaders should show some level of positivism, enthusiasm and confidence all the time. Also negative emotions are not very much appreciated in the workplace. So there is this tremendous pressure on the leaders as they have to maintain a positive attitude, even if at times it might not come to them naturally. Such kind of expectations that we keep from our leaders is harmful and impractical. Emotional agility is a term used to describe the inner experiences and emotions of people which can be responded productively with a clear head and open mind. Instead of confronting with their negative emotions, leaders generally suppress them or push them away, resulting them to make poor decisions. Emotional agility helps them to learn from their negative thoughts and emotions instead of being dominated by them. To know more visit at: https://www.business2community.com/communications/the-importance-of-emotional-agility-in-the-workplace-02076802