Holding effective meetings is just a matter of how you do it. The manner by which meetings are held can affect business productivity. There are steps that you can take to make sure that lesser or even no time is wasted when holding meetings and that business productivity can greatly be increased.

If you can meet a goal without necessarily holding a meeting, then skip it. You don’t want to waste time planning and scheduling something that is not necessary anyway. However, if a meeting is really needed, consider limiting attendance. The more people there are in a meeting, the longer it can take. Narrow down the participants on the basis of who really needs to attend. It is going to be a waste of time and effort including additional people to be contacted prior to and after the meeting as well as in the distribution of minutes as well.

Always be prepared when calling for, and holding a meeting. Many people make the mistake of not being well prepared in meetings since most of their time is spent on attending them. A lack of, or no attendee preparation is only but a waste of time since things do not really get accomplished. To prevent this from happening, schedule a meeting a week early and block off the time to get ready for upcoming meetings, even if it is as little as ten minutes. Remember that time is of the essence so you need to spend time wisely.

Make sure that the people who are to attend the meeting know what the meeting is about so they can prepare well. Have the agenda sent out a few days before the meeting is to take place.

Always be on time. Not only an act of courteousness on your part but it is also important to make the most out of the time allotted for the activity. Moreover, just as it is important for participants to arrive punctually, so is starting on time as well. If the meeting is to start at 9:00, then it should start at 9:00. There is no excuse for starting late. By habitually starting on time, you are sending a message to people that they should be on time as well. Don’t give late attendees a recap for parts they may have missed. They can ask from others or from the minutes of the meeting.

Meeting facilitators should stick to the topic. Whatever needs to be accomplished needs to be carried out in order to properly maximize the time spent for the meeting. Always take minutes too. Recording what goes on in the meeting does not have to be too much. Whether you have someone to take down the minutes, do rotating responsibilities among attendees or do it yourself, if it is worth keeping, then you need to have a record of it. Keep in mind that the action items are very item in the minutes of the meeting. These should have completion dates that need to be acknowledged.

Attendees should give their full attention to the meeting and keep away from distractions so you can accomplish more things. Besides, paying attention to the meeting is but a way to show respect and professionalism as well. Facilitators, on the other hand should keep the meeting as short as possible, mostly to an hour. Don’t beat around the bushes and get down to business straight up.

Help desk ROI or return of investment is highly associated with customer satisfaction for both internal and external customers. With high help desk effectiveness, customer satisfaction will translate to higher ROI and profit margins.

A help desk is an assistance and information resource that allows users to troubleshoot problems with computers and other products. Today, more and more companies are providing help desk support not only through a toll-free number but also website, email and chat support. Generally, these help desks are designed to address the needs of external customers. However, there are also other help desks that are especially designed to assist a company’s internal customers or employees.

One of the most important functions of a help desk is receiving customer requests. The management of all customer requests is its most important purpose. Generally, help desk software are integrated with an incident tracking system that will allow the monitoring of customer requests. At the onset of a call, a logging process commence wherein ticket or tracking numbers are assigned. These individual tracking numbers make it easier to find, analyze, and minimize common computer and technical problems encountered by customers regarding certain products and services.

Queue managers or supervisors are tasked to manage and delegate calls to ensure prompt problem resolution. Large help desks are divided into different levels, each of which are trained to provide support for certain customer issues. Usually, first-level help desk can help resolve issues that concern basic FAQs or knowledge base. Customer requests that are not resolved at the first-level are then forwarded to the next higher levels. Second-level and third-level help desks are more equipped to resolve problems that are more complex in nature.

Implementing and maintaining a help desk can be costly for a business organization. This is why help desk managers should be able to maximize all help desk resources. Moreover, they should ensure that the company gains a high ROI or return on investment for investing on a help desk. ROI, also called ROR or rate of return, is commonly defined as the ratio of money gained or lost to the amount of investment. With low ROI, management might not see the wisdom behind employing a help desk. Having one might just translate to unnecessary costs for the company.

One very effective way of ensuring an increase in help desk ROI is to employ a software tool that will enable help desk managers to delegate and assign calls more effectively to reduce the length of waiting time for customers. It is also a good idea to calculate help desk ROI regularly through specialized applications that can function as ROI calculators. These software takes into account the hourly rate of help desk personnel, number of calls handled daily and the average length of calls handled. By tracking this particular metric, managers are able to assess the collective and individual productivity of their employees.

Proper and intensive employee training is also seen as an effective way of achieving higher returns as this will enable company agents and representatives to address the problems of customers better. Problem resolution leads to customer satisfaction and customer satisfaction paves way for higher profit margins.

Marketing is an important function of business organizations. It is through marketing that consumers become aware of the products or services offered by different companies. Marketing managers use a marketing scorecard to assess the effectiveness of the marketing techniques that they employ.

Today, marketing is widely-considered to be an industry that requires creativity and innovativeness from its participants. Aside from creating consumer awareness, marketing departments of companies are also tasked to plan, implement and spearhead advertising, selling and distribution efforts of the company. Moreover, this department should be able to anticipate future changes in consumer behavior by undertaking market research.

Today, marketers are challenged not only to implement effective marketing strategies but also to provide quantitative justification or data support for all marketing activities and plans. Through these figures, top-level managers like Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) and Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) are able to determine how marketing expenditures translate to corporate revenues.

To help marketing executives assess the effectiveness of the marketing campaigns they launched, the concept of marketing scorecard emerged. Through this tool, marketers are able to identify what is working and what is not working with their activities. When developing a marketing scorecard, it is important to consider four marketing elements namely; product, pricing, promotion and placement. Product considerations include product features that can address the needs and wants of the target market. Pricing considerations, on the other hand, include the process of price setting including the different factors that can affect pricing.

Promotion considerations, meanwhile, will include all marketing techniques that could be implemented to create awareness of products and services including advertising, publicity, sales promotion and branding. Lastly, placement or distribution considerations include the distribution channels to use including retailing and point of sale placement. In marketing scorecard development, the four Ps previously mentioned should be integrated into the scorecard. The link between marketing investment and marketing ROI should be highlighted in this scorecard.

Typically, action areas like market positioning and promotion aspects are included. The action areas identified are then given appropriate scores by management executives in a scale of 1 to 5 or 1 to 10. The overall score obtained would then be reflective of the effectiveness of marketing techniques done. A low overall score would suggest that marketing activities need to be improved in terms of achieving their objectives. On the other hand, a high overall marketing score is reflective of effective standards and activities implemented.

A marketing scorecard benefits not only the entire business organization but also the individuals that compose the organization. This tool will benefit the organization because this will help company executives understand better how marketing tools and technique perform. This also leads to better appreciation of the marketing efforts being undertaken. Moreover, with better understanding of how marketing investments fare, it becomes easier for company management to justify an increase in the budget for future marketing endeavors. This scorecard will benefit individuals because it will help each member of the marketing department to understand how important it is for the organization to achieve effectiveness and efficiency in all marketing activities.

Time management and project expense tracking requirements vary from company to company, but to streamline efforts and maximize productivity, nearly every organization will at some point need help. The million dollar question most companies ponder is whether to build a software solution in-house or choose a packaged solution.

In the past, many companies didn’t hesitate in designing and building their own internal program to track project costs, employee time sheets and expenses. However, with software specialization getting to the point where the cost-benefit between developing, building and implementing an in-house solution versus buying a functionality rich, commercial, off-the-shelf application is becoming increasingly skewed toward the purchasing of off-the-shelf applications. Many companies are finding it is more economical and a lot less taxing to find an already developed, well packaged solution that will address their every need. After all, why reinvent the wheel and pay additional developmental salaries and benefits when a solution for a company’s every need is readily available.

Some features to look for in a good off-the-shelf time management and project management solution is the ability to track tasks, activities and projects in a variety of combinations and situations. Employees should be able to record their time allocated to a particular task across multiple projects and activities as well as the company being able to track projects on a person, team and development basis. A good time management software solution also allows for the ability to estimate project costs and manage project expectations.

Additional attributes for a good time management software suite would include tracking time and costing for tasks, activities and projects as well as analyzing actual time and cost metrics. A program that would reduce time to develop project estimates and proposals as well as monitor actual costs versus original estimates would also be a big plus. Good reporting, project alerts and the ability to increase management transparency and track projects for both salaried and hourly employees and consultants could be very beneficial. And of course ease of use, fast deployment in minutes and the ability of the time management software to interface with existing software would be huge. Ready to run reporting and over budget notifications would be icing on top of the cake.

When a company experiences growth and the raised expectations that come with that growth, it is often necessary to address staffing additions as both a company’s biggest expense, but also its biggest resource. By realizing in short order that a software solution is needed that allows for the management of not just time, but personnel, a company is then able to address possible solutions to their needs. A software solution that can track projects, tasks, activities and teams, as well as manage project expectations, can be very powerful and cost effective.

The decision to Buy versus Build offers the following advantages:

A Predictable Development Cost - The opportunity to evaluate the features in advance, including functions and capabilities in an existing enterprise environment.

Rapid Deployment – A packaged software application is a production ready application that can be customized for a unique environment within a relatively short period of time.

Known Maintenance and Support Costs – A commercial application vendor specializes in the development and maintenance of the products. They invest in the resources necessary to support, upgrade and maintain the product year after year using the latest technology, so you don’t have to.

Strong Knowledge Base – Unlike an in-house system, a packaged solution has already anticipated your future needs and has applied best practices from the industry along with established expertise.

Core Business Focus – Buying an off-the-shelf application keeps you focused on your core business while gaining the benefit of an experienced partner in the software development industry.

In a cost-benefit analysis, the decision to purchase a product off-the-shelf can afford a company more flexibility of services in the long run. This solution also allows companies to concentrate on what they do best instead of worrying about developing a time management and employee tracking system that may not include as many features as a solution that has already been developed.

What is a business without sales and productivity? It would become an utter failure, right? This is because both sales and productivity are very much needed when it comes to ensuring the success of a certain business. But when you coin these two concepts together, the resultant concept may be a bit too vague for you. Still, when you are in the volatile world of business, it is very important to understand the concept as much as possible.

What exactly is sales productivity all about it? What does this concept have that requires much importance from companies all over the world? To completely grasp the concept, you need to define both concepts of productivity and sales separately.

In its most basic form, productivity is actually labor in its total amount, as needed in accomplishing certain tasks or processes entailed in the operations of a certain company. Let us take the common scenario of content writing, for instance. The typical writer can complete an assigned task of 5 different topics in a span of 1 to 2 days. This is the usual flow of the typical content writer, during an ordinary work day. But there certainly comes a time when there would be a rush project that the content writer needs to complete as soon as possible. For example, the rush project comes in, and 20 different topics are to be assigned to the writer. What’s more, the rush project has to be completed within the same designated period, which is 2 days at the most. If you were in the position of the content writer, then it would be fair to say that you would not be completing just 5 topics in a day. Roughly, you would have to complete 10 topics in a single workday. In this scenario, there should then be a delicate balance between quality and quantity, for you can never sacrifice either of the two. Thus, for your business to be more productive, the management should develop says and means for writing potential to be maximized without having to sacrifice the quality of the articles produced in the whole process.

The concept is pretty similar when you have sales in mind. Let us say that the monetary equivalent of your efforts in writing an article amounts to $5. That article is then sold to your client at $10, which means you have a net profit of $5. But as you get better in your craft, it would be expected that your sales cost would also decrease. However, if your sales cost remains the same, then something is definitely wrong with the picture. You have certainly become stagnant when it comes to productivity.

Now that you have defined both concepts individually, it would be then easier to combine both into the resultant concept of sales productivity. Because the resultant concept is just the combination of both. By ironing out which aspects of your business you can improve on to maximize productivity, at the same time lowering sales costs on your end, then you can definitely see much improvement for your business in no time at all.