Laziness and Procrastination

Posted on May 29, 2013 by dawn — Leave a comment

Everyone have these feelings within them (even I am included). Both of these feelings are what usually hinders the productivity of what we do. Laziness is not having the will to do something and usually ended up doing nothing. Procrastination is the act of delaying or deferring what you needed to do. We are always having a hard time in hindering these feelings away when trying to do something. I found out that there are a couple of reasons that made us feel that way:

1. It is difficult to start doing something

Usually, it is difficult to start doing something unless it already urgent (which brings us back to procrastinating).

2. Delaying or deferring is easier

We tend to find it easier to delay or defer the work because we believe that we can do it better at a better time. In fact, there is no better time! What we are trying to do is slacking (lazy) around and procrastinate while believing that we can do it later.

3. Just don’t have the urge to do it

This is what I found out to be the hardest barrier to overcome. Pushing yourself to do something you do not want to is difficult because you just

To overcome these barriers, there is a technique proposed from a book that I read is to make yourself work for a period of short time i.e. for 30 minutes. When you started working, just told yourself that you are only going to do this for 30 minutes and you will find yourself to be able to do more (I already tried it)!

I hope this helps whoever that is struggling with this problem because this works for me 🙂

Tagged with: effective, lazy, procrastinate, productivity, psychology
Posted in Business

Market Acceptance Test

Posted on May 23, 2013 by dawn — Leave a comment

I have just read a book that gives an excellent idea on how to test your product before launching to the market. After reading and thinking about it, for everything that you are selling, it ought to have a certain value to the customer and the customer ought to be willing to pay for it. The customers are the one who decides that the product that you are selling is valuable enough that they wanted to spend their hard earned money into your product.

Imagine you have created Something and you wanted to sell it for a certain price. Before you move ahead and purchase the tools for mass production, you need to know first whether your product will be able to thrive in the market because purchasing the tools can be very costly. You begin to wander on how to try to sell your product without manufacturing it first to avoid the unnecessary cost.

One of the ways of testing your product is by using a technique called the Shadow Testing. Shadow Testing is being done by letting your product out in the open market before production. One of the way to do this is letting your customers know about your product and the value that you can deliver onto them. After marketing your product out in the open, the next step is to open a subscription for them to pre-order for the product. When they are doing the pre-order, you will not charge the customer until a certain date (ex. release date). The no charge action is being done to put the customer in a loss aversion state because nobody wanted to be at a disadvantage position.

After gathering for a while, you will be able to see that whether your product could thrive in the market or not. If it is not then you don’t have to continue on because you have not charged anyone for your product. On the other hand, if it is then you already have their credit card number and you could charge them for the product that they already ordered.

By doing this, you could avoid a lot of unnecessary steps before knowing whether your product will be able to thrive in the market or not. The costs that you needed will be far less.

Tagged with: acceptance, business, deliver, market, market entry, marketing, test, testing, value
Posted in Business

Amazon Takes Kindle Fire HD Tablets To 170 Countries As It Ramps Up Its Appstore To Nearly 200 Markets

Posted on May 23, 2013 by dawn — Leave a comment

Posted in Uncategorized

Marketing is Sales? or Sales is Marketing?

Posted on May 22, 2013 by dawn — Leave a comment

Most often when you are scouring looking for a job, you often found that there are a lot of marketing positions and you thought “hey, the job seems interesting. I guess I could try it out.”. After several interviews and questions to the interviewee, you started to realize that the job is actually for sales not marketing.

Nowadays, most people perceived marketing as the same as sales (at least in my country it is). People often thought of combining these 2 parts as the same. While in fact, it isn’t and the content for each part is far from identical. The perception of marketing and sales have been biased so far that most people perceived it as the same thing.

Marketing is the act of letting people know about your product, brand or services. Marketing doesn’t have any relation whatsoever in closing a deal or making profits. Marketing is trying to let people know how well you can provide a good value for your customers and why should they choose you instead of other competitors.

Whilst Sales is the act of making a sell for the company. What sales is trying to do is offering the products or services for the customers to pay for. In order for the company to make a profit, the sales must do their work well and close the deal. Approaching the customers and closing the deal is what the Sales team are there for.

So in conclusion, the difference of Marketing and Sales is that Marketing is the part where you try to brand your products and letting people know about it. While Sales is the part where you try to close a deal and make a profit out of it.

Hope this helps.

Tagged with: advertising, brand marketing, branding, business, closing the deal, marketing, Perception, profit, profits, publication, sales
Posted in Business

Radical Vs. Accumulative Change

Posted on May 21, 2013 by dawn — Leave a comment

Optimizing is something we usually do to either the process, flow or even existing products that we have created. Optimizing means that we are changing it for a better result. But how do we implement the changes? Is it by radically changing it or by doing accumulative changes?

Toyota becoming #1 in vehicle manufacturing by constantly doing small changes to their manufacturing processes. The changes that they implement could be accumulated to 1 million changes in a year. Doing a lot of small changes will need a lot of work and time but accumulative changes could give us a huge impact on what we are doing whilst reducing the risk making a false change altogether. The time it needed for the changes to show its result may took longer than expected. Nevertheless, accumulative change sometimes is a waste of effort if not defined properly. The thousands of changes that is implemented might not show any result whatsoever and is a waste of time and resources.

Now let’s talk about implementing radical change. Implementing radical change will show us how effective the changes are but we also need to consider a lot of factor by doing this. The time it needed will be much less compared to accumulative changes but the risk of implementing radical changes is really high. I have read in seen in several cases that when doing this they are having a risk in shutting down altogether. Instead of having a better result for the change, they are having big trouble with the changes they implement. The damage that they cause could be tangible damage (assets, loss, etc) and even intangible damage (reputation, trust, etc). Sometimes, radical change will give an excellent result compared to accumulative change, this can be shown by how IBM changes. The changes that they made enables them keep sustaining and growing.

Here are the advantages of these two types of changes:

Radical Change	Accumulative Change
The time that is needed to be able to see the changes is shorter	Lowers the risk in having a complete meltdown or shutdown
Having a mega blueprint for the changes can actually be done	Minimizes the effort needed in each stage of the changes

The disadvantages of these two types of changes :

Radical Change	Accumulative Change
Have a high risk of completely meltdown or shutdown	Took a long time and effort to implement
After the changes has been done, additional cost and effort for utilizing the changes needed to be done (such as training etc)	A lot of changes procedures needed to be managed

Having these two types of changes, what do you think is the best one?

The answer is none. These types of changes both have their own merits and can be useful according to the circumstances, resources and time span. Defining the right moment and the right situation for implementing the changes is really important for maximizing the result received.

Tagged with: Accumulative, Advantage, business, Change, management, merit, Radical
Posted in Business

Real-Time Parking Startup ParkMe Launches An Android App

Posted on May 21, 2013 by dawn — Leave a comment

Interesting

Posted in Uncategorized

Mobile Phone Battery Power Consumption

Posted on May 6, 2013 by dawn — Leave a comment

Often I found myself using mobile phones in a high building is power consuming. I don’t know why but it seems that when my usual battery could lasts for around 12 hours, it is cut to half in high buildings.
Is this because of the lack of signal due to the structure of high buildings or there’s some other reasons for it?
Really curious about this one because I seem to found myself to have a low battery state whenever I wanted to use my phone 🙂

Tagged with: battery power, consumption, high building, skyscrapper, time power consumption
Posted in Curious

WHAT A DEAD SQUIRREL TAUGHT ME ABOUT VALUE PRICING

Posted on May 2, 2013 by dawn — 2 Comments

Source : WHAT A DEAD SQUIRREL TAUGHT ME ABOUT VALUE PRICING
By : Neil Baron

MANY COMPANIES WORRY ABOUT THE COMMODITIZATION OF THEIR OFFERINGS AND THEIR INABILITY TO JUSTIFY PREMIUM PRICING–BUT IF YOU FIGURE OUT HOW TO TAKE CARE OF YOUR CUSTOMERS’ “DEAD SQUIRRELS,” YOU’RE GOLDEN.

During the summer months, we spend as much time as we can enjoying our screened in porch. We eat our meals, read and play board games without worrying about mosquitoes. Without question, it is our favorite part of the house.

All that changed a couple of weeks ago when we noticed a strange odor coming from our beloved porch. Over the next couple of days, it grew from a mild annoyance to one of the most toxic, disgusting smells we have ever experienced. It became impossible to approach the porch without gagging. Flies were everywhere. We assumed that the smell was coming from a dead animal that was hidden somewhere beneath the porch. We never thought about it, but the 4-inch gap between the ground and the porch floor was big enough to allow an animal to get trapped.

I got as close as I could with my flashlight, but I couldn’t see anything (not that I looked all that closely).

My mother in law, having lived in New Jersey, considers herself an odor expert. She investigated the situation and was convinced that the porch needed to be torn down in order to remove the animal.
My family panicked over the prospect of an unexpected construction project. “How to save the Barons’ porch” became a neighborhood topic of conversation. On the advice of my wise neighbor, Dana Wilson, we conducted a Google search and reached out to our local pest control company.

NW Pest Control told me that they could come the next morning. If they removed the animal, the cost would be $125. If they couldn’t remove the animal, there would be no charge.

Bob from NW Pest Control showed up the next day exactly when he said he would. From about 50 feet away, he confirmed that we had a dead animal on the premises.

He grabbed his flashlight (which was much more suited to finding a dead animal than mine) and immediately told me that the problem was a dead squirrel in a hard-to-find spot beneath the stairs. With his special animal removal tools, the squirrel was gone within 5 minutes.

Our porch was saved and life could return to normal. We were overjoyed. I told my wife it was the best $125 we ever spent. For everyone but the squirrel, this story has a happy ending.

There are a number of pricing lessons that B2B companies can take from this story. Bob spent only 5 minutes with us. So the $125 we paid for Bob’s expertise was equivalent to $1500 per hour! Now, there are very few situations where I would willingly pay someone $1500 per hour. Yet I was delighted to pay in this situation. What was going on?

•NW Pest offered a guarantee that was appropriate for their business and customers. If they could not solve the problem, then we did not have to pay.
•We were in pain. The stench from the dead animal was impacting our quality of life.
•There was a huge financial risk if we did nothing. If my mother in law was correct, tearing down and rebuilding the porch would have cost at least $20,000.
•The emotional aspect of this problem was real. We were anxious about the situation and angry that we could not use the porch.
The value to us of fixing this situation far outweighed the $1500/hour cost.

Unlike how many B2B companies sell and market their offerings, NW Pest did not overwhelm us with the details of their animal removal equipment, their process for animal removal or the credentials of their technicians. They focused on our problem, guaranteed it would be solved or no charge and made it clear how they would make our lives better. Through their hiring practices, training, and equipment, they clearly invested in optimizing specific services that offer maximum value to their customers.

Many B2B companies worry about the commoditization of their offerings and their inability to justify premium pricing. They could probably learn a lot from thinking about NW Pest’s pricing model for dead squirrels.

The Takeaway: Just because you’re B2B, doesn’t mean premium pricing is out of reach–if you emphasize exemplary customer service.

Tagged with: B2B, nature, pricing, Product, service
Posted in Articles

Autism Awareness Month: An IDEA to Include

Posted on April 11, 2013 by dawn — Leave a comment

Posted in Uncategorized