Learn When the Christmas Sales Season Starts

Learn When the Christmas sale Season StartsLearn When the Christmas Sales Season StartsNo official start date exists for retailers to begin launching their Christmas holiday season sales. In fact, each year, different retailers experiment with new types of sales, shopping incentives, and earlier start dates in an effort to enhance shopping opportunities for their customers, both online and in-store. The Christmas/holiday retail sales season is dynamic and continues to evolve. As a current rule of thumb, the unofficial kickoff event for holiday shopping usually hovers around Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. Some larger department stores have experimented in previous years with launching holiday shopping sales on Thanksgiving Day. However, this welches met with a lot of backlash, mainly for not considering the needs of the stores employees. The perfect time for you to start a holiday sales campaign in your geschftliches miteinander depends on two things The nature of your busi ness andthe market you serve. When and Why to Start Holiday Sales Its unclear whether starting holiday sales earlier in the year has any benefits, in part because each business and market is different. There are some obvious drawbacks that do span multiple industries, though. First and foremost, pushing too hard for sales is almost always a way to turn-off potential buyers. Few shoppers want to see a store decked out for the fall holidays before Halloween, especially because theyre still recovering from back-to-school sales and may need a break before they ease into the holiday season. Even the day after Halloween is just too soon for most shoppers and is more likely to lead to eye-rolling and irritation than to pre-holiday sales. If handled poorly, early holiday sales events can end up costing retailers. For instance, temporary or seasonal hires hired on too early can end up costing more if hired earlier in the season when the store doesnt have the additional sales to support t he extra staff. Another issue is taking up store space with Christmas inventory instead of other year-round merchandise that could be selling. If the Christmas items arent selling yet, thats a welcheste of potentially valuable retail space. Choosing the Right Products for Holiday Sales It pays to put some thought into which products and services you discount for the holiday sales season, and when you start offering the discounts. For example, there are many types of products and services that people need to plan for or purchase long in advance of the holidays. This includes travel services, wedding arrangements, and big-ticket items like new cars. Offering a Christmas in July sale for cars, trucks, and similar items make sense. However, offering Christmas in July sales for winter-season clothing and ice skates may not go over as well because theyre not big-ticket and the weathers still warm. Conversely, if you live in a cold climate where people associate the crisp, cool air wit h the ushering in of the holidays, you may find it easier to market winter items earlier in the year than you would in Florida or Southern California where people are less likely to be thinking scarves, mittens, and hats. Keep zeiteinteilung in Mind Timing matters because of your target customers paycheck cycles and year-end pay. Some people only shop towards the end of the year when they get their annual Christmas bonuses. If your target market does not have money to spend earlier in the season, consider offering a layaway plan where shoppers can pay off a large purchase over a number of weeks. And dont forget about the shoppers who do a good part of their buying after the holidays to take advantage of after-Christmas sales. Many people have cash and gift cards to use, and theyre likely to have lighter work schedules which allow them to spend more time shopping than before the holidays. Do Whats Best for Your Business Perhaps the best holiday sales tip for all business owne rs is to aid just following what your peers do. It is always wise to study what the competition is doing but just because someone else started their holiday sales campaigns in October does not mean that it was a good decision, or that it will work for your business.

Tips for Creating a Testimonial Form Template

Tips for Creating a Testimonial Form TemplateTips for Creating a Testimonial Form TemplateTestimonials are a powerful sales tool when handled correctly and customer testimonials are often the most effective type since they are also the most believable. The wise salesperson will gather a group of testimonials for use in convincing prospects to buy. vorstellungsgesprch Your Customers The most effective, albeit time-consuming, way to get testimonials is to interview your best customers, write up a testimonial including direct and accurate quotes, and print it out in a professional-looking format such as a letter or brochure. This process takes some planning, as youll need to locate customers who are willing to help, set up a time to interview them and do the actual writing of the testimonial. Prepared Form The next best way is to have a pre-written form for interested customers to fill out, and then plug quotes from this form into a standardized testimonial template. This method takes up much less of your time and yields faster results, but usually, results in a less effective end product. One method that just doesnt work is sitting back and waiting for your customers to shower you with testimonials. Sad but true, if your product is working well for the customer, they dont think about it. The only time youre likely to come up in the customers mind is when something is going wrong, in which case they are unlikely to shower you with testimonials. Ideally, youll want to collect testimonials from a wide range of customer types. The more connected a prospect feels to the customer in the testimonial, the better, so having a lot of possible samples increases your odds of finding a really good match for a tough prospect. It also demonstrates that your product works well for many different types of customers. Testimonials If your business is brand new or youre selling a new product and dont have many customers, you can get testimonials anyway by handing out fre e samples of your product in return for a written evaluation from the recipients. Make sure to include the information somewhere that you may use quotes from them in your absatzwirtschaft materials. Thank You Notes Hopefully, you already send thank-you notes to new customers right after you close a sale. You can include a request for a testimonial in the thank-you note itself, and youll soon be neck-deep in testimonials. Either suggest that they email you a few lines about their experiences with your product, or include the aforementioned pre-written testimonial request form with the note. If you need to build up a big stock of testimonials quickly, try offering some incentive to customers. It can be as simple as appealing to their pride by telling them their name and story will be featured in your marketing documents, or you can offer a coupon, free gift or another incentive to get the testimonials rolling in.

Meet the Founders Behind Jobscan

Meet the Founders Behind Jobscan Meet the Founders Behind Jobscan I love a good startup story.The odds are always huge on the personal level, because entrepreneurs have to take lots of risks in order to put their ideas to the test. And theyre fully aware that most startups fail.So when I welches on Skype with Jobscan founders James Hu and Michael Lee, to find out how Jobscan worked, I also asked a few questions beyond the technical stuff. How the idea came about, the pitfalls, the lessons Heres a bit of their story. The job search problemIt begins in October, 2013, when James welches out of a job, coming back from Asia. He welches caught in the grueling process of looking for work. He researched how resumes were handled and decided to invest a lot of energy into tailoring keywords. His goal was to convince automated resume screeners that he was a good candidate. But he felt he was spending too much time, for each application, identifying the right keywords to include in his resume. S uch a tedious process Being a techie, he knew this could be automated, so he got to work on what would become the core Jobscan functionality comparing keywords in your resume with those of the job listing.Not only would an automated solution improve his job search, it would also become a remarkable part of his portfolio. Two birds with one stone This was indeed a good project to showcase his technical abilities. So he coded away, by himself.For about two months and a half, he was using his keyword tool and improving it. The idea of sharing his little app became obvious While I was building this, I figured I might as well make it useful to others. Maybe its something I could turn into a service one day.Once it was relatively bug-free (James and Michael like that term relatively), he started telling his friends. And thats how Jobscan was launched. In a remote corner of the web, somewhere, without blogger-magnet startup stunts like chocolate-covered grasshoppers or lying about a yoga v ideo It was just out there, for people to use. And it grew organically. The word got out about this cool new keyword-matching app. (A very decent minimum viable product, or MVP, as its called in the Lean Startup movement in the Silicon Valley.)In the meantime, James found work. And hes not the only one that got good results with Jobscan the feedback he was getting was positive. So he kept going, dug deeper into each ATS, despite working full-time.A year later, James quit his job and focused solely on Jobscan. The website started picking up mora traction and now needed to level up engineering. Enter Michael. A software engineer who spent 8 years with Google in New York. They met during a street clean-up volunteering event in Seattle. (Yes, it does read like something they would make up.)In February 2015, we were looking at a healthy, but still quite small project. And now that James and Michael wanted to see it blossom, they did some serious testing (Why It Works). It allowed them to deepen their understanding of how resumes were processed by computers, and to adapt their tool accordingly. Riding the waveIn the following months, Jobscan was getting more and more attention. Actually, just a few days after launch, they got mentioned on Lifehacker.com. When youre a startup, that stuff really helps. Each month, new users were coming in. Which meant that James and Michael were working hard to improve it, but were also feeling the pressure of running a legitimate startup. Heres JamesWhen you work on something thats not exactly working a product or service that people dont really want, it feels like youre dragging the project along. Youre just hammering away and youre not getting traction. This time around, theres a market force. The product and the users are dragging us along. Its almost like were riding a wave, and the wave is pushing us forward. Thats a nice feeling, but at the same time, theres an obligation. A pressure to keep doing better.James realized that he was surfing that wave while he was employed. Thats when it clicked for him Jobscan had taken off. It wasnt a side project anymore. People were really using itAnd the pressures of a real service were kicking in. The two guys were working very closely together, owning the entire project. For Michael, the main programmer, stepping out of his comfort zone used to mean customer support. But now, he needed to do some marketing and SEO. And had to learn these skills.Also, in the early days, the two entrepreneurs would personally reply to every single email they received. Now, they had extra hands for that. People they needed to hire and manage and payFor a long time, Michael was afraid of the scale of the website. Could it handle the expanding number of users? We were growing month over month in terms of traffic. But I didnt really have the background to know when the website would stop working.That does sound like a big concern when your website IS your productThere were some scary momen ts We got to migrate a couple of times (servers, service providers, etc.). Migrations are fun.To handle all that stress, James even started muay thai (martial art from Thailand). Michael enjoys driving around, something he missed out on in his years in NYC.Now, while this might look like just another tech startup story, its very different when its your story. For example, it wasnt clear from Day One whether this would actually take off. It was an adventure, far from the paths they were expected to walk. A lot of people around them thought that safe jobs at Google or Microsoft were much better than this little side project.What about your 401(k)? And how will you meet a nice young lady if youre working on this all the time? You get the picture.The purpose of JobscanIve asked them about the black hole of resumes that dreadful silence after youve sent one, ten or fifty resumes. Its sort of a hot topic in the job market space, as it deeply resonates with the unemployed. Why dont I hear anything back? What am I doing wrong?James understands both sides of the coinTheres a technical perspective and theres a human element. Ideally, recruiters could get back to candidates, to bring a human touch. No one wants to be rejected by a machine or feel ignored. But at the same time, zugnglich applications have become so easy that it causes a flood of resumes which causes recruiters not being able to respond. And then people apply more Its a cycleThe cycle that leads to the blackhole conundrumOur job is to help people know why the black hole exists and how they can improve their chances.And thats really the purpose of Jobscan. They understand how broken the job search process is, especially the lack of feedback. But Jobscan can help you navigate around the black hole (explained here). Theyve tested the impact of tailoring keywords and they know it works.Theyre quite serious about trying to help jobseekers. As Michael noted We cant solve the problem completely, because theres mu ltiple aspects to it. But we can help job seekers surface their resumes within the applicant tracking systems.And each step forward matters.Improvement and the Seattle Nomads Caf GuideIn the first half of 2015, James and Michael were working out of coffee shops around Seattle. In order to help them choose the right one, they even created a spreadsheet in Google Sheets. But they brought this spreadsheet to another level.They used the spreadsheet to keep track of each venue and its prices, but also its temperature, number of outlets, wifi speed and free parking availability. And you could sort the list according to your needsWhats even funnier is that, when they told me about that spreadsheet, it really wasnt a big deal for them. (Doesnt everybody track the number of outlets in their favorite coffee shops?)I was laughing my head off.The very specific Seattle Nomads Caf spreadsheetIt just illustrates how optimizing and improving is a natural part of their mindset.For instance, theyve r ecently improved how Jobscan tracks skills, distinguishing among soft and hard skills. They also provide more and more recommendations for your resume, such as scanning for measurable results.So what does the future hold for Jobscan?More improvements, of course They pay attention to user feedback and theyre adamant about always striving for a better product. And while the ultimate vision is building the best tools for job seekers, they remain focused on their core service providing you with the right resume keywords to get past resume screeners.* * *If youve been using Jobscan for a while, James and Michael would love to hear your ideas on how to make it better for you. Send them your thoughts at emailprotectedAbout the AuthorRichard Poulin is the founder of Resume Hacking, a website and book series to help job seekers with tailored advice, by profession. One of his big ideas the 3 laws of resume writing.