RESOURCE CENTRE

So, you've spent a lot of time and money writing, testing, rewriting and finally sending out a great mailshot promoting your new product. You're sure it's going to work well, because the test you diligently carried out proved very effective. All you have to do now is wait for the responses to start flooding in. But there's one other thing you need to remember.

Be there to receive them.

Too many small businesses waste blood, sweat and tears - not to mention cash - planning and carrying out a promotional campaign, only to blow it all by making the prospects who respond to it wait too long for a response.

Of course, you can't man your phones and e-mail systems 24-7. But there are a few things you can do to make sure your potential new customers don't get tired of waiting for you.

• Set up a recorded voicemail which you can use to make sure that even prospects who call out-of-hours have somewhere to leave their names and numbers. Then, first thing every morning, make it your top priority to get back to them. A prospect who rings you up at 11pm (and you'd be surprised how many will) won't necessarily expect you to answer the phone, but they WILL appreciate a call back the following day.
• Make sure your website includes an e-mail address, or better still, an e-mail enquiry form, to enable interested visitors to contact you. More people are using the Internet to research products and services, and this method of research appeals to people with full-time jobs who don't have time to call you during business hours.
• If you do happen to pick up an e-mail enquiry or phone message after hours, don't be afraid to reply to it immediately. Some small business owners worry that this will set an unhelpful precedent or look unprofessional, but the truth is that prospects simply want a fast response. They won't notice the time marked on your e-mail to them, but they will remember how quickly you replied.
• Decide on an acceptable response time, include it in your promotional literature, and stick to it. If it's going to take you two days to follow up each lead because you're working alone, then make sure you tell prospects this so that they're not disappointed by the lack of an immediate response.
• Don't let public holidays spoil all your efforts. If you know that you're going to be unable to respond to enquiries between Christmas and New Year, make sure you leave a voicemail or set up an automated e-mail response to keep your prospects informed and let them know when they can expect a reply. Don't leave them hanging, as they won't hang around for long.

The UK Small Business Marketing Bible contains more practical advice on responding to enquiries, as well as hundreds of tips and tactics for boosting your sales using proven marketing strategies that work no matter what product or service you sell.

Setting up a home office is a favourite way for entrepreneurs to get their business ideas off the ground. It saves on rental charges, it allows you to balance home and work life, and it cuts out the daily commute which is a feature of many office workers' lives.

You can expect your local Valuation Office (VOA) to find it interesting too. Their job is to assess properties for the purpose of setting council tax and rateable value, and they will make a decision on whether your home is liable for business rates or council tax depending on how it's used.

The VOA considers "the extent and frequency of the business use of the room (or rooms)" you use for your business, and takes into consideration any alterations you've made to make your home suitable for running a business.

If they decide that part of your home is mostly or entirely used for business purposes, they may well split your rates between council tax and business rates.

There are no hard and fast rules, so the VOA offers some examples of decisions they make. An office with a lot of business equipment is likely to be considered business premises, but a room with a computer and a phone may well still be subject to council tax. Getting a second phone line installed (a common practice with business owners trying to separate work and home life) may prove decisive, and the use made of a room for normal domestic life will be an important factor.

With this in mind, the VOA website (http://www.voa.gov.uk/council_tax/working_from_home.htm) is worth checking out before making any major decisions about extensions and conversions to your home. And the Red Tape BUSTER has useful guides to tax, working from home, and hundreds of other scenarios and FAQs about the legal issues faced by small businesses.

Now that everybody seems to be doing business with firms and people abroad, it's a good idea to be fluent in three or four languages. Five, if possible.

But wait, let's get back to reality. If you're too busy running your business to spend the thousands of hours that would take, there are ways of finding out what that German catalogue means, how to send a confirmation note to your new Russian customer, and whether that strange Italian e-mail you received is a valuable order or a marriage proposal.

• Alta Vista has been offering free online translations via Babelfish (http://babelfish.altavista.com) for several years now. Sure, it's taken some flak since it translated the Italian for World Cup as Global Teacup, but it continues to improve and add new languages, including Chinese and Russian.
• If you're looking for the meaning of individual words, the European Union portal offers a huge database called Eurodicautom (http://europa.eu.int/eurodicautom/login.jsp), which covers most continental languages. It's particularly impressive for technical terms, but it's also great if you're just looking for the French for "for your information".
• Trueterms offer a free multilingual dictionary, but strangely not on their website. It's available at Downloads.com (http://www.download.com/Travel-Dictionary-English-for-Windows/3000-2279-10118104.html), and contains a database of words in all the major European languages.
• And finally, Travlang (http://dictionaries2.travlang.com/index.html) has everything the business traveller or tourist needs. It includes online dictionaries, but also sells a range of handheld translation machines from Seiko, Franklin and Ectaco.

a. to solve a problem
b. to cancel or revoke
c. to replace a faulty product
d. to compensate

Answer at the end of Bulletin.

If you're thinking of travelling to an international trade fair to display your wares and meet new customers, be on the lookout for a new breed of scammers, pegged as 'brandnappers'. The Institute of Trade Mark Attorneys (ITMA) is advising small businesses to register trade marks on their products prior to attending trade shows, after a recent case saw a rejected distributor attempt to register the same trade mark as the business they had hoped to work with.

Get advice from the ITMA at:
http://www.itma.org.uk/news-events/press-releases/press-view.php?id=97&date=25%20Aug

You can get an explanation on what a trade mark actually is, and how it works, from the UK Patent Office at:
http://www.patent.gov.uk/media/pressrelease/2004/2408.htm

Google web alerts