One of the great joys of our work is meeting a wide range of successful local business owners. Each has a wonderful story to tell about how they created and developed their firm, and each has special challenges.

Each owner has a set of talents that make his or her business unique, and some valuable lessons for all of us on what has worked for them.

On the principal that it’s easier to follow someone else’s best practices than spend time and effort making up our own, here are some lessons we can all apply from business people right in our own neighbourhood.

We are not sharing these ideas for you to change your business partners and suppliers-these are simply people we have met and worked with whose business practices have given them above-average returns.

One is an independent insurance professional. Now, you probably all know that selling insurance is tough-in fact, there’s a saying in the business that “insurance is sold, not bought.” This insurance guy has created long-lasting relationships using a basic practice we should all follow: he makes and retains detailed notes about every single conversation he has with a client or potential client. Over twenty years, he has made a lot of notes! So now he can instantly and accurately recall exactly what his clients needs and issues are and offer products and services that change as people’s lives change. Because of this, his customers see that he has a detailed grasp of what’s important to them-a welcome change in an often-anonymous world.

Another makes and installs counter tops and cabinets. If you ask him the single thing he does that makes him more successful than his competition, he’ll say, “I call people back quickly.” He calls his prospects to confirm an appointment. He calls if he is going to be even five minutes late. He calls to let people know the status of their job. He calls to say how a quote is coming along. “Hey, I have a cell phone,” he says, “it’s so easy to do.” As a result he closes more deals, gets more repeat business and is recommended more often by his contractor partners.

The last one is the Membership Development Manager at a nearby Chamber of Commerce. She uses new social networking tools like LinkedIn, where she has a personal profile and a special Chamber group to connect to chamber members and potential members. The Chamber website allows visitors to track using Twitter and Facebook. The site is updated regularly with information that directly relates to the Chamber’s core message, “Where business connects”. This chamber has a reputation for being forward-thinking and has attracted over one thousand members.

Keeping notes of customer preferences, following up, and using new tools to automate the process: things we can all do to make our businesses more successful.

We are working on a new campaign for a client and spent a few hours today looking at competitive web sites, ads and brochures.

After about three hours we looked at each other and said, “Can you remember anything any of these companies said that stands out?” Ken said, “I bet if I took all these brochures, and removed the company name and logo, even our client couldn’t tell them apart!”

Every single firm started their pitch with a description of their products and services, and lots of detail on how great they are. Then they added thrilling descriptions of their plants (usually with a picture of the parking lot) and a price list.

No one acknowledged any of the pain, concerns, questions or worries prospects or customers might have. It was all me! me! me!

It’s too easy these days to build your marketing around what you want to offer. The real trick is to package products customers want to buy .

People make buying decisions in ways that we may find hard to imagine. The mental, logical process and the emotional, feel good process come together at some point in every sale. The problem is that this process is invisible to the marketer.

The questions prospects ask are clues to what matters to them. So, forget about the shiny new features of your gizmo and address what’s really on their mind. Do it now, because some of your prospects won’t think to actually ask, they’ll just move on.

Every time a prospect or client asks a question, write it down. Collect these questions on an ongoing basis, and make every sales person note the questions they receive. In a very short time you will see patterns developing. If you are getting some of the same questions over and over again you can bet that your marketing materials need to address the answers.

FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) pages are popular on web sites. Create one for your sales team as well. Make a game out of getting good questions. Ask everyone in your organization to bring a client or prospect question to a weekly sales meeting. This can and should include everyone who has any contact with clients.

Develop the art of asking questions too. Every sales trainee has been schooled at some point to ask probing questions to find a prospect’s pain, but really successful sales folks go beyond that fully understand what a prospect is thinking.

Don’t take a prospect’s question at face value-your job is to help them understand what they really need to know. Sometimes all you need to do is ask them to “tell you more”.

For example, a stock question is “What is your customer service policy?” The temptation is to launch into how great your service is (just like everyone else), but a more valuable step is to find out what good service is to them or what bad experiences they may have had, so you can customize your answer.

If you really want to make massive improvements in your sales, service and communications technique, buy a mini digital recorder and record several sales calls. Some clients and prospects will be a little nervous about this practice so you will need to choose wisely and respect boundaries, but do this once or twice and you may make some pretty interesting discoveries.

Another great thing about gathering your list of questions is that it arms you with the questions and answers that your prospects may not ask but are thinking.

Our mentor John Jantsch suggests that every organization should create a marketing page and web page that is titled something like “Questions you should ask.” In some cases your prospect may not really know how to analyze a purchase from you. If you educate them on the best way to think about your product or service, give them the questions to pose to competitors, you get to frame the buying decision in a way that plays to your strengths.

Online surveys have become a powerful tool for the small business. By asking your clients everything from “How much should I charge?” to “What’s the best color for our logo?” you can test your assumptions before you push something out to the market. Creating simple satisfaction survey and serving them up to each individual customer allows you to find holes in your customer service and collect comments, good and bad, from the street.

Planning what your readers would like to hear more about in your next five newsletter issues is as simple as proposing topics in a survey.

Journalists love survey results and will often take great interest in the results of research conducted by an industry expert-that means you! Conducting some basic research about trends and habits in your industry is a great way to add some expert status to your brand and could land your results in a publication or two about your industry.

Sharing your survey results with prospects is a great way to help educate them on important information that may impact their buying decisions.

Take a systematic approach to small business public relations.

PR (public/media relations) is a powerful small business-marketing tool. By PR, we mean getting positive press mentions about your firm in local, trade and national publications.

These mentions are so powerful because they are seen to come from unbiased third parties, so they are more believable. People may think ad messages are just sales hype, but when they read about how great you are in the local business journal…well, it must be true!

A lot of people think that gaining positive PR is luck. No! It’s the result of a systematic commitment to generating media coverage.

The hardest part is getting the PR machine rolling. Once you get coverage, it just keeps on coming. The more coverage you get, the more the press will keep coming back to you. Here’s our step-by-step system for generating positive press coverage.

Step 1 - Build relationships before you ask for the order! Target your media sources, including a growing list of internet-based media and news resources. Start networking with these media targets today by requesting editorial calendars, sending industry information, commenting on stories they write, passing on surveys and data, inviting them to workshops.

Tip: Network with the advertising sales folks at the publications too, they will give you lots of good information about who does what and where in the course of trying to sell you an ad.

Step 2 - Create three or four central media themes for the years that support your core-marketing message.

Step 3 - Create a list of ten to twelve minor, but interesting, marketing related themes for ongoing PR. You need to fill in with volume while you are working on the front page feature.

Step 4 - Create a PR calendar (download one at http://marketing.about.com/od/marketingtools/l/blmktgcaltemp.htm) and assign a PR theme and goal for each month. Focus on one publication or one writer and you will be amazed at how much you can accomplish. Remember to target editorial calendars (Publications will often assign monthly themes, so match your pitch to the theme.)

Step 5 - Write a fully developed pitch (start with our sample Media Pitch Letter below), for each of your major themes-a pitch is a story idea that you can “pitch” to a member of the media. This is not a press release, but more of a sales job. Wrap your story idea around a news angle or trend and package the pitch to interest the readers of a specific publication you are pitching. You can change and repackage your pitches as needed. These are reserved for your central media themes.

Step 6 - Formulate one-page press releases (Send for the free Press Release Creator we talk about at the end of the article) with catchy headlines for each of your minor themes.

Step 7 - Once a month, target your core media list and distribute a press release or pitch for a major theme. Post all press releases on a national wire service, such as PRWeb, and send copies of your press releases to clients and prospects. Don’t forget op-eds and letters to the editor.

Step 8 - Follow-up with your core media list by telephone and offer some new piece of news or trend angle that you did not include in your pitch or press release.

Step 9 - Track media coverage in local and trade press, set-up Google Alerts for a number of key related terms and reprint for marketing purposes any media coverage received.

Step 10 - Send handwritten thank you notes to members of the media to thank them for an interview or mention.

Are you starting to get a glimpse of how combining advertising, PR and referrals can build momentum and create marketing energy? Try it and see the results.

You can get a free online press release creator that allows you to instantly create powerful, attention grabbing, perfectly formatted press releases in an instant at: www.ducttapemarketing.com/Instant-Press-Release.htm .

About a month ago, Staples and Angus Reid released their latest “STAPLES Canada Small Business National Quarterly Index,”

It looks like we believe we are over the hump. 70 per cent of business owners expect at least some improvement to their business over the next six months (compared to 58 per cent in March 2009).

Now that you’re feeling better, get out there and make sure that your customers will come to you rather than your competition when they are ready to buy.

Chances are you are a little tight for cash, so here are 10 low-cost ways to market better we’ve worked out with help from Joanna L. Krotz, co-author of the “Microsoft Small Business Kit”.

• Stop servicing break-even customers. By now you know this is a theme with us. Every second you spend with a customer who doesn’t help you make money you are short-changing those who do.

• Make every customer feel special. Always add something to the purchase, whether it’s a hand-written note to a consumer or a recommendation on the latest greatest business book to a business customer.

• Create business cards that prospects keep. How about a good-looking notepad with your contact info and tagline on every page? Or a free or low-cost trial offer on the back, real estate that’s valuable and often wasted.

• Develop an electronic mailing list and send old-fashioned letters too. E-newsletters are cheap to send, but you can quickly stand out by occasionally sending personal, surface mail letters to customers and prospects too. Just make sure the letter delivers something customers want to read.

• Boost your profile at point of sale, trade shows and conferences. You can quickly create your own signage, glossy postcards with your contact information, product news inserts or an event mini web site even if you are not a software professional.

• Combine business with pleasure - and charity. Spearhead an event, party or conference for a cause you care about. That puts you in the position of getting to know lots of people and shows off your small business leadership skills.

• Create a destination. Indigo Books & Music has its coffee bars. IKEA offers child-care centers and cafeterias. Steal this idea. Add a free advisory service. Add customer loyalty services, such as free delivery for second-time buyers.

• Become an online expert. This is the “free sample” approach to bringing in business. Research active e-mail discussion lists and online bulletin boards that is relevant to your business and audience. Join and start posting expert advice.

• Court local media. Editorial features convey more credibility with prospective clients than paid advertising does. (Check our recent article on how to get PR.)

• Finally, don’t let customers simply slip away. It costs a lot less to retain a disgruntled or inactive customer than to acquire a new one. Send a personalized e-mail (you can automate this process), inquiring whether all is well. For a customer who suffered a bad experience, pick up the phone, acknowledging the unpleasantness and ask if there’s anything you can do. A discount can’t hurt either.

Being kind to customers is the smartest low-cost marketing you can do.

In the last couple of weeks I had an occasion to witness extremes of communication between a customer and a business. It certainly hammered home the point that customer service and communication are critical.

Example #1: my wife phoned for service on a microwave which did everything except actually heat food. Admittedly, it was after hours, but she went through six levels of: “If you want this, press that” until finally getting to “our hours of business are Monday to Friday, 9-4:30”, please try our website. To cap it off, the website was down.

Example #2: I went to buy some software online. At the checkout for item A, I was offered a suite for the same price as item A, and I’d get A, B and C. As I was interested in C, but not to the point of paying an extra $400, I said yes. Now my checkout cart said: suite, download protection, and media kit. As the download was around a gigabyte, and I wasn’t in a hurry, I cancelled the download protection and said yes to the media kit, and even paid the extra $2 for next day delivery. Well, it turns out that next day delivery from Thursday evening was actually Tuesday, but that was the least of my problems. The DVD did not have item “C” on it; it was not the media kit for the suite. I emailed the address from the confirmation email. I had a reply saying they didn’t do refunds. I said I didn’t want a refund, I wanted the correct item. I got a “call customer service”. They said I got what I ordered. Two escalations later, I found I’d been talking to a software distributor, not the manufacturer. Two more calls got me to the manufacturer, and finally, an offer to refund my $25 so I could order the correct item. What about the $19 shipping? They don’t refund shipping. Period. Now, we’re talking about a $1 DVD in a 70 cent DVD case here. Couldn’t they just ship me the right DVD - it would cost them less than the $25. NO. NO. NO. I took the $25 and downloaded on a spare PC and burned myself a disk.

Example #3: bought a fancy phone on e-bay. After the deal was settled, I e-mailed and asked if the seller knew how to set the parameters to get internet on a pay as you go account. He answered within hours with a page of detailed instructions, and also warned me that at 15 cents a KB, I could go through my balance quickly. I bought on Saturday, the seller shipped the phone on Sunday, and the phone arrived on Tuesday.

The big companies showed contempt for their customer, the little guy did it right. Sometime in the future, when it comes to upgrading the development software I’ve been faithful to since the 1990’s, I’m going to think twice (it wasn’t Microsoft, by the way). If someone sees my phone and wants to know where I got it, I’ll go the extra mile and refer them to my seller, who also got a glowing feedback.

Some takeaways:

• Don’t let just anyone program your phone response system, use someone with training
• Phone in yourself from time to time - see if it makes sense, at all times of the day
• If you come up with a marketing idea, make sure the distribution system and web site programming can handle it. Don’t, for instance, leave the SKU for an accessory the same when you change the main item!
• Be clear in your communications who you are. If you outsource some aspect of your operation, be sure that their policy and communication match yours, and where appropriate they identify themselves properly
• Make sure your customer service arm (even if outsourced) knows about your special sales, so customers don’t have to explain it over and over
• When it’s necessary, especially if a mistake has been made, be flexible

The nice thing about this is that for a small business, all of this is easy. It’s much harder for a large conglomerate. Small business owners, this is your huge advantage. Don’t blow it!

I really enjoy stepping outside my comfort zone. For me, this can take the shape of taking a class in a subject area quite orthogonal to my career, or attending a random event or starting a project in a realm in which I hold minimal to no expertise.

Along those lines, I recently attended a little known event called "Podcasters Across Borders" (PAB), which is a cozy affair traditionally held in Kingston, Ontario, that attracts independent podcasters from across the world, though mostly from Canada and the USA. For those not in the know, a podcast is essentially internet radio (or sometimes video) usually "broadcast" in the form of streaming audio from a website or as a downloadable MP3 file.

Many mainstream media providers, such as the CBC in Canada and NPR in the USA, produce their own professionally rendered podcasts. Indeed, I had the very good fortune of having been recently interviewed on two CBC podcasts: the technology show "Spark", and Radio Canada International's "Indo-Canadian Report". Both shows are also broadcast on regular radio, but service a fair chunk of their audience through online downloads.

A new business partner and I have decided to try our hand at creating a high quality, regular podcast. The details will have to wait for another time, lest this unnamed partner beat me senseless for letting the cat out of the bag too early. But the important thing here is that I know nothing about the medium or the tradition of podcasting; that's her thing.

And that's what brought me to PAB. As someone who spends a great deal of time at conferences and public meetings relevant to my discipline, usually behind a microphone, it was a thrill to attend such an event as a complete naive newbie, with no expectations placed upon me for either expertise or vocal participation. So this is what relaxation feels like?

The content and participants of the PAB event are irrelevant to this article. Rest assured, it was a fascinating event in which I learned a great deal about technology, unseen electronic social networks, and a global phenomenon of private citizens sharing their personal tales with the faceless masses of the internet; and where I met some very nice people. In short, non-professional podcasting in its present niche format seems like blogging with a lot more effort.

What was curious, though, was how a presentation on the monetization of this free user-generated content was received. An interesting model was put forward wherein income could be effectively generated by selling ad space in around one's podcasts, supported by some sophisticated market research and product marketing. I could see where the podcasting purists might object to this seeming taint on the altruism of their efforts. But the fact remains that the sector likely will not evolve without considering its economic aspects.

And that's where my mind got going. I think there's an opportunity here to meld small business practices, regardless of one's sector, with the social media interactivity and subtle marketing of podcasting. I already lightly tie my business practices in with my day job as a university professor, and heavily tie them in with my extensive online activities, which are ostensibly pursued for fun. My Facebook and Twitter feeds, for example, are essentially silliness, but both drive traffic to my blog, which is sometimes a tad more serious. That in turn drives attention to other elements on my website, and generates enthusiasm from me to explore thoughts and avenues that may or may not end up being financial profitable, but always result in an interesting outcome.

In short, I'm now wondering how podcasting and other such rich media social networking can assist the process. Stay tuned, I'm sure I'll work it out eventually!