The LuxMob Info Tags

Ondeck Sailing have been in business as a Sailing & Powerboat School for over ten years. The recent investment they have made on Open 60 - Pindar’s means the firm has built on the existing sea school product to make available a full assortment of events aboard high performance ocean racing yachts, for skippered charter, company sailing, race charter, mile building opportunities, cruising, adventure sailing trips, ocean passages & Caribbean charter. Their principal head office is based in Portsmouth at Gunwharf Quays Marina although Ondeck Sailing & Powerboat School do work from Greenwich as well.

Boating can be a sport, hobby, personal challenge or business tool. It is greatly pleasing for all participants that are involved & Ondeck Sailing can cater for persons of all experience from absolute beginners to sailing legends.

Ondeck Sailing provides a wide & inventive selection of corporate activities, and so there can be a bit for everyone to select from. Ondeck Sailing & Powerboat School do not only offer spectating and racing at all of the key events in the corporate yachting diary, Ondeck in addition have the resources to hold outstanding racing or yachting events for corporate hospitality, rewards, celebrations, networking, team & personal building. Ondeck have details on a range of Corporate Sailing Events.

There are corporate & group watersport events that provides unique fun and can be something everyone can join in. In this type of surrounding sailing allows everyone a chance to come together & resolve issues like that of morale, teamwork and leadership all of which can support your firm. Ondeck Sailing School can organise for anything between six to 600 hundred clients & can provide a full flotilla of sailing boats & performance yachts to opt from, depending on your organisations plan.

They additionally specialise in corporate Yachting trips, where you will do a full days corporate yachting work, stopping for provisions and then concluding in corporate and group sailing matches with a number of your team members so you can see how much you have remembered.

There are 3 basic components to capturing leads on free traffic exchanges that need to be understood. Lead capture pages , Autoresponder follow up systems , and Ad tracking URLs .

The lead capture page can be hosted anywhere but it needs to have at least one thing on it to be effective… a way to capture a person’s email address.

Why waste your traffic exchange credits sending user’s to your sales page where they only have 15 seconds to decide whether they are interested in your product or service? It is too easy just to let your website rotate to the next causing you to lose a potential prospect.

If you set up an incentive-laden lead capture web page (by incentive I mean a contest or freebie for providing their email address) that has a short tag line about your product or service combined with a 2 line form consisting of name and email address you have a simple yet incredibly powerful marketing tool.

In fact what would stop you from advertising 5 or 10 different lead capture pages on several traffic exchanges for each product or service you are promoting?

Ok, so you have a person’s email address and name. What now?

Let me explain the purspose of an Autoresponder before I do that. An Autoresponder is a script that sends out timed follow up messages to anyone in your Autoresponder email list. If you connect the form on your lead capture page to your Autoresponder you have a virtually unlimited opportunity to advertise to your now ” opt in ” subscriber.

Your only real job becomes promoting your lead capture pages. The Autoresponder system once set up requires little or no maintenance on your part.

Now when a person sees your incentive laden lead capture page on a Free Traffic Exchange they can quickly scan your opportunity and provide a minimum of information (nobody likes filling in forms, especially when they only have 15 seconds to decide on your offer).

Freebies work well, free downloads, contests, giveaways. People like free stuff and this gives you a nice way to build up credibility with your customer.

To take this a step further you can track your campaigns by replacing the URL for your product with an Ad tracking URL .

This will tell you every time someone clicks on a link within your email message or lead capture page allowing you to weed out ineffective ad copy.

Make sure you set up a different ad tracking URL for each lead capture page or email message and you can truly see how well each of your campaigns are performing in real time.

So get busy creating your lead capture pages, connect them to your Autoresponder follow up system, and start promoting and tracking your campaigns. You should see improvements in your sales and recruiting efforts immediately.

Michael Lawrence is the webmaster for http://www.cobrasurf.com
providing Free Web Traffic and Free Website Promotion.

He also publishes a Blog which can be found at http://cobrasurf.blogspot.com
containing articles on website promotion and internet marketing.

A conversation:

The Salesperson: “I don’t cold callI want to build relationships.”

Wendy: “Huh?”

Recently I’ve had a number of conversations with sales professionals and entrepreneurs who tell me they do not cold call because they want to build relationships with prospects.

I’m confused.

Who says the two are mutually exclusive?

Every relationship whether business or personal begins somewhere. Everyone whom you currently know, your significant other, your colleagues at work, your friends, or your neighbors were unknown to you at one time. Then, somehow, you met and over time formed a relationship. It takes time.

In sales there are many ways to contact and reach out to new prospects. There’s direct mail, networking, referrals, trade shows, the internet, public speaking and writing articles. And yes, there is calling prospects on the telephone. These are all ways to introduce yourself, your company and your product or service to potential customers.

The telephone introduction is incredibly direct, easy, efficient and inexpensive. First you target your market and then you introduce yourself to the decision-maker. That’s one of the reasons I prefer the term “introductory calling” to “cold calling.” The call is an introduction. It is not a sale or a relationship.

However you initially meet a prospect, after that introduction, you still must take all of the necessary steps to build a relationship. With every prospect that you encounter, however you first encounter them, at some point you will have to pick up the telephone and call them. If at that point you do not represent yourself effectively and articulately, you will not move to the next step. This means that even if you are calling a prospect who did not originate with a phone call, you will need to do all of the same preparation that you would do if that prospect were a total stranger and you were calling for the first time! You would still have to determine how you want to represent yourself, what points you want to make and what is the goal of your conversation.

Every sale has a cycle with four steps. The cycle could be longer or shorter depending on the product or service, the market and/or your skill level, but you must go through every step of your sales cycle. Most sales cycles go something like this: The first step is always the introduction. This could be a phone call, it could be a letter or an e-mail, but somehow the prospect must become aware of you. Usually the next step is a meeting (or sometimes a series of meetings) or an extended conversation (or a series of conversations.) You personally introduce yourself and whatever you are selling to your prospect and you learn more about the prospect company. From there, if all goes well, you move to the proposal step. This proposal can be verbal and as simple as explaining your services and fees or it could be a more complex written proposal. The last step of this particular cycle is the close, when your prospect accepts your proposal. This process could happen in a dayor it could take a year, but however long it takes you will never skip any of the steps.

The mistake most people make is in not understanding the steps of the sales cycle and that you must pass through each step to get to the next. The introductory call does not lead directly to the close. What that introductory call does is easily and quickly get you directly in front of your prospect to begin your sales cycle. You will still have to put in all of the work to show your prospect how you can help. And you will still have to put in all of the work to build a relationship with that prospect.

Many people do a lot of time-consuming, expensive things to first meet prospects so that they can later follow up with a phone call. My suggestion: Simply call. It saves time and it saves money.

© 2004 Wendy Weiss

Wendy Weiss, The Queen of Cold Calling & Selling Success, is a sales trainer, author and sales coach. She is the author of Cold Calling for Women and the recently released Cold Calling College. Get her free e-zine at http://www.wendyweiss.com.

The term Operational Risk Management (ORM) is not new. It has been tossed about in businesses across North America for the last several years. ORM and the oft associated term Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) have generally been used as corporate buzzwords, business culture idioms referenced in board meetings and articulated during presentations. Recent developments, such as the creation of the Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act in 2002 in response to growing financial scandals in the U.S., have brought Operational Risk Management, Enterprise Risk Management and related concepts from the backrooms to the forefront of corporate America.

The inescapable reality is that every single day businesses incur losses and experience operational disruptions due to failures by employees, incorrect implementation of processes and technologies as well as wilful disobedience to internal controls. These losses may be manifest in the form of uncollectible receivables from disappointed clients, lost sales due to call centre failures or unproductive employee downtime when computer systems are unavailable, or a host of other potential problems. While most businesses have developed ad hoc methods of dealing with such losses in the past, legislation (such as SOX and the Basel Accord) has made standardized compliance procedures much more complex. Thankfully, just as these new rules have given rise to increased awareness of ORM/ERM, new tools (including Risk Management software) have been developed to aid compliance efforts.

The new regime of Sarbanes-Oxley, under the direction of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) which is in turn accountable to the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC), has undoubtedly benefited the business world by providing a foundation from which to decrease corporate fraud. However, the complexity and associated technical, labour and administrative costs posed to business is also considerable. The realities of both individually large and collectively mundane errors resulting in loss, as well as the newly regulated reporting of those losses, affect virtually all areas of every business each and every day. Therefore, it is in each company’s best interest to simultaneously find ways to cut losses while keeping regulatory compliance costs down. Hence the rebirth of Operational Risk Management/Enterprise Risk Management and the new demand for Risk Management software solutions.

Traditionally, few operational losses were measured in any accounting system, and rarely were the loss incidents tracked and analyzed in any way; the time and paperwork required to do so was simply daunting. Because there was no standard legislation in place, any Risk Management software tools were often proprietary and slightly more than electronic log books at best. New technologies and attitudes have allowed loss incidents to be seen as more predictable and able to be grouped into risk categories. Proper analysis of these incidents can result in attribution to root causes which aids in mitigation. Even this beginning leads to dramatically reduced costs while achieving huge gains and strategic advantages from well crafted Operational Risk Management policies and Enterprise Risk Management procedures.

Changes in legislation, technology and attitudes related to ORM/ERM have produced not just economic gains, they have led directly to re-invigorated business innovation and even created improvements in the quality of life. For example, safety, quality and environmental related loss incidents have proven to be not only manageable and avoidable, but sound management of these issues has conferred greater advantage on those who succeeded while driving many who did not adapt out of business. While large scale corruption may have brought about regulatory changes, these changes have spurred a re-visioning of Enterprise Risk Management. Advanced Risk Management software has allowed business to more directly mitigate losses. This has resulted in a cleaner, more efficient and more competitive business environment.

In the post-SOX environment, the same social and political pressures on organizations are present. Improved attitudes and tools have encouraged the proliferation of sound Operational Risk Management to the economic and strategic benefit of those properly prepared for the journey. To find out how Paisley Consulting can help your company on that journey, whether through the provision of powerful Risk Management software or expert consultation on Enterprise Risk Management, visit www.paisleyconsulting.com

Joe Armstrong writes about Enterprise & Operational Risk Management for http://www.paisleyconsulting.com

Refinancing a fixed rate mortgage is usually only suggested when interest rates start to drop. However if your looking to save money in other ways you can also save by changing your loan terms. Another simple solution would be pulling out part of your equity to pay off those high interest credit card bills.

Lower Interest Rates