http://www.acceleration-partners.com/blog Small buisness advice, tips, and guidance. Tue, 09 Mar 2010 15:37:33 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Many owners and managers still don’t believe the Internet can be a valuable lead-generation and sales tool for their business-to-business company. Usually this is because they don’t currently get any leads this way, which may simply be because the company has little to no search presence. It seems obvious to ... Savvy marketers know the value of a brand. It’s the reason a bottle of Tide costs twice as much as generic detergent that works just as well. Companies receive a brand premium, not because they have shown that their product is better, rather it’s based on the belief and or ... Last Sunday my wife and I wasted an hour driving to a rug store that turned out to be closed even though the store’s website indicated it would be open. When we called on Monday, the man at the store apologized and explained that the business is in a fight ... Entrepreneurs often have well-laid plans for global domination. They have charts, projections and sales plans showing who they are going to sell products and services to and how much they are going to gross once their company has become a household name. What they typically don’t have is a tactical ... A few years ago, just after the Sprint/Nextel merger, I dropped into my local Sprint store because my cell phone contract was about to expire. The companies had already merged brands, but the products in the store were positioned as if they were still two competing companies. The cell plans ... About five years ago, I was involved in a new consumer services business that was the talk of the town. Friends and colleagues, seeing the flood of customers and press, often commented that “you guys must be making money hand over fist.” Truth was, we weren’t. Providing our services was ... If you have ever talked with Acceleration Partners about your new online business idea, you are sure to have heard us say “get to revenue fast.” This was tough advice to give when the market seemed to reward top-line user growth over revenue and profitability, but now things are changing ... A lot of people ask the same questions when they are trying to learn about affiliate marketing, so I have tried to compile all of the answers here in one place. Q. What Is An Affiliate Program? A. An affiliate program is a system where your website posts a link to ... If you run a small services business, you spend a lot of time thinking about where your next customer will come from. Given the time you invest in building a sales pipeline, you might be surprised to learn that almost everything you have been told about the sales process is ... Which is better, the business plan or the executive summary? Academic institutions and the marketplace appear to be moving in opposite directions on this question. While many business students are required to develop 30- to 50-page business plans, we’ve found that these lengthy documents are used less and less ...