All Entries Tagged With: "Business Sense"
IncrediMail Provides Valuable Lesson Why Placing All Eggs in One Basket is a Bad Idea
IncrediMail, an Israeli based a company that develops software to customize e-mails, has provided business owners an incredible lesson as to why you should not place all your eggs in one basket. This occurred last week when they discovered that their AdSense privileges had been banned. This resulted in their stock dropping over 45% to a new year low. While IncrediMail does claim to generate revenue by selling software products, offering subscriptions to their content database, and by selling paid advertising on their Web site and e-mail client, they did admit that search revenues powered by Google’s AdSense program made a significant contribution to their results in 2006 and 2007.
When Is It Time To Fire Your Customers?
If you are Sprint Nextel, when they become customer service nightmares. While watching the local newscast last night, a story caught my attention about cellular phone provider Sprint “firing” customers for abusing customer service. I followed up with it online and found Fox News covering the story. Apparently they are disconnecting more than 1,000 subscribers for calling their customer service lines too often and making what the company called “unreasonable requests.”
How To Detect Problematic Customers Before They Become Paying Customers
When talking to a potential customer, I can usually tell in a minute or less if they are going to be problematic. Call it intuition. Call it sixth sense. Or simply chalk it up to over ten years of experience. It usually starts with a gut feeling that tells you, “Don’t take on this new client, it is going to be more trouble than its worth.” It is then up to you to decide whether to listen to that still small voice or go against it and sell out for the money. Everytime I have done the latter, I have lived to regret it. Fortunately the longer I do this, I learn from past mistakes and pay more attention to the voice inside my head.
