The Official BizUnite Blog

Preferred Insurance Programs

Insurance programs both you and your employees will love that save you money!

 

 

Lower Costs with Insurance & Risk Management

Aon utilizes insurance carriers that best suit your business needs, including national & regional companies

 

Program Benefits:

• Evaluating risk
• Appropriate and cost effective products
• Protecting assests
• Safety of your employees & facilities
• Loss control specialists for customers

Expected Savings:

• Premium savings
• Minimizing potential coverage gaps

 

Medical and Lifestyle Benefits - only $9.95/month!

 

Medical Discounts Package

• Alternative Health and Wellness
• Chiropractic Care
• Dental Care
• Family Consultation
• Pet Care Savings
• Prescription Drugs
• TelaDoc
• Travel Assist
• VIP Health & Wellness
• Vision Care

Lifestyle Discounts Package

• Auto Pricing & Maintenance
• Financial Help Line
• Lifelock
• Legal Services
• Roadside Assistance
• Tax Helpline

For a list of providers for each of the programs you can go to www.locateproviders.com and enter 55110 into the group number box.

What to Look for in 2010

BizUnite consistently negotiating deals with our Preferred Vendor Partners to create new Cost Savings Programs.  BizUnite offers unbeatable savings on key business services such as payment processing, office supplies, package delivery, wireless services, and payroll processing.  In 2010 look for BizUnite to negotiate deals with new vendors and expand into different business service categories.

Our increased buying power allows us to negotiate premium deals that are offered through our marketplace exclusively.  The BizUnite Marketplace is an easy to navigate tool that allows our organizations to add their own programs to our Cost Savings Programs.  The BizUnite Marketplace is specifically designed to help member-focused organizations reduce costs and increase profitability for their affiliates. The BizUnite Marketplace makes it simple to save on everyday business operations. 

 

With 2010 fast approaching we have this to ask you:

• Are you a member focused organization? 
• Do you want to lower the everyday cost of doing business?
• Would you like to supplement your current member services with our world class programs? 

If you answered yes to any of these question and want to obtain more information about BizUnite contact hello@bizunite.com or call 1-866-623-5784.

Use Referrals to Generate More Revenue

Are you actively asking your current customers, clients and other contacts to refer new business to you? If not, why not?

The fact is, referrals can generate much more new business than most companies realize. Yet you can’t just sit back and wait for your current customers or clients to send new business to you. You need a plan. Here’s a simple three-step process for generating more business to increase revenue through referrals.

Step One: Create a Master List of People Who Can Refer New Business to You

Remember, customers are not the only resources who can refer new business to you. You can also ask your suppliers and vendors, your CPA, your attorney, your landlord – and the list goes on and on.

Ask everyone in your organization to help build a master list of all the company outsiders they know. Your goal should be to generate a list of 50, 100 or even more contacts who can each refer you to three or four new potential clients.

Step Two: Ask for Referrals from Everyone on Your Contact List

Contact everyone (via letter or email) you identified in Step One and make the following points:

• We value your business.
• We know that we have been able to provide you with excellent service or savings.
• We hope that you will do us the favor of referring potential new clients or customers to us.
• We are asking you to refer us to three (or four) companies who might become our new clients or customers. Asking for a specific number of referrals makes it more likely that people will respond.

Offer incentives for clients and customers who refer new business to you. Offer a discount, an award – something tangible, with dollar savings attached to it. It’s a way of saying thank you for referrals, and it results in more referrals. Then follow up by phone if you do not get a response.

Step Three: Carefully Cultivate Your New Business

Don’t just turn over your list of potential new clients to your sales team. Instead, make personal phone calls to the contact people whose names you got in Step Two. Or write personal letters to them.

Explain who referred you (“Joan Davis at Allied Container suggested that I contact you...“). Express your eagerness to explain the kind of businesses or services you can provide, explain any special incentives or offers that you are making – and say that you would like to meet personally.

Follow up diligently, but not aggressively. Referred clients should be treated with a special measure of tact and care. Because they are qualified leads, they have extra potential to become long-running clients, just like the companies that referred them.

And remember...

In addition to following this plan, consider making a referral program an integral part of your marketing plan. Include information about it on all your communications (letters, invoices) and on your company Website too. The wider you cast your net, the more revenue you can generate. For more ways on how to increase savings and revenue, contact us at hello@bizunite.com or 1-866-623-5784.

Success Lessons from a Two-Handed Bowler

Jason Belmonte is an Australian bowler who has singlehandedly reinvented his sport by making one simple change: He rolls the ball with two hands instead of one.

If you haven’t seen Belmonte bowl, check out his videos on YouTube and elsewhere on the Internet. The ball explodes from his hands with incredible speed. He puts so much spin on the ball that it seems to make a sudden 90-degree turn before smashing into the pins.

People have been bowling for hundreds of years, but Belmonte seems to be the first professional bowler to perfect the technique of releasing the ball with two hands. It’s a change that is simple and revolutionary at the same time.

We can all learn some important business lessons from him. Let’s take a closer look.

Lesson One: Find New Ways to Use the Resources You Already Have

Belmonte didn’t put microchips into a bowling ball, invent a laser tracking system, or design new bowling shoes. He simply found an entirely new – and pretty obvious – way to maximize his use of the same resources that everyone else had.

Some very successful companies have that too. Amazon.com, for example, didn’t invent customer follow-up. But they did take it to a new level by recommending new products to customers, based on their previous purchases. QVC didn’t invent television advertising, but the company did find a powerful new way to use it, by moving it to center stage.

So find new ways to wring a more value from the obvious resources you already have. Brilliant new ideas could be right in front of you – as obvious as Belmonte’s two hands.

Lesson Two: Don’t Be a Quitter

Belmonte didn’t try his new two-handed technique for just a few hours. He invested years to discover its astonishing potential.

In this sense, Belmonte is a lot like eBay – a business that defied the rules of traditional business because it had nothing to sell beyond a connection point for sellers and buyers. In its early years, eBay was declared dead a number of times by business experts. But the founder Jeff Bezos proved them wrong. Instead of giving up, he refined his business model until he worked out the snags and really got things moving.

So remember that great ideas usually require hard work and development. If you believe in an idea, have the resolve to follow it through.

Lesson Three: Don’t Let “Experts” Kill Your Ideas

According to an article on ESPN, some highly respected coaches tried to discourage Belmonte from pursuing his two-handed style of bowling. They wrote off his idea as a dead-end that would cut his career short. But who is laughing at him now? He has proved them wrong by winning a number of international championships.

In that sense, Belmonte can be compared to BizUnite. One business at a time, we are convincing our members that there is a new, better way of doing business. Our members are sometimes a little skeptical at first – until the day when the bottom-line numbers convince them that cooperation is today’s key to profitability.

Slumping Sales: Do You Have Yourself to Blame?

Are your sales really slumping – or are you in a slump as a marketer?

That can be a hard question to ask. But as some recent news stories show, savvy marketers are coming with some very innovative strategies to boost sales. Here are some you might not be exploiting...

• See who is in your store and sell to them. In the current recession, more upscale shoppers (or shoppers who were formerly upscale) are cruising WalMart aisles. So the retailing giant is expanding its offerings to be sure that those new shoppers will find the high-quality products that appeal to them.
• Save your customers money without bruising their self-esteem. Reuters reports that Saks plans to offer loss-leader items from Prada and Christian Dior at discounts of up to 75%. Buying an entry-level handbag for $900 is not exactly bargain-bin shopping, but it speaks to Saks shoppers who might not mind saving a little money on luxury items today.
• Offer more than merchandise to make customers feel at home. Several menswear stores are offering alcoholic drinks to customers, the Wall Street Journal Reports. It might be a bit extreme, but men feel more comfortable, and buy more, when the store offers them a complimentary beer or glass of single-malt scotch.
• Give bargain items center stage. Toys R Us, for example, is highlighting ultra low-cost toys. According to the Los Angeles Times, the toy-selling giant hopes to capture lots of dollars by creating prominent displays of toys that cost $3 or less.

So how innovative are you willing to be, in the interest of boosting profits? How many of your fundamental assumptions are you willing to question? It's time for you to move your success to the next level.

Advertising: Learn from the Lizard

Geico runs so many advertising campaigns at the same time, it is hard to remember them all. If you turn on your television, chances are pretty good you will find a Geico ad featuring a Cockney-accented gecko, created for the insurance company by The Martin Agency. Tune in later, and you might find a commercial that shows people being pursued by little bundles of the money they could be saving if they switched to Geico. That same evening, you could see a Geico ad that shows its cavemen spokespeople, or one of Geico’s “bait and switch” ads that starts out looking like an ad for something else, but morphs into a Geico ad after fooling you.

What is going on here? One thing for certain is that Geico is breaking one of the fundamental rules of advertising, which holds that a company should pick one theme and use it consistently through every point of contact with its customers. That is part of brand-building, right? Well, maybe. Yet the fact remains that Geico’s unorthodox advertising philosophy has made it one of the fastest growing insurance companies in the world.

And when you stop to think about it, there might be some pretty sound reasons why you should consider varying your ads the way that Geico does.

• You lower the risk of alienating your customers. I am willing to bet that there are people out there who moan whenever the Gecko appears. (I also bet that plenty of people love him.) But when you run multiple campaigns, you reduce the risk of alienating potential customers with a campaign they don’t like.
• You build flexibility. Geico launched its newest campaign, which shows people pursued by cash, at the very time that people are especially worried about their household budgets. Yet at the same time, Geico still runs its other ads. So its brand foundation remains consistent, despite the appearance and disappearance of shorter-running campaigns. This is the kind of flexibility could allow you to adapt to temporary market conditions without throwing your primary campaigns away.
• You can target your message to different consumer bases and geographic areas. When economic conditions strengthen in certain areas of the country, for example, Geico might cut back on the “customers pursued by cash” ad campaign and fall back on its caveman or talking lizard. This “tool box” approach could help you target your messages strategically.

You might have noticed that Geico’s cavemen actually became a television show last year, when ABC created a sitcom that starred them. It was short-lived, with only seven episodes. But can you think of another television commercial that became a television show?

Make no mistake about it – today’s smartest marketers are thinking in new, adaptable ways that maximize market impact and minimize cost outlays. BizUnite is ready to help you do that too, with our cooperative marketing tools.  Call (866) 623-5784 and let us explain how.