Time Management and Technique Definition

Time is a precious thing so make the best use of it. Mind Tools teaches you personal time management skills. This personal time management guide and the accompanying newsletter are dedicated to building a stronger foundation for your success. One skill at a time. These are the simple, practical techniques that have helped the leading people in business, sport and public service reach the pinnacles of their careers. There are only 24 hours in your day, just the same as everybody else's. So how do you end up frustrated, angry, behind in your work, and dead on your feet? Maybe because you don't know how to use those 24 hours to your advantage. If you use these skills well, then you will be able to function exceptionally well, even under intense pressure. Developing time management skills is a journey that may begin with this Guide, but needs practice and other guidance along the way. Your main source of problems or your major breakthrough may still be hiding in your blind spot. What you really manage is your activity during the time, and defining outcomes and physical actions required is the core process required to manage what you do. Tips for time management set priorities and manage your time to meet deadlines Handle people and projects that waste your time Action Plans and Prioritized - To-Do Lists help you focus on the most important short-term activities. Prioritize assignments - When studying, get in the habit of beginning with the most difficult subject or task. Make Sure the Surroundings are Conducive to Studying: This will allow you to reduce distractions that can "waste time." If there are times in the residence halls or your apartment when you know there will be noise and commotion, use that time for mindless tasks. Time management provides you with the opportunity to create a schedule that works for you, not for others. This personal attention gives you the flexibility to include the things that are most important to you. If using your time wisely is a problem for you, you probably don't have a very good idea of where it all goes. It just seems to go! A good place to start, then, is to keep track of how you use your time. Get a Weekly schedule (available in the Learning Skills corner of the Counseling and Testing Center's Career Library) and faithfully keep track of how you use your waking hours for one week. The results will probably surprise you. Successful leaders in almost every field organize each day according to the priority assigned to the activities to be accomplished. Make sufficient copies of the Daily Activity Guide to insure a two-week supply, and use the form as an aid in planning each day's work. The objective is to change your behaviors over time to achieve whatever general goal you've set for yourself, such as increasing your productivity or decreasing your stress. So you need to not only set your specific goals but track them over time to see whether or not you're accomplishing them. Put things that are most important at the top and do them first. If it's easier, use a planner to track all of your tasks. And don't forget to reward yourself for your accomplishments. Visualize your long-term picture of success and put it in writing. Review your goal frequently. Your goal should be specific, measurable, achievable, and compatible with where you are now. There should be an end date as well. Steven Covey calls this "Begin with the end in mind." Planning your day can help you feel more in control of your life. Write a to-do list, putting the most important tasks at the top. Keep a schedule of your daily activities to minimize conflicts and last-minute rushes.

How to Become A Better Leader

If you are striving to become a better leader for your job, a stronger leader to better run your own business, or looking to develop the leadership skills you've always known you've had, there are a number of easy tips and guidelines you can follow to drastically improve your leadership skills. Being a strong leader by definition means that you have the ability to lead and act in an instance of leading, or guiding others in a leadership role. This means you must be someone that not only people look up to, but someone who people have confidence in, and will want to work with to accomplish your goals. Any motivational speaker or leadership expert will tell you that strong leaders are not born, they are made. It takes years of experience, successes, and failures to become a strong leader. One excellent way to become a better leader is to learn from those already established in high leadership positions. Find a mentor or someone in your organization that is an already established leader, and ask them about their experiences, how they came to this position, and how they learned to be a successful and strong leader themselves. Most of the time, these individuals will be more than happy to help you in any way they can, including explaining to you what they have done to become the leader they are today. Strong leaders are able to influence, guide, and shape the attitudes and beliefs of all of those around them, as well as able to inspire confidence and cooperation. Once you understand that leadership is more of a behavioral skill than an innate natural trait, you can learn to become a better leader by studying who a leader is supposed to be and putting these tips into practice. Leaders make the most out of every opportunity that comes their way. Leaders also don't make excuses for themselves but take full responsibility for all of their actions. A leader is one who inspires confidence and has a natural charisma about them that inspires cooperation and loyalty. One step to becoming a better leader is becoming a better listener, as well as a better team player. If you want to lead from the front, sometimes this means leading from the back or the middle. Sometimes a strong leader needs to know when to step aside, and when to take charge. A good leader is one who listens carefully to everyone around them, then has the strength and wisdom to make the best decision. A strong leader is not one who barks orders at people, but inspires cooperation among their employees, and inspires them to work harder as well as making them feel valued and respected. Leaders are not only people that inspire confidence but also have a clear direction and purpose for where they are heading. A leader who has a strong personal vision is a leader who not only commands respect but also respects others as equals and contributors to their great vision. If you are looking to become a better leader, then you need to first decide what kind of leader you want to be and have a clear vision and purpose so that others will follow.

The Mobility Of The Business World

While the second type has been around for quite a while the first type of mobile marketing has been catching up. Short Message Service Marketing: Short Message Service (SMS) Marketing is probably the most popular form of mobile marketing today. With the growing popularity of text messaging among cellular customers, entrepreneurial reliance on the mobility of the business world would be remiss to not include SMS marketing in their plans. Multimedia Message Service Marketing: Another form of mobile marketing is Multimedia Message Service (MM0S) Marketing. This includes advertisements that are sent via mobile devices as pictures or videos. This is the basis of ‘viral marketing' where the customer sends a video they like to someone else and they pass it on and so forth. The mobility of the business world is matched by the MMS Marketing system. Game Mobile Marketing: Two types of Game Mobile Marketing are emerging. One form deals with games that have great detail and control in their play. The other type is the easy-to-understand and executes games. On occasion marketing can be found within the confines of the game itself, other times it is posted on the banners around the main window of your mobile device. User-Controlled Marketing: User-Controlled Marketing deals mainly with the content that customers want instead of a steady stream of spam going to endless inboxes. The customer's choices online are watched and marked and they are advertised in relation to this. This means a more personalized marketing experience for customers. Mobile Web Marketing: With the growing popularity of mobile phone web surfing so emerges the use of internet ads on mobile web pages. Ads that are placed on these pages are usually determined by the content of the page. With the mobility of the business world, Mobile Web Marketing is a great tool to have.

Varieties of Zinc Anodes in the Marine Industry

Zinc is one metal that is used in almost all industry sectors. Its alloys in many different forms find use mostly in cars and construction, motor housings, door furniture, toys, taps and pipes, roofing and guttering, coffins, batteries, tires, and zinc creams. Zinc anodes in ships and boat Zinc are nowadays being extensively used in the form of zinc anodes in almost all marine industries. For submerged structures in saltwater and brackish water, zinc anodes are known to provide protection to other metals lower on the galvanic scale, at the expense of sacrificing themselves. Hence, just like magnesium anodes, they work best when used to offer excellent protection in ships and other offshore applications. They are also cost-effective and economical as they safeguard the expensive metals used in ships getting wiped in the process. They are used extensively in boats and are called boat zincs when used in this application. Zinc anodes in other submerged structures Apart from using in boats and ships zinc anodes are also used in other submerged objects. This is because they have a higher driving voltage that helps in providing protection in a marine environment from corrosive seawater. Zinc anodes can also be found in marine applications like ballast tanks, offshore platforms, bridges, hulls, propeller shafts, rudders, stern drives, etc. This is especially useful in protecting the cooling system from galvanic corrosion, which occurs when dissimilar metals, like an aluminum stern drive and a bronze through-hull, are placed in an electrolyte solution. Zinc anodes and their different varieties Zinc anodes are available in different varieties and you can choose the one as per your requirement. You can also get customized ones as per your area of application, just like aluminum anodes. Almost all the manufacturers have the option of producing any anodes of your specifications. However, always see that your zinc anodes conform to MIL-A-18001 Standard for the prevention of any unwarranted loss of your precious metals.

Human Resources

Talent acquisition is the latest human resource tool to recognize a candidate's inherent skills, quality, knowledge, personality, and other respective traits. The renowned manpower consultants identify all such traits in a candidate and offer him a matching job.

Everyone has some the other talents that are best suited for a particular job, switching on to just any job might cause discomfort. It is the work of the Management specifically the Human Resource Department to consign candidates with forethought and caution. A wrong placement would result in further recruiting, re-training, and similar unproductive activities. A specialized recruitment agency understands this very fact and approaches a professional with his type of job.

Since the recruitment process is a bit crucial thing for both the company and the candidate thus, a recruitment agency should note three very essential steps while implementing the approach of talent acquisition. Firstly, the recruitment firms practice massive consolidation of talents without understanding the actual requirement. This let go of the unfit or comparatively less productive manpower replacing them with the newly hired candidates. This is a totally wrong way to go as it hampers the professionals the most. This is the most common practice undertaken by the IT industry which makes it completely unstable for anyone.

Secondly, with an increased number of manpower consultants, everyone is rushing to get through a particular job. There are employment firms that do not believe in the talent acquisition process and run with the main focus of earning profits. These firms make it pretty easy for the candidates to go for the wrong fit.

Last but not the least, today companies are focusing on a quantitative approach rather than going for a qualitative one. This is making the companies hire new professionals every now and then, making it a bit complex for both the candidates and themselves. Thus, respective manpower consultants must focus on talent achievement & purchase and do the needful to hire and retain the right candidate for a particular job profile.

China's future development in Medical Device Industry

Now China has entered an era of an aging population, as of the end of last year, China's elderly population aged over 60 has reached 160 million, while China's medical equipment industry has also been the fundamental gap in the development of liberation to now be able to produce 47 categories, more than 3000 varieties, more than 11,000 kinds of specifications of the size of its medical device manufacturing companies are more than 12000. An investment adviser in the pharmaceutical industry researcher Guo Fan Li pointed out that the long-term medical care needs of the elderly, as well as people's health care demand, on the other hand also benefited from the improvement of people's living standards, coupled with new medicine now to correct the conduct of a grand scale, in this kinds of new circumstances, the future of China's medical device industry, the development of the how, the what kind of direction to the development? First, is a broad market space for medical equipment in rural areas Investment adviser in the pharmaceutical industry researcher Guo Fan Li pointed out that for a long time, China's rural primary health facilities in the building are obviously lagging behind the real needs of the rural primary health care sector has not been fully developed, China's rural primary health care sector accounted for the total number of medical institutions in the country 7%, but it bears nearly 60% of the number of clinics, in the absence of comprehensive medical services network, and its high level of demand can not be effectively released. With the advancement of new medical reform and the state of the rural market network construction, the future of China's rural primary health care institution-building efforts will be strengthened as a key measure to expand domestic demand, the recent national new investment of 4.8 billion yuan to support rural health service system construction, in 2009, the central government invested nearly 27 billion yuan to support rural three-tier health infrastructure, and rural infrastructure to a large extent is to increase and improve basic health facilities, which would lead to expansion of medical device market,. For a long time, China's rural primary health care sector is lack equipment, and medical devices, and many are too old or service beyond the period of "second-hand" equipment, but since the new medical reform program is proposed, this will be effective mitigation. Today, our financial investment to purchase basic medical equipment is increasing the proportion, and with the continued promotion of new medical reform, the rural primary health care institutions will become more perfect and sound, which will also stimulate the growth of demand for medical equipment in rural areas, the future of China's rural medical device market has a broad space for development. Second, medical equipment to build the platform is the focal point of development Investment adviser in the pharmaceutical industry researcher Guo Fan Li pointed out that "Shier Wu," China will vigorously adjust the medical device industry, development direction and product mix, support,  and development of independent intellectual property rights of the medical device industry, the medical device industry, technical research, product R & D platform to build and base construction will be "Shier Wu," China Medical Device industry development priorities, and is based on "national long-term Science and Technology Development Plan" develop a complete. Third, medical equipment will be high-tech, and user-friendly, a micro-Development Investment adviser in the pharmaceutical industry researcher Guo Fan Li pointed out that China's medical device industry, science, and technology will be higher, more humane direction, and now biological intelligence and robotics have a great breakthrough in intellectual development, our country will be in the future of medical device join the high-tech elements, such as mechanical sensors, materials, smart devices clinical trials system, etc. In addition, China's medical device industry will produce the family as a unit more suitable for family self-monitoring and remote medical devices and diagnostic products. On the other hand, China's medical device industry, will open a new era of minimally invasive medical devices, medical device products in the past accuracy is not high, in the treatment of the disease at the same time might produce some negative effects, however, now begun to enter the non-invasive medical devices or micro - trauma of the times, a number of miniaturization, intelligent medical devices will be the future direction of development, China will vigorously develop organ transplant and para-medical equipment, such as cardiac transplantation, skin transplantation, vascular grafts, to the greatest degree of defensive people life, health, and safety risks emerged. 4, basic medical equipment will significantly benefit from The country's new round of comprehensive health care reform to open, the state invested heavily in increasing the rural and urban and community health service network construction, investment advisers in the pharmaceutical industry where a researcher Guo Li pointed out that as China's medical device products for the increasing demand for is expected within the next three years, China's medical device industry will usher in a boom peak, especially for some basic, relatively low-end medical equipment products have a very positive impact, while for the low-end medical equipment companies such as health care is also Xinhua an opportunity for its development.

U.S.A Federal Government Grants

These days, people are finding them selves short of additional finances for one reason or another. Some for the simple lack of employment, cash for school, starting a company, opening a non profit business or simply attempting to fix the roof over there heads. Luckily one of the advantages of Us citizenship is possessing the ability to apply for USA grant money assistance.

These funds are available and are given for numerous reasons to people that qualify. Meeting the qualifications to the letter is the key to receiving the cash. People who have been denied almost definitely didn't do any research, didn't request specialized help or they just failed to fill out the paper work correctly.

Luckily, there are many grant writing services out there that will help improve your chances in getting approved for the free money! All you have to do is begin to look for the information and you'll be on your way to finding all you need know. Bear in mind government agencies aren't the only source of grant monies. You can find public and privet corporations that provide grants to individuals as well. Make sure to search for those too.

If you don't feel secure attempting to obtain a grant by yourself, employ someone to complete it for you. Qualified grant writers will in some cases just charge a tiny one time fee and guarantee to revise and resubmit your grant application until it is approved. This will take some of the pressure off and give you the luxury to target other business.

Due to the internet, having access to extensive amounts of data on United states of america government grants is easy to find. In case you are a self doer then I'd suggest researching some grant writing software. The prices for this type of information is vary low. The software will provide you with step by step coaching from the application process to the best way that you can get an approval of funds.

If you happen to be denied, do not despair. You're allowed to reapply again and again if need be. Correct your errors and try all over again. The most important effort you can make in applying for a grant is to keep trying, giving up means NO MONEY.

Your personality should stand out. Make an effort to be as personable as possible within your proposal. This undertaking of grant writing, applying and getting accepted is not all cut and dry. There are real people considering your request, they'll most probably see your application like all the others. Still if your personal motives for grant approval stand out, you will have a greater likelihood at receiving that big check. So be truthful sincere and to the point. It's one thing to have a good story and another to shovel a load of bull. I'm a sales man of eight years experience. The most important tickets I've ever had where made with a good truthful and sincere story. The buyers did not only thank me. A number of them became my friends.

Once you are approved based on the type of grant you received will determine if you are able to reapply for the next year or term of availability. I worked for a non profit performing arts organization that received a $2500.00 cash grant year after year. We use it for equipment purchases, upkeep and equipment. If I remember correctly, we had to explain in our grant proposal how much we wanted, why we wanted it and the timeframe we planed to use it in. It is vary important that you're specific in your plans for the money you need. The last thing any association, government, privet or public will want to do is give cash out to people who will waste it.

The perfect time to start is NOW! Should you wait you'll miss it. As soon as you get the hang of this you will know which grants you qualify for and the one you don't. Apply for as many as you can and repeat it. Your odds for approval increase the you submit so keep at it.

Connecting Franchise Companies

It was revealed earlier this week that unemployment levels are decreasing with the number of people getting part-time jobs at an all-time high. This is an unusual occurrence in modern times as we look at the home-based job option and the significance of home-based franchise options and businesses. As many people are now getting part-time jobs they now have enough time to look into their own projects and work ideas. These opportunities are growing all of the time with the internet and other communication devices increasing all of the time. Our connectivity to more businesses and franchise for sale offers is at a high point so many individuals are looking for franchise companies as an opportunity to start their own business. The security of a part-time job offers the money to start up a home-based franchise and still gives you enough time to make a success of it. Many franchise companies offer online opportunities, which can be done after usual working hours and in the comfort of your own home. This idea has been coming about for a number of years as marketing and advertising have been increased on the internet from various business sectors. There is now a huge choice of options available for a new entrepreneur to take that first step into business or look for a franchise for sale. Many franchise companies have been offering franchise options through the internet, both commercial and home-based options, with more frequency, which explains the peak of people working from home. Juggling a part-time job with a home-based franchise can be difficult but with the right research and knowledge could be a successful lifestyle and career. The two options may be linked so by working for a company part-time, the knowledge and work that you do may overlap the franchise companies' ideas. Developing a connection between your job and home-based franchise can be beneficial for both as they both then become full-time occupations. If you can find a franchise for sale that provides a mail order service through selling on the internet and the part-time job involves an internet company, then they both can overlap and be beneficial to both. You will be able to promote your mail order franchise by utilizing the skills that you have gained by working part-time for an internet company. Choosing the right franchise companies can be the most difficult thing to do in this process. Most of all you must choose a home-based franchise that you are passionate about as how are going to sell or market a franchise that you are not passionate about. Passion is not enough on its own, other factors come into play such as start-up costs, management, and business knowledge, but at the heart of the franchise must be your desire to make it a success and enjoy what you are doing. If you do decide to take up a home-based franchise option and juggle it with a popular part-time job, make sure that the time you put in is worth it. You must have a strict timetable and manage your time well and hopefully, your part-time work will support your franchise for the short term to make it a success.

The Advantages of Webinars for Busy Executives.

There are more companies that are cost-conscious and because of that, there are some business conferences and meetings that are no longer held. In an effort to contain costs, there are many businesses that are using web conferencing to hold important business meetings and training seminars, when a simple conference call won't be effective. In fact, there are many businesses that are coming to realize that webinars can be a great way to communicate with business associates and train their employees. A webinar can provide five times the retention rate of a normal business conference call and there are several other advantages that are part of this form of communication.

The webinars are fairly easy and affordable to put together. You will have a web conferencing host that facilitates the combination teleconference-webinar with an invitation that lets participants know the time, date, web address and participant code they need to use. Because the teleconferencing is integrated with the web conference, it is easy for participants to sign on to one or both, whenever you are ready to start the meeting. You are charged based on 15 cents per minute per connection, so you can budget your costs and the length of your web meeting accordingly.

When you compare the advantages of web conferencing to holding a traditional conference, the cost difference can be staggering and the convenience and productivity factors make it a more profitable option. If you have a remote workforce or business associates that are scattered around the globe, the price of airline tickets, lodging and meals can amount to large amounts of money. This doesn't consider the fact that your employees or clients might not be able to get away from other duties for the several days a business meeting can involve and the loss of productivity can be staggering, when you consider traditional means. With webinars, the participants can work until the webinar starts and go back to working, once it has been completed. For businesses that are watching their costs, this is a substantial saving that goes straight to the bottom line for all involved!

As a busy executive, you might not have enough hours in a day, but you don't want productivity to suffer or the important client contacts and presentations to be avoided because these are things that affect your management ability, as well. With web conferencing, you can collaborate on important business issues, train employees or distributors on innovative products and techniques or implement a company-wide change of policy with ease, through a webinar. In fact, you can hold several business meetings in a matter of minutes or hours through webinars, but they might take weeks through traditional business meetings or training seminars.

Because of features like desktop sharing, easy to implement PowerPoint presentations for visual effects and demonstrations or feedback tools you can implement in your web meeting, you can still have an interactive meeting that is productive and accomplishes the tasks you need to address in a short amount of time. When you are ready to meet, remote workers or business associates on the other side of the globe can have a visual presentation with an audio conversation and communication. This allows for immediate feedback, questions and personal interaction, while making everybody more productive and involved.

There are some business executives that aren't crazy about conference calls and consider them a waste of time. With web conferencing, the retention rate is higher because you are stimulating more than one of the important senses-visual and audio. Because the web meeting and presentation takes place on the participants' desktop, you can have a meeting where participants are following along and prepared for test questions, instead of surfing the Internet while their phone is set on speakerphone, like many conference calls they might take.

Entrepreneur Success and Challenge

Are you about to take the challenge and become an entrepreneur? Entrepreneurs are not born, they are not just lucky people, an entrepreneur creates their own luck by the actions they take as they move towards their business goals. With all the doom and gloom that so many are facing right now, you could not pick a better time to begin your entrepreneur success story. Are you willing to take an educated risk with yourself? Many people will shy away from the very concept of that, with the belief that it is safer to stop as they are. But what is really secure? Is it prudent to rely on someone else? We all have to take responsibility for ourselves at the end of the day, so why gamble our future on another company when the decisions they make touch our life and livelihood. The real entrepreneur success factor is what action you take with the opportunities that come your way. In reality, the real risk is to walk away when an opportunity comes along rather than take the challenge and let the entrepreneur in you come out. By becoming an entrepreneur you straight away start a change in yourself. It is then you that can invent your life, choose what you do, and be responsible for the success of your enterprise. The only way to make wealth is to stand out from the crowd and begin your journey to becoming an entrepreneur success. Action is the answer to all of this, and the actions and choices you make today shape your tomorrow. When you reflect on how powerful that is you can see that by making a few changes you can alter the course you are on now and no longer settle for anything less. I became my own boss when I was 20, and only once have I worked for anyone else, (8 weeks) I realized that after having my own business there could be no other way, I simply could not settle for less. The freedom that I have had and the possibilities that have come to me have far exceeded anything else. Maybe the biggest entrepreneur success factor is to be in the company of other successful people. By being in the company and sharing ideas with other successful people you find that their attitude rubs off on you. You begin to observe and behave in a different way and start to become the person you need to be to be successful. If you are thinking of starting a business I can only say take the challenge and become the entrepreneur that you really wish to be. Just do it, it could make you the person you want to be.

Six Things Customer Intelligence is Not

While they may be related to customer intelligence, none of these can stand steady alone

In my last post, I reviewed six important, defining characteristics of Customer Intelligence (CI is cultural, it's organizational, is interdisciplinary, involves two-way communications with customers, is focused on customer profitability, and is above all customer-centric). Now, I will contrast that list with six things that Customer Intelligence is not.

Although these six things are often associated with successful Customer Intelligence initiatives at organizations, any one of them taken individually is certainly not Customer Intelligence.

How many of these have been implemented in your organization?

Database Marketing

Database Marketing is a very specific set of tools and methods that tailors marketing, in particular direct marketing, to targeted groups of customers based on their characteristics (typically stored in a database, hence the term "database marketing"). It is, in essence, a more sophisticated form of direct marketing (that is, sending communications directly to customers or prospects to sell or promote a product or service), relying on vast collections of data and sophisticated techniques to determine who is likely to respond to such communication (e.g., statistical response modeling and other techniques).

This is certainly a step in the right direction – more targeted communications are better for both the customer and the business sending them, because customers are being told about something truly interesting to them, and marketers will generate a higher response rate, and therefore greater profitability, if they talk about something that customers actually want to buy – but it falls short of true "customer intelligence" because it is too narrowly defined.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

A CRM system's primary purpose is to help front-line customer service representatives interact with customers by providing "at-your-fingertips" access to customer profile data, in effect allowing reps to speak knowledgeably to customers about their relationships, take notes, and resolve issues. CRM systems consist of a front-end computer interface that the service reps use to call up customer profiles, and a back-end database that stores all of the customer data (often this is not a standalone database but part of a larger data warehouse).

A CRM by itself does not constitute CI nor does it provide CI, although it can be a critical component of CI since it provides a critical feedback loop, allowing service representatives to speak to customers with full knowledge of a customer's relationship, and to gather information from customers on issues that are important to them. The CRM does not provide high-level analytic capabilities but can provide a distillation of what is known about the customer and best practices and rubrics for handling inbound and outbound communications handled by service representatives.

Business Intelligence (BI) or Decision Management (DM) Business Intelligence, or BI, refers to a set of tools (primarily software such as that produced by Cognos, for example) and the information provided by those tools to business users to provide insight into the business and support business decisions. BI is sometimes used directly by business decision-makers but is more often used by specially-trained professionals in a separate Decision Management, or DM, function. In that case, business decision-makers will present their business problems to DM, who will employ BI to research those problems and present results to the business decision-makers who ultimately will be responsible for any decision-making as a result.

The diagram below illustrates a typical flow of information between the Marketing team, the Decision Management team, and the Business Intelligence infrastructure (tools and data):

Marketing (business)

Decision Management

Business Intelligence Infrastructure (Tools +Data)

Decision Management and the supporting Business Intelligence infrastructure help define and direct the various customer strategies that the business pursues, but they do not constitute Customer Intelligence by themselves since they do not connect to the customer nor to the operational functions of the organization. Again, as with CRM or Database Marketing, DM and BI can be critical components supporting the development and deployment of Customer Intelligence, but alone they are not enough to be a sufficient Customer Intelligence solution.

Sales-Force Automation (SFA)

SFA tools are used to support the sales function in an organization. Typically an SFA implementation provides a "seat" or licenses to each sales person, who is then able to log in to the SFA software and load, manage, and work his or her leads. With an SFA tool, a sales person can input contact names, classify them, add notes as the relationship with the contact changes over time, send communications, and keep track of tasks – it is like contact management software on steroids.

SFA tools can range from simpler, more easy-to-use packages like GoldMine or ACT! (which can also be customized), to enterprise-class platforms such as Salesforce.com which is served over the web as a service (it doesn't require installation but is instead "hosted" on servers that the client company's sales force accesses over the web) and Oracle's Siebel platform, which has features of both CRM and SFA systems and is installed on a company's own computers.

You Have the Power to Fix Your Own Credit

Everywhere you turn, you will see offers from others to "fix your credit." There will be debt consolidation services, credit debt lawyers that promises to create a "new credit report" so you can start from scratch. We're not saying they are 100% scams, but we are saying that is money that you do not have to spend! You have the power to fix your own credit report.

What is required from you is that you check your credit on a regular basis. The government only guarantees you one free credit check per year. In order to get full access to your file, you may need to subscribe to a credit-reporting agency's services. The best you can do is to purchase a credit repair kit so you can get help with the technical requirements (letter drafting, and so on). However, when it comes down to communicating with the credit bureaus, the process is rather simple.

You write a letter to the bureau or bureaus that are listing the erroneous information. You provide your evidence (always send copies) and explain the situation in a letter. You request an investigation into the matter and the bureau opens a disputes case. They report back when the case is closed, whether in your favor or not. The good news is that even if the case doesn't close in your favor, you can still include a letter in your credit report explaining your side of the story.

Now you must take steps to repair your bad credit history. No one else can do this for you, regardless of any sensational offers made. Debt consolidation services do the same thing you have the power to do—they negotiate a payoff balance. (Even if they do get a payoff balance, they will charge you for their services, which defeats the whole purpose of "savings") A credit debt lawyer can only help you in reducing the volume of creditor harassment. As for software that promises to create a new credit profile, this action would be illegal!

Instead of letting others help you for a fee, help yourself to crawl out of debt and earn your way back to a favorable credit score. Create a budget that you can work with and then start analyzing your credit report. It all begins with you!