Blogs & Articles

If your business occupies a competitive marketplace and you've worked hard to build up a good customer base, the last thing you want to see is your customers drifting away to spend their money elsewhere. The key to achieving long-term customer loyalty is to build and maintain solid business relationships and have the flexibility to continue providing exactly what they want as times and circumstances change.

Assertiveness is a useful trait in many areas of life, but for managers, leaders and salespeople, it is a vital skill. Many people confuse assertiveness, which is a strong and positive communication technique, with aggressiveness which is negative and undesirable.

Change is an inevitability of modern business; in order to remain competitive, companies must adapt to accommodate evolving customer requirements, market conditions, technological advances, new legislation and many other aspects which may have a bearing on long-term survival and profitability.

As a manager, it's vital to ensure that your staff are sufficiently motivated to perform their tasks competently and in a timely fashion. Once upon a time, it was thought that financial incentives were the key to employee motivation, but studies have shown that pay raises and bonuses are merely short-term motivators.