It Pays to Have a Helping Hand to Get Ahead

1. Ask yourself what you want in a mentor or sponsor.
2. Check your employer’s human resources department to see if they have a mentoring program.
3. Look outside the office. Mentoring doesn’t have to be a “business” relationship. You can find mentors outside the workplace from associations you belong to, activities you’re involved in, neighbors, and relatives.
4. Do an Advanced People Search on LinkedIn. You might search for someone from your alma mater.

How to Avoid These Mistakes

Hiring sales people can be a risky business, even for large companies with sophisticated recruitment processes, let alone a smaller business run by an accidental sales person with no background in sales management. Hiring a good sales person can be one of the best things you do for your business but equally it can turn out to be an expensive mistake and the source of a lot of heartache. Here are 7 of the biggest mistakes to avoid:

Use These 6 Tips to Better Engage your Customers

1. - Create awesome loyalty programs. - While loyalty programs are relatively easy to set up, they don’t always drive repeat business. Make sure yours is successful by including the following three elements:

• Make the goal attainable. For example, if you run a spa, offer a free service after five visits, not 10.
• Make it valuable. Reward customers for their loyalty with deals on your most popular items.
• Be creative. Go beyond punched cards and loyalty apps to create a memorable experience. For example, one restaurant presented an offer in a sealed envelope at the end of the meal. Only when the customers returned were they able to open the envelope. Inside it was a special offer, which ranged from a glass of wine to a free dessert to a free meal.

How to Avoid Them

1. - Failure to plan. - Like the wise saying goes, “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” It’s especially true for women-owned businesses. Fewer than 10 percent of all businesses both new and established take the time to create a plan.
2. - Not managing accounts receivable. - Small business owners are consistently challenged by accounts receivable. You know your customers are going to pay you, however, it may take 60 or 90 days for them to do so. The challenge is that your vendors want to be paid within 30 days. Obviously, planning and budgeting make managing this process easier.

How Women Can Avoid These Common Mistakes

Mistake 1: Running your business impulsively - It's great to have heart, intuition and creativity. But those don't necessarily lead to profit and profit growth. If you're averse to numbers, think of your financial statement as a garden. Your money needs care, watering, weeding, fertilizing and pruning.
Mistake 2: Setting prices too low - Some female owners set their prices according to what they think their customers will pay and then resent them for paying too little. Instead, come up with a price that takes into account the percentage you want to make on each sale, how much your costs are, "invisibles" such as the things you do above and beyond the call of duty for customers, and how much your competitors are charging.

Ask Yourself the Following 3 Questions and Put the Answers Into Action

1. - What was the last service you recommended to someone and what motivated you to recommend it? - When you uncover why you recommend other people’s services, you can incorporate that into your own business, to attract more word of mouth referrals.