StrategyDriven Decision-Making Article | Decision-Making Warning Flag 1a - The Gambler's Fallacy

Decision-Making Warning Flag 1a – The Gambler’s Fallacy

StrategyDriven Decision-Making Article | Decision-Making Warning Flag 1a - The Gambler's Fallacy“The Gambler’s Fallacy, also known as the Monte Carlo Fallacy, is the false belief that the probability of an event in a random sequence is dependent on preceding events, its probability increasing with each successive occasion on which it fails to occur.”

Gambler’s Fallacy
Wikipedia

Seated at a roulette table, a gambler must decide on what color to place his next bet, red or black. He knows there is a 50 percent chance of getting either red or black and that the first four spins of the wheel yielded all reds. The gambler reasons that because half of all spins should result in black and the first four were red, it is more likely the fifth spin of the roulette wheel will be black and places his bet. While his logic appears reasonable, the roulette player has just fallen victim to the Gambler’s Fallacy.


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Additional Information

Additional insight to the warning signs, causes, and results of logic errors can be found in the StrategyDriven website feature: Decision-Making Warning Flag 1 – Logic Fallacies Introduction.

StrategyDriven Talent Management Article |Compliance | Must-Haves for Successful Compliance Training

5 Must-Haves for Successful Compliance Training

Compliance training is critical for the success of an organization. It informs and educates employees on the laws, policies, and regulations that will have an impact on their jobs. It covers areas like anti-harassment, workplace safety, and diversity, among others. So, what makes compliance training successful? Keep on reading and we’ll list down some of the must-haves.

User-Friendly Software

Gone are the days when compliance training was conducted in an in-classroom setting. We are living in a digital age, and hence, training programs are also digital. That said, one of the most important things to keep in mind with such digital compliance training programs is to use the right software. Learners will be able to access training and reading materials online. They can even access compliance blogs, videos, and audio files that can help improve their knowledge.

Looking for a user-friendly enterprise solution and software that can be utilized for compliance training? While the options will be diverse, one that should be on your radar is True Office Learning.

Consistent and Long-Term Implementation

One of the most important for compliance training is for it to be consistent. Meaning, it should not be a one-time thing. Rather, it should be a long-term endeavor. It should be conducted several times to make sure that it will stick. The training should also be regularly refreshed, which will make it possible to reflect the changing policies.

Strong Leadership

To create a culture of compliance and to ensure the success of the compliance training programs, it is important to have strong leadership that is involved. Take note that compliance should be a function from the top to the bottom. Meaning, even the CEO must be part of the compliance training. Plus, the management should have the budget and the tools that are necessary to carry out the compliance training. It should be seen as a valuable investment.

Engaging and Effective Approach

The goal is to implement compliance training in such a way that it will not bore the participants. If it is monotonous, it will be ineffective when it comes to skill and knowledge retention. With this, think of the different ways to make training fun and entertaining. If you are using training software to teach compliance to the employees, it should have a user-friendly interface and culture of gamification must be infused.

Customized to the Needs of the Business

A successful compliance training program is tailor-fitted to the specific needs of the organization and the participants. There is no one-size-fits-all strategy that will work for all the users. Having a customized approach to compliance training starts with the need to determine the target audience to be able to identify what will work best for them. The specific goals of the organization will also have an effect on the way the training will be conducted.

In sum, as discussed above, successful compliance training must have a user-friendly software, long-term implementation, strong and supportive leadership, engaging approach, and tailor-fitted to the needs of the organization.

StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |Consumer Demand|Can Your Business Keep Up With Consumer Demand?

Can Your Business Keep Up With Consumer Demand?

StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |Consumer Demand|Can Your Business Keep Up With Consumer Demand?When you’ve got a good thing going, you want to keep it going. But success only comes in intervals in business, and therefore no one is ever guaranteed a permanent seat on the throne. So you should do you best to stay one step in front of the next interval, and make sure you are consistently achieving what you want to achieve. Maybe your product is selling very well, or perhaps your service is making headway in your industry. Suddenly you’re looking like a brilliant alternative for customers around the world. Consumer demand for your commerce is only going to stay high if you know what they want. Then logistically you will be tested to deliver on that expectation. Practically, you will need to be ready to smartly use your resources, to continue improving your products and services in the ways being demanded. Do you have the capacity to fill such new demands and live up to the anticipation? There are numerous ways you can do this.

Don’t believe the hype

Your first bout of success is going to have you smiling from ear to ear. It’s going to feel wonderful and finally you’ll say to yourself, things are working out as planned. However, you must snap yourself out of this euphoria that success can bring and make sure you are keeping your finger on the pulse. Why are you having this great period of rising sales and profits? What are the exact reasons for this. It may not be because the majority of consumers think your product is better but rather, that you were simply cheaper than the next rival. On the other hand it could be because there is a key feature they like which no other competitor has. There’s always a reason or multiple for why you are getting a new and consistent sales increase.

Plan your improvements

Of course business cannot stand still, you are in the annals of constant improvement. You may have the best product one year, but the next year you could so easily be toppled from your perch. The large corporations like Samsung always begin to plan ahead for the improvements they will make for their next iteration even before the current product is released. Therefore you need to begin planning on what you would like to see be done more thoroughly, made stronger, more complex, optimized and just the sheer overall quality increased.

All this entails, going back to the drawing board and being totally honest about what you think were the shortcomings of your current product and or service line. In a perfect world, what would you change? Slowly but surely you should work your way towards making that perfect goal a reality.

Keep them fixated

Is there such a thing as customer loyalty? Yes. But is consumer loyalty real? No. Consumers on the whole look for what’s best for them. And price has a huge part to play in what choices they make. Consider using netsuite pricing which has the world’s leading ERP system. In this system there is a section for ecommerce. It will help you organize your strategy for reaching out to online consumers. This external strategy is by far the most important in the modern age of internet shopping. Everything from marketing, software applications, and real world connections via ecommerce can be decided and managed using this ERP.

Upscale your production

Perhaps the most crucial but by far the most expensive is the upscaling of your production. It’s the dream come true when you simply don’t have enough products being made to satisfy the sudden overwhelming demand. Yet, if it’s allowed to continue for too long it can be a nightmare. Consumers don’t wait around for any business, they want what they want, and they want it now. So if you can see that your units are being sold far quicker than you can currently produce in a short space of time, you need to upscale your production capabilities.

Instead of one manufacturing facility or storage warehouse, double both and start creating the right amount of products that will keep up with the rate of purchases. This way the increase in demand is met with the equal supply. Avoiding backlogs of orders also avoids the big headache of going back and rectifying outstanding and late orders.

Every business wants to have that feeling of being overwhelmed by so much demand for their product. You’re obviously doing something right, but you can’t be in a production deficit for too long. Using an ERP you can manage your online strategy for reaching out far and wide to new customers.

StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship Article |Starting a Business| Starting a New Business and Want to Make It Look Professional? Here Are Some Steps You Should Take

Starting a New Business and Want to Make It Look Professional? Here Are Some Steps You Should Take

Turning a start-up into a professional business requires all sorts of different actions, approaches, and outlooks. You certainly need to be good with your use of financial resources, and you obviously need a strong work ethic. Networking with other people in your industry certainly doesn’t hurt either.

But, it’s one of those interesting facts of life that no matter how good your service or product may be, and no matter how much work you put in, it can all be made pretty much redundant by poor presentation.

We all know that, in principle, we shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, and yet that is precisely what we all do to some degree or another.

Having a professional presentation is extremely important if you want your new business to be successful. Businesses that look amateurish in any obvious way present a red flag to prospective clients or customers, and this can be fatal for start-ups in particular.

Here are a few steps you should take in order to ensure that your business looks as professional as possible.

Get a high-quality logo to use in your marketing materials

Have you ever noticed how the biggest and most successful brands out there have logos that they display prominently, at every possible opportunity? This might not be the kind of thing that you necessarily think of a lot, but that’s just because those logos are so ubiquitous that they almost fade into the background after a while.

Still, everyone knows what the McDonald’s arches represent, or the Apple apple, or any number of other professional logos.

At the earliest possible opportunity upon starting a business, you’ll want to have an effective professional logo in place. That’s because, as you start marketing and putting yourself out there, your logo will serve as a shorthand psychological trigger to bring awareness to your business, and to help people to identify with who you are.

Images stick in people’s minds in a pretty profound way, and on a pretty deep level. So, look into using a service such as Instalogo.org in order to obtain a logo for your business, today.

Ideally, your logo will be something quite unique, and won’t be easily confused with any other logo that can be commonly found out there in society. At the same time, however, your logo should be quite simple and elegant. Simple logos stick in people’s minds well. Highly complex logos often seem like “clutter” and get forgotten about.

Host your own domain name, and set up a WordPress site (hire a web designer if needs be)

In the digital age, you absolutely need to have a high-quality website up and running in order to look professional, and even just to be on people’s radar at all.

An unfortunate mistake that some new entrepreneurs make, however, is to host their websites off free domains, which then make the fact that they are free openly known through their generic URLs and watermarks.

Instead, host your own domain name. This is achieved in mere moments with any number of online domain management services, such as GoDaddy.

The next step is to subscribe to hosting plan, and create your own website using WordPress or a similar platform. WordPress tends to be ideal for a number of reasons, not least of all the fact that it includes a huge number of potential plug-ins and themes that allow you to build your own website from scratch, with no real coding skills required.

Experiment with this for a while, until you’ve got a professional and appealing website up and running. If you struggle with this, however, hire a professional web designer. It will be well worth the investment down the line.

Get some professional head shots taken – it’s really a big deal

Prospective clients and customers look for certain markers of professionalism and authority when they’re browsing the market and weighing up their options.

If your website is going to include any photos of yourself (and there’s a good argument that it should) it’s imperative that those should be professional head shots, taken by an expert photographer.

People really can tell when you’ve just skimmed selfies from your Instagram profile, and this is an immediate red flag that screams that you’re an amateur who may be there today and gone tomorrow.

Including photos of yourself on your site, along with a well-curated “Our Story” or “About Me” section will help to build rapport, and make you seem like a real person rather than just an algorithm.

StrategyDriven Customer Relationship Management Article |Payments| Pronto Payments: Get Clients To Cough Up Quicker With These Tips

Pronto Payments: Get Clients To Cough Up Quicker With These Tips

StrategyDriven Customer Relationship Management Article |Payments| Pronto Payments: Get Clients To Cough Up Quicker With These TipsDo you have a problem with clients and customers not paying their bills and invoices on time? Not only can this be very annoying, but it can pose a more practical problem for your business when it starts to affect your cash flow. If the majority of invoices aren’t paid on time, you could find that the amount of cash in your bank starts to dwindle and you might even struggle to pay your own bills as a result. But you shouldn’t let it get that far! There are a few ways you can encourage your customers to pay on time and, in some cases, even early. Read on to find out more!

Offer A Range Of Payment Options

Firstly, it’s now necessary to offer your customers and clients numerous ways they can pay you. Even though most people will go online and do a bank transfer using their online bank account, there will still be some people who would prefer not to. So, you need to make sure they can just as easily pay you. You could give customers the chance to ring your office or headquarters so that they can pay with their credit card over the phone. Another option is to accept checks. Even though these are seen as quite an old-fashioned method of payment these days, most of the older generations who aren’t so tech-savvy still prefer to pay this way.

Ensure Payment Processes Are Secure

No matter what kind of payment methods you offer to your customers, you need to make sure that they are all safe and secure. The general public is now very aware of the various ways their sensitive data could end up lost or stolen, and one of the most common reasons for stolen bank details is using unsecured methods of payment. Ivrnet offers secure solutions for over the phone payments, so it’s worth contacting them if you want to continue to offer phone payments that your customers can trust. Make sure that you also use an ecommerce platform that is known for their tight security as well so that your online customers can shop with plenty of peace of mind.

Send Out Invoices On Time

Some companies wait until the very end of the month to carry out their invoicing for work that they have completed over the month. However, this means that you will be invoicing for projects that you did at the start of the month quite late. It’s a much better strategy to send out your invoices and bills as soon as the work has been completed. Your clients will then have a month to pay up from the end date of the work.

StrategyDriven Customer Relationship Management Article |Payments| Pronto Payments: Get Clients To Cough Up Quicker With These TipsDon’t Leave Any Information Off An Invoice

One of the main reasons some clients will give for not paying on time is because they were unable to. There are a few different reasons why they might have been unable to pay on time, but sometimes it is all down to not having enough information to do so. This could be because you have missed off some information from the invoice you sent them. The client will need more than just your bank details to pay. For accounting purposes, they will also need a date on the invoice, your company address, and also the address of your bank. It’s always worth asking them what information they need on your invoice when you first create one for them so that you don’t miss anything that could be important.

Chase Up Payments As Soon As They Are Overdue

Have you just noticed that one of your invoices hasn’t been paid and is now overdue? You need to chase it up right away. It’s worth sending a polite email to remind the client as they might have simply forgotten. It’s a good idea to direct this to their accounts payables department so that it goes straight to the individual who has the responsibility of paying it. If no one responds to that and the invoice continues to be unpaid, you might want to send a more formal demand for payment.

Add Late-Payment Fees And Interest To Overdue Invoices

It’s also important to add some late-payment fees and interest on invoices that are overdue by more than a week. You should calculate a new invoice that includes the original fee and these additions added on. Hopefully, these extra charges will prompt your client to cough up finally!

Follow these tips and your clients should start paying a lot quicker in the future!