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Achieving Balance: How Hormone Health Improves Personal Performance 

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StrategyDriven Practices for Professionals Article |Hormone Health|Achieving Balance: How Hormone Health Improves Personal PerformanceThe human body is made up of numerous hormones that all have essential functions for the body’s overall well-being. It all stems from one straightforward concept. The hormones of the body have quite an element of control in how the human body functions through the control that it has. These hormones act as messengers so that your performance daily is as it should be.

It’s precisely for this reason that today, various health remedies are in place to help address the need for better hormone health. As one strives to keep their entire body in check, their hormone health should also be cared for.

Here’s why:

1. It Controls Overall Organ Functions

By the nature of what hormones are, it has the task of controlling the overall organ functions. Hormones travel all over the body. When they reach and bind to receptors, they lock together. When this process is completed, the hormones transmit the specific messages that they’re responsible for. Henceforth its ability to control the various functions of organs.

This is important so that every day, the human being can perform even the basic tasks that you’re supposed to achieve. With this, healthy hormones can accomplish the following:

  • The growth and development of the body
  • The reproductive processes of the human body
  • The various sexual characteristics that distinguish male from female
  • The ability of the body to store and process energy

Note that while hormones are widespread in the body, these don’t affect the human body in entirety. Every type of hormone has its respective function, depending on which organ or tissue it’s meant to send a message to. Because hormones perform this very important function for the human body, all the more that the clamor for balanced hormones now exists.

This is precisely the reason why it’s very important for individuals to check from time to time, their hormone levels, to ensure that all is well with them. Thankfully, products like HealthConfirm’s Hormone Vitality Complete have made it possible now to have hormone level measurements done at home, through their kits. This advantage gives you no reason not to be this prudent also about regularly checking your hormone levels.

2. It Helps Control How You Feel

Personal performance also includes one’s ability to process emotions or your ability to feel. If hormone health is poor, this also means that the level of hormones is disrupted. When this happens, you’ll also begin to notice changes in your mood. Imbalanced hormones lead to more severe mood swings. This can hinder even your behavior and your overall outlook for the day.

For example, even after a good night’s sleep, you notice that you’re still feeling weak and moody as you wake up. This may not be a problem of lack of rest anymore. It could also be a deeper problem, such as poor hormone health. With a better balance of your hormones, you end up happier.

StrategyDriven Practices for Professionals Article |Hormone Health|Achieving Balance: How Hormone Health Improves Personal Performance3. It Controls The Metabolism Of Your Body

No matter how much you exercise or control your diet, if your metabolism is poor, this could also affect your ability to maintain a healthy weight. One of the functions of healthy hormones is its ability to control your metabolism.

This function stems from the hormones of the thyroid, which were built precisely for that purpose. Along with metabolism, other functions of healthy thyroid hormones include:

  • Regulating weight
  • Managing hair growth
  • Determining energy levels
  • Controlling the inner temperature of the body

4. It Boosts Brain Function

Good hormonal health is also necessary for the brain to function adequately. Remember that the brain doesn’t merely work on its own. It’s reliant on its connections and relationships with the other organs of the body. One of these are the hormones, or the critical messengers so that the brain can process various information, depending on the specific performance that it’s meant to do.

For instance, if your hormone health is poor, specific cognitive issues can arise. When this happens, your overall personal performance is also affected. You may not be able to do the tasks you were accustomed to, not just in your job, but even in other aspects of your life.

Examples of these adverse effects of how poor hormone health affects your brain would include:

  • Having only a short attention span
  • Quickly losing one train of thought
  • Experiencing frequent short and long-term memory gaps
  • Changes in creative coordination ability

You need to think of your brain as an operating system of a computer. To fuel its functions, excellent hormone health is necessary. The healthier your hormones are, the better your overall performance is.

5. It Keeps Your Body Healthy

When your body isn’t healthy, then it’s expected that you wouldn’t be able to function to your full potential. If you notice that you’re also getting sick more frequently, this could mean that your hormones may also be of poor health.

A proper balance of your hormones is needed to keep the immune system healthy. That way, you can better function and perform, as your body’s innate ability to ward off bacteria and viruses is stronger.

Takeaway

It’s normal for the human body to experience instances when certain hormones are depleted or that their overall function is affected. While the effects may sometimes be minor, this isn’t to be taken lightly. After all, good hormone health is needed for the body’s performance to be excellent. The more that you’re able to understand about hormone health after reading through this, the more that you can step forward with ensuring that your body’s overall hormone health is excellent.

Why Small Businesses Should Transition to Online Faxing

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |Online Faxing|Why Small Businesses Should Transition to Online FaxingMany small businesses are quickly adopting digital practices to survive the rapid digital transformation driven by technology and evolving consumer needs. That is playing a significant role in enhancing their operations and facilitating their employees. One of the latest digital practices has been the adoption of online fax systems from the traditional fax machine.

There’s no doubt that fax remains an indispensable tool for many businesses. When you consider the limitations of operating and maintaining a fax machine, including the costs, you’ll understand why digital faxing is the future of fax. Online faxing helps address operational challenges and makes it easy to send and receive fax from anywhere on any device.

So, why should you transition to online faxing systems?

Increased Fax Accessibility

If your business relies on fax, you’ve likely gotten new employees or even existing employees who wanted to learn how to fax something. If you’re still using a traditional fax machine, what follows is a time-consuming process of pressing buttons and waiting, with limited access to the machine only during office hours. That is not productive for any small business.

By switching to online faxing, sending a fax is easy and quick, and you get to enjoy increased fax accessibility. Most digital faxing solutions can now be accessed via mobile, PC, or tablet. That means that your employees can send and receive documents and access their fax records anytime and anywhere.

Streamlined Efficiency

By transitioning to online faxing, your small business gets to streamline operations and improve efficiency. Instead of your employees spending countless minutes on the fax machine, they can send faxes in seconds and do more productive work. Complex on-premise storage solutions for your fax documents are also replaced by online fax storage solutions.

Your employees can access all the fax information and documents they need from a single location. Whether you use fax to communicate to clients, market your products, or keep your customers in the know, online fax streamlines the entire process for better efficiency.

Enhanced Faxing Security

With 46 million fax machines still operational worldwide, it’s easy to see why there have been growing calls about the security risks that these machines pose when conducting confidential business transactions. For small businesses in industries that still rely on fax such as real estate, legal, and healthcare, transitioning to online faxing offers enhanced security.

Online faxing helps you reduce compliance risks and ensure data protection when sending and receiving faxes. Even when sending confidential documents, your small business can be assured of a secure solution. When choosing an online fax service, be sure to confirm the security protocols in place for peace of mind.

Reduced Costs

By transitioning to online fax, your small business gets rid of the costs associated with fax machines, including hardware, software, networking systems, and maintenance. You can save a significant amount of money by simply switching to a cloud-based solution that is much cheaper, more efficient, accessible, and quicker instead of relying on a complex on-premise fax system.

No more buying ink, toners, and papers. With a quick and easy setup, you should be faxing by email, online, or a mobile app in minutes. Most online fax services feature a scalable and affordable pay-per-use pricing model or a monthly subscription model depending on your faxing needs. You can easily choose a pricing model that suits your small business.

Conclusion

Faxing is here to stay, and online faxing offers small businesses complete flexibility and access to their document sharing needs while ensuring secure data sharing. Being able to continue working and sending and receiving documents without the need for a physical fax machine will help your business streamline operations.

How To Use Your Website As An Effective Customer Service Tool

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StrategyDriven Customer Relationship Management Article |Customer Service Tool|How To Use Your Website As An Effective Customer Service ToolMany businesses don’t consider how important their website is when it comes to customer service, but it’s actually one of the best tools that you have at your disposal. It’s important that you have a well staffed customer service team that has the right training and knows how to deal with customers, but you also need to consider making changes to your website. If you manage it in the right way, your website is an incredibly effective way to improve customer service throughout the customer journey. These are some of the best ways to use your website to improve customer service.

Set The Right Tone

Many people don’t consider how their website sets the tone for your customer service strategy, but it’s important that you think of your website in the same way as you would any other customer service operative. If somebody calls your customer service line, do you want an operator that answers with no enthusiasm or do you want somebody that is friendly and welcoming? Do you want a long and complicated menu system that is frustrating for the customer to use or do you want to connect them to the right person immediately? These same questions can be applied to your website and they should direct your website design from the outset. If you create a website that is vibrant and welcoming, and take steps to improve the user experience so the process of browsing products is quick and easy, that sets the tone for your customer service experience as well. People will feel more comfortable buying products from you because you have given them a good first impression and they will feel confident that they will receive good customer service from you.

Make It Easy To Contact You

If people want to contact your company, they will probably start by visiting your website and looking for contact details. It’s important that you make it as easy as possible for people to get in touch with you if you want to improve customer service. You need a ‘contact us’ page on your site but you should also display your phone number throughout the site. Don’t just put it on one page, have it on the header and footer of every single page so people don’t need to search through the whole site to get in touch with you.

As well as a phone number, you should also include a simple contact form on the website. Many people prefer to contact you via email, and a contact form makes it quick and easy to do. If you just display your email address, the customer still has to open their email and input the details etc. But with a contact form, it’s all there for them.

Live chat features on your site are a must as well because they’re perfect for customers that don’t have much time and want to chat with you directly. Say, for example, somebody has a quick question about a product before they buy it. They’re not likely to take the time to call you up or send an email, so they will probably just leave the site and forget about the purchase. However, if they can fire off a quick question and get an answer right away, their first interaction with your customer service team is a positive one and they’ll be more likely to buy products. It also improves the service for existing customers because the response time is so much faster. Live chat apps also help you to save money because one customer service operative can deal with multiple queries at the same time, which is far more efficient than dealing with customers over the phone.

Provide Useful Content

Content marketing is a brilliant way to drive traffic to your website and it has many other benefits outside of SEO, but did you know that it is also a great opportunity to improve customer service for your existing customers? If you post content that addresses frequently asked questions about your products, you can solve customer issues without them having to contact you directly. You can also provide content that gives tips on how to get more out of the product, so you add value and improve the customer experience long after they have made their purchase.

Make Returns Simple

If a customer needs to return a product for any reason, it’s important that you handle it efficiently. If the returns process is long and complex, the customer will leave with a bad impression of your business and they are far less likely to use you again in future or recommend you to friends and family. It’s important that you have a simple returns process on your website so people can easily send products back and get a refund or replacement. Before any product is purchased, you need to make sure that your returns policy is clearly stated because this will avoid any conflict later on when a customer wants a refund but you will not accept the return.

Integrate With Social Media

Social media is one of the most important customer service tools that you have at your disposal. Many people prefer to contact companies directly on social media when they have an issue, rather than emailing or calling you up. That’s why it’s important that you integrate social media with your website. Adding simple follow buttons to the website helps you to build an audience on social media and makes it easier for customers to contact you on social media without having to manually find your account. You can also use social media to promote the useful content that you provide, which will boost likes and shares and expand your audience.

Many businesses make the mistake of viewing their website as a sales tool and considering it separately from the customer service branch of the company. However, the reality is, your website is a hugely important part of your customer service strategy and you need to consider that when building and maintaining your site in the first place. If you make these simple changes to your website, you can improve your customer service in a big way.

How to grow sales on a downsized marketing budget

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StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article | How to grow sales on a downsized marketing budgetBusinesses are often quick to slash marketing budgets in times of disruption, and the response to the recent economic upheaval has been no different. Global ad spend is predicted to fall by nearly $50 billion in 2020, with major organizations like Google cutting marketing budgets in half for the rest of the year. Most companies are either in startup or turnaround mode and looking to reduce expenses while maximizing the impact of their remaining resources.

Though marketing is largely seen as a “nice-to-have” versus an essential business function, it’s actually a critical aspect of any business that works to drive sales. For organizations already struggling in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis, freezing or scaling back on marketing can have dire consequences on business growth when it’s needed most.

How can business leaders confidently continue to invest in marketing during such a volatile time when both budgets and timelines are tight? The key is not necessarily to invest more in your marketing budget but to invest more wisely with strategic, data-based initiatives. That’s where segmentation comes into play.

By using data you probably already have on hand to group your clients or customers based on their value to your business, it’s possible to make the most of your digital marketing efforts to grow your revenue, fast. Though the concept of segmentation is nothing new, what is new is how quickly you can derive them and garner insights. In the past, investing in segmentation for your business could take months and millions of dollars. But with advances in technology, today it’s possible to get it done in days, not months or years, and take immediate action on the insights to boost your bottom line.

Whether you’re the leader of a startup without much digital marketing prowess yet, or a business that’s had to make marketing cuts in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis, segmentation can help you spend less and make more by empowering your marketing team to:

1. Target the right people

Segmentation allows you to identify the shared characteristics of your best customers and create detailed personas to inform your approach. Most businesses will have several distinct high-value personas, which can be grouped by a number of segmentation techniques, such as demographics, geographics or psychographics (the way people think, feel or behave). For example, a luxury car dealership might segment its customers by the attitudes and beliefs that motivate purchases (the need for speed versus family safety), whereas a grocery retailer might segment customers by demographics such as their age, education or profession.

A common mistake is taking a cookie-cutter approach by spending the same amount of money going after your high-value customer segments as your low-value segments. By determining the margins each type of customer brings to your business, you can stop wasting resources on unprofitable segments and instead more strategically focus your marketing efforts on targeting the customer segments that will deliver the greatest ROI, such as lookalike or adjacent audiences to your high-value customers. What’s great about digital advertising is that you can be incredibly specific about who you target. All the major platforms like Facebook or LinkedIn allow you to display ads to return customers, go after new audiences who are similar to existing customers or target an entirely new segment based on criteria you select.

2. Adjust your messaging

It’s not only important to determine who you need to target through digital marketing, but also what you need to say to those valuable audience segments. Generic messaging will likely have your best customers scrolling past your ads or tossing your email in their junk folders, so take what you discovered in your research about your high-value personas and tailor your content accordingly.

How you communicate with one segment versus another may be wildly different based on several motivating factors. For example, young parents and well-off retirees might consider the same pieces of furniture from a high-end retailer, but their motivations for purchasing them are very different. While young parents are more likely to purchase furniture that holds up well to long-term wear-and-tear from kids and pets, retirees might be drawn to more expensive pieces because they feel they’ve earned nice things. Segmentation allows you to truly understand these unique (but equally high-value) groups and create different pieces of marketing content that speak directly to each one.

This may seem like an obvious step, but when is the last time you really performed a robust segmentation and used that to inspire your messaging? The information you uncover may surprise you — especially if you have never segmented in the past, or haven’t for a long while. We have experienced such a significant cultural shift recently that the usual wants, needs and motivating factors of your clients or customers may have shifted as well. It might be time to take another look at your segmentation to craft more impactful messaging.

3. Tailor your product offering

In addition to who you’re targeting and how you’re targeting them with your digital marketing content, segmentation can also inform what you’re offering. With consumer needs and concerns changing over the past several months, this ability to strategically pivot your products or services based on data is more important than ever before.

Perhaps your data reveals that one high-value customer segment desires a trimmed-down version of your product or service, while another prefers a more robust option. The best course of action might be to create a streamlined version and a premium version in addition to your core product or service, and then map these offerings to their corresponding segments throughout your sales and marketing efforts. But you won’t know how to make this pivot until you really understand your customer segments and determine what needs they have.

Transitioning from a one-size-fits all marketing strategy to high-level segmentation, with the eventual goal of one-on-one personalization, simply won’t happen overnight. It’s an evolution that will take time, patience and trial and error. But the good news is, if you’re asking the right questions and tracking what’s working and not working, your segments can actually get “smarter” and more effective over time. Likewise, your creative team will become more experienced crafting the right messaging for the right clients or customer segments at the right time. This is where the art and science of data segmentation can really come together to enhance your marketing strategy and content for greater ROI.

About the Author

StrategyDriven Expert Contributor | Rob RistagnoRob Ristagno is the founder and CEO of Sterling Woods Group and a keynote speaker focused on sharing new ways to use data to drive business results. Rob combines his expertise in data science with proven sales and marketing strategies to help established middle-market companies quickly generate new revenue by improving the way they gather and utilize data.

Rob earned his bachelor’s degree in economics from Dartmouth College and his Master of Business Administration in general management from Harvard Business School. He currently lives in Newton, Massachusetts, with his wife, Kate, his daughter, Leni, and his black lab, Royce. For more information, please visit www.sterlingwoods.com.

6 Reasons Why Your Organization Would Benefit From Using a Remote File Server

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article | 6 Reasons Why Your Organization Would Benefit From Using a Remote File ServerKeeping your business organized can be a struggle, especially if you’re trying to take care of everything by yourself. Getting everything set up and ensuring that it all works properly is a hassle in and of itself.

But you can definitely make things easier for yourself with the use of a remote file server. So how do they work exactly and how can you benefit from one?

What is a Remote File Server?

A remote file server is a computer that someone can access from their own computer from anywhere else in the room or the building. That allows a person to have access to files that they may not have storage space for on their own computer.

With that said, here are the remote file server benefits you could experience when employing one in your business.

More Security and Backups

Instead of having to use your own computer to save your backups, you have a separate server where everything can be saved. You can also save and backup your files to another computer entirely, leaving you with more hard drive space.

That means less slow down and having to purchase another hard drive to transfer your files to. That’s more money in your pocket while still having access to all of your data. Having a separate server also means that your files are more secure, as only you (or anyone with the password) will be access the files.

Remote Access

Remote servers can be placed on their own VPN (Virtual Private Network) so that you can access it from just about anywhere, including your home or even on your phone while you’re away on vacation. You can grant access to your employees as well so that they can keep abreast of work and which projects need to be tended to.

File Centralization

No more having to search through hard drives to find what you’re looking for. With everything in one place, you can be more effective with work and get through projects much faster. Different permissions can be assigned to different employees as well so that only the right eyes are on the files you want.

Monitoring Employees

No one enjoys their boss peering over their shoulders to see if they’re working on what they should be. Through a remote file server, you can see exactly which employees are hitting which deadlines and what else needs to be worked on. No more having to rely on he said/she said arguments.

Data Recovery

Did you reformat your hard drive or have your computer hacked and lost everything? You won’t have to worry about losing all of your files with a remote server onhand. You can recover all of your data with a remote file server, as long as you’ve been backing up your files on a regular basis. You can avoid that horrible burden of having to start everything over from scratch.

User Control

User accounts and passwords are all controlled by your remote file server, which makes it very easy for new accounts to be created or to lock out/disable those who are no longer working for the company. This provides a safer working environment for all of your data.

Consider a remote file server for your business the next time you’re looking to upgrade. It’s definitely more beneficial than people give it credit for.