It can be easy to use your cell phone for business calls—after all, it’s right there in your pocket! However, there are a number of reasons you might want to reconsider that decision. Here are five practical reasons why you might want to stop using your personal cell phone for business calls.

1. Screening Your Calls? You Might Miss Out on Opportunities
If your cell phone is anything like ours, you probably get a lot of robocalls, and screening your calls can be a great way to avoid having to talk to a telemarketer. However, if your personal phone doubles as your business phone it also means that you’re likely to miss a call from a customer. That runs the risk of losing sales or damaging customer relationships.

2. Your Voicemail Might Get Too Crowded
Another disadvantage to using your personal cell phone for personal and business calls is that your voicemail can get overcrowded. From telemarketer calls you haven’t erased yet to messages from your kids, there are a wide variety of messages you might receive and keep for personal use. However, that overstuffed voicemail could also make it harder to answer messages from customers in a timely fashion.

And speaking of voicemail…

3. Your Personal Voicemail Message is Likely to be Different From Your Business One
Your voicemail message is a great chance to promote products, let customers know about upcoming holiday hours, and more. However, you could be missing out on that promotional opportunity if you’re using your personal phone.

4. It’s Important to Know Who You’re Talking To When You Answer
Think about the many different ways you can answer the phone. If you get a phone call from an unknown number, you might assume the person on the other end of the line is a telemarketer and your tone might reflect that. If that phone call is, instead, from a customer using a different phone than usual, that tone could start that conversation on the wrong foot.

5. On Your Personal Phone You Can’t Share Responsibility for the Line
When your call volume gets heavy or when you’re unable to take a call, it’s nice to have another person take a call. However, when your customers use your personal phone number, it’s much harder to hand the phone off if you’re unable to take the call.

How do you make the most of the telephone at your personalized print business? We would love to see you join the conversation in the comments below.

Whether you’re attending a tradeshow or setting up a booth to promote your print business, you’ll meet a wide variety of people at a show. Depending on their goal for the show, they might have a very different approach to tradeshow attendance than you do. Here are four people you’ll meet at the next tradeshow you attend.

The Info-Maniac
It’s good to do some research on the tradeshow ahead of time and to pay attention to the details, but this person takes that to the extreme. They love doing their research on exhibitors beforehand, and probably can be seen on the exhibitor floor with a notebook full of scribbled bits of information and a bag full of informational pieces.

If you’re an exhibitor, the Info-Maniac could be a gift or a curse depending on how you handle it. If you can give them the right details—or get their contact information so you can touch base on those questions after the show—you might have a new sale on your hands. Just be sure that you don’t let them monopolize your time.

The Trick-or-Treater
Remember how much fun it was to go door-to-door on Halloween and coming home with a bag of candy? The Trick-or-Treater definitely remembers, and they want to come home with a bag of tradeshow swag to rival those youthful candy hauls. If you’re attending, don’t be afraid to keep an eye on this person if they have a great promotional piece. That might give you an idea of where to explore next.

If you’re exhibiting at a tradeshow, though, this person can be a challenge because they might be more focused on stuffing their tote bag with logoed pieces than they are connecting with the companies behind those logos. Try to limit the amount of time you spend on this person and move on to more promising leads.

The Stealthy Competitor
The Stealth Competitor isn’t interested in doing business with the exhibitors—in fact, he’s one of those exhibitors! He might be seen asking very specific questions about pricing or production costs, trying to get the inside scoop by posing as a customer.

If you’re exhibiting and think you’re talking to a Stealthy Competitor, don’t be afraid to be brief. Ask for their contact information so that you can follow up. If they actually are a potential customer, it’s a great chance to answer those specific questions in a less busy setting. If they are a competitor, chances are they won’t want to talk further.

The Serious Buyer
This trade show attendee visits a booth for a good reason—to buy a product—and that makes them the best person to talk to when you’re exhibiting. If you’re attending, on the other hand, you can still benefit from the Serious Buyer. If you overhear them talking to an exhibitor, pay close attention—you might learn something! Not only might the Serious Buyer give you ideas for good questions to ask, but the direction of their conversation might tell you whether or not an exhibitor is a good fit for you.

Have you met these tradeshow attendees? How did you talk to them? We’d love to see your stories in the comments below.

Summer can be a tough time for marketing. You’re busy and your customers are busy, and that can make it a challenge to create an effective marketing strategy. However, those challenges also make it a great time to get back to basics with your marketing! Here are four tips that will help you bring your marketing back to basics.

1. Focus on Who You’re Talking To
This is the heart of any good marketing strategy, and focusing on the audience you’re reaching out to is the best shortcut to market effectively even when time is tight. Think about whether you’re reaching out to existing customers or new customers, and then use what you know about those customers to create a strategy. What media do they engage with? Can you send an email, or do you need to reach out using ads in local media or a direct mail piece? Focus your efforts where they’ll be most effective, and let your audience be your guide.

2. What Is Everyone Else Doing? Consider Doing the Opposite
One of the best ways to stand out is to do what nobody else is doing. If your competition is advertising through email, for example, a simple handwritten note could be the best way to make your business memorable.

3. Think About What Worked in the Past but Isn’t Used Now—And Think About Why
Sometimes, marketing strategies are dropped for good reason. You might have stopped putting your energy into newspaper advertising, for example, because you got better results from focusing your efforts on creating a quality email campaign. However, if you dropped a marketing strategy for other reasons—you didn’t previously have the time to pursue it, for example, or something new took your attention instead—it might be worthwhile to revisit that strategy. As an added bonus, you might be able to get inspired for new marketing efforts by examples in your files from these old projects.

4. Always Be Willing to Learn New Things
With new technologies arriving every day, the marketing landscape—especially for smaller businesses—is constantly changing. While there are a lot of tips that can help you navigate that changing world, nothing will serve you better than a willingness to learn. Staying open to new information will help keep you from getting stuck in a rut when it comes to your marketing strategy, and it will keep you flexible enough to adapt to new options when they arrive.

What marketing tips can’t you live without? We’d love to see your tips and tricks in the comments below.

When you carve out time in your busy schedule to hold a meeting, you want to make sure you use your time effectively and make the most of your time together. However, if you aren’t communicating well, you might be ruining your meetings. Are you making these mistakes—and do you know how to keep them from ruining your meetings?

1. Forgetting the Important Information
If you have important information that should be reviewed before the meeting starts, don’t forget to share it! Not only will this ensure that everyone is on the same page, but it will also save you time in summarizing that information.

2. Having Too Few People at Your Meeting
Have you ever been at a meeting and, midway through, wished that you’d included someone? Sometimes, your meeting can grind to a halt when you don’t have that person there, even if you’re able to track them down or reschedule.

However, there are definitely ways to keep this from making too big of an impact. Did you forget someone important? Was someone not able to be there? Make sure that you take the time to catch up with them after the meeting. This can mean taking notes of all the decisions made at that meeting, keeping note of the questions that you want to ask them, and the pros and cons of undecided issues.

Of course, having too few people at your meeting isn’t the only numbers issue you might face…

3. Having Too Many People At Your Meeting
If you’ve been to enough meetings, you’ll probably have come across an overstuffed meeting before and be very familiar with the issues that these meetings face. It can be hard, with so many people, to have important points heard. And if your meeting has too many people in it, you might find yourself facing another issue…

4. Having Multiple Relevant Conversations Going on At Once
Have you ever been to a meeting where the attendees walked out of the meeting feeling like the group came to very different conclusions? One of the reasons for this might be that the meeting splintered into a few different conversations. This can easily lead to different attendees hearing different information and coming to different conclusions about what the next step is, and that can be a big problem for your projects.

So how can you fix this when two groups of people within the meeting need to address focused points? Don’t just let the meeting wander off into multiple conversations. Instead be intentional when these conversations break off, and make sure to share the decisions with the group when you come back together.

Have you made these communication mistakes? Are we missing a mistake that has impacted your meeting? We’d love to see you join the conversation in the comments below.