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Listening to your customers and to the business can be the critical difference between winning and losing. The right methodology, the right data, and the right tools can help you listen to your business -- and even smaller companies have more data available today than ever before. Read More

There is nothing more important in starting a business than learning all you can about your potential market. Most entrepreneurs have an instinctive confidence in their product or service -- but without first-hand market research, it's only a hunch. The first step is to conduct a "SWOT" analysis: analyzing your business's strengths, weaknesses, Read More

For men 18 and older, TV advertising is no longer the main influencer in purchasing decisions - just 22% say it is (down 8 points), compared with 24% who now cite advertising inserts as the most influential medium, according to the Customer Focus: Decade of Data report from Vertis Communications.

Overall, 27% of total adults survey said they t Read More

Return Path's 2007 Holiday Email Survey has been released and the data suggests that consumers are becoming savvy inbox managers and businesses that continue to churn out unrefined email campaigns could find themselves labeled as spammers. Read More

Women who own small businesses — about a third of all small businesses in the United States, in fact — have been pushing for years for a bigger piece of government contracts, which now total $400 billion a year. But few were happy when the Small Business Administration finally announced new rules in December to ensure that 5 percent of the cont Read More

Need a little help writing your next direct mail letter or web copy? This is a great summary of the steps needed for effective copywriting. Includes solid examples. Read More

Forced ranking is a controversial workforce management tool that uses intense yearly evaluations to identify a company's best and worst performing employees, using person-to-person comparisons. In theory, each ranking will improve the quality of the workforce. Top managers rank workers into three categories: The top 20% are the "A" players, the Read More

New research from The Nielsen Company finds that half (49 percent) of U.S. consumers are reducing their spending to compensate for rising gas prices, up four points from June 2007. Consumers are also battling high gas prices by combining shopping trips and errands (70 percent), eating out less (41 percent) and staying home more often (39 percent). Read More

The brain is often envisioned as something like a computer, and the body as its all-purpose tool. But a growing body of new research suggests that something more collaborative is going on - that we think not just with our brains, but with our bodies. A series of studies, the latest published in November, has shown that children can solve math prob Read More

Small-business lobbyists on both sides of the aisle will do their best to keep health care reform near the top of the next president's agenda. The difference, it seems, in this election: They are looking to compromise. Both sides have come a long way since 1993, when the United States' largest small-business lobbying group, the National Feder Read More