In every neighborhood, there’s always that house down the street with the picture-perfect lawn. And this isn’t just a grass-is-always greener scenario. It’s genuinely a perfect turf dreamscape. It keeps you awake at night, scheming about aeration and fertilizer, wondering if maybe there really was some merit to your father’s maniacal grass-cutting patterns.
But do you ever go over there and knock on the front door and ask just what the neighbors put into their yard work? If you do, you probably have not only made vast improvements to your own miniature pasture, but maybe you made new friends and have some block parties and barbecues to attend.
That’s the nature of sharing information. People who reveal their knowledge feel magnanimous, and the ones receiving it are appreciative. Thus, a friendly social bond is formed. Contrary to what we might think, people who have been successful with anything ranging from a good recipe for pie crust to more efficient rocket fuel will be happy to share in their good fortune to the extent that they’re able. They may not be able to give you the play-by-play or the exact formula, but they can share the empirical experience of how they arrived at their result, and that’s more than half the battle.
In our close-knit neighborhood of an industry, we all know who is good at which specific aspects of business. We also know who has the best golf swing, and all sorts of other trivia we probably shouldn’t know, but that’s because we’ve been in this together a long time. So it happens that when an issue arises in business, there are certain people we hope we could call for help.
Well, for SCN’s annual Best Practices issue, we made a list of the most pressing issues of 2014 and made those calls for you. In the articles below, you’ll find amazing and intriguing insights that will help you optimize your business. But not your golf swing. We’ll save that for next year.
The Secret to Closing a Sale, by Brock McGinnis
The Secret to Inventory Management, by Steve Olszweski
The Secret to Recurring Revenue, by Julian Phillips
The Secret to Life-Saving Tech Support, by Michael BridwellThe Secret to Surviving Audiovisual Commoditization, by Tim Hennen
The Secret to Better User Interface Design, by Christopher JaynesThe Secret to Wireless Microphone Success, by Karl Winkler
The Secret to Personalization, Quality, and Responsiveness, by Steve Emspak
The Secret to Winning Bids Over IT VARs, by Erin Bolton
The Secret to Maintaining a Killer Product Lineup, by Jeff Irvin
The Secret to AV Project Success, by Mark Madison
The Secret to Breaking into Streaming Media, by Rob Read
The Secret to Bulletproof Product Testing, by Michael Pettersen
