Businesses exist to provide access to products and services for people and other businesses, but their entire spiel depends on people. Entrepreneurs are people, their staff are people and the purchasing decisions are made by people. It is remiss, therefore, to only consider businesses’ value as the product or service they offer, their prices and their placement; despite it being imbued on business students that product, price, placement and promotion are the most important considerations for a marketing mix. Little wonder, then, that a 2018 study on learning and development carried out by the folks at LinkedIn indicated that training for soft skills was the number one priority for talent development. This is simply because today, when automation and computing technologies reduce the technical labour placed on workers, adaptability and a human touch rules. Human resources industry experts, the study asserts, agree that demand for soft skills will continue to…

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Yellow Pages have announced the launch of a new service, Yellow Connect, specifically designed to help SMEs grow the visibility of their businesses both online and offline, and reach more customers with prices starting from as low as Ksh.2,500. While making the announcement, Yellow Pages CEO, Pedro Gomes, noted that small businesses may lack the manpower and capital to dedicate to large scale marketing efforts, and this is the gap that Yellow Connect aims to fill. “In my opinion, SMEs face two major challenges; the first is the lack of manpower in the organisations, and the second is the need to grow beyond their physical locations. Yellow Connect basically gives them that opportunity,” said Gomes. In addition to providing services such as website creation, listing on the Yellow Pages digital and print directories, and email and SMS campaigns, Yellow Connect will allow small business owners to monitor and engage sales…

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The world is tough for SMEs: A 2017 exploratory study on the critical success factors for SMEs in Kenya found that 70 percent of small businesses fold within their first 3 years. Having a good product or service, innovative leadership and skilled staff were among the critical success factors that business owners identified for the study. Two of the key factors mentioned specifically involved business interaction with customers. The first was customer relations, which involves the businesses’ staff directly talking to the customers. The better your staff is at handling customer communication, the higher the likelihood is that the business will succeed. Marketing was the second factor, with consumers constantly bombarded by messages, it is difficult for businesses to rise above the noise. Great experiences are the solution for businesses that want to connect with their customers. A survey of marketers by Hub Spot, a developer of marketing and sales…

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The world is tough for SMEs: A 2017 exploratory study on the critical success factors for SMEs in Kenya found that 70 per cent of small businesses fold within their first three years. Having a good product or service, innovative leadership and skilled staff were among the critical success factors that business owners identified for the study. Two of the key factors mentioned specifically involved business interaction with customers. The first was customer relations, which involves the businesses’ staff directly talking to the customers. The better your staff is at handling customer communication, the higher the likelihood is that the business will succeed. Marketing was the second factor, with consumers constantly bombarded by messages, it is difficult for businesses to rise above the noise. Great experiences are the solution for businesses that want to connect with their customers. A survey of marketers by Hub Spot, a developer of marketing and…

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