The keynote speaker was Lee Rainie, Director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Since 1999, this organization has examined how people’s internet use affects their families, communities, health care education, work place and political life.

Gas prices are up, rice prices are up. And there is talk of a downturn, a recession or worse.

So if the current economic climate lasts throughout 2008, how will you protect your business? Here are some bits of advice from several successful business people.

Eliminate unprofitable customers. Evaluate the profitability of each customer. If you have a customer who demands a lot of attention and time, but you see little in return, it may be time to let them go.

Severing unprofitable or exhausting relationships can, after the initial fallout, boost your company's revenues by allowing you to focus more time on gaining new business. Read more about Customer Evaluation Scoring.

Keep in close contact with your customers. Show them that you care. They are also experiencing the downturn. Understand how their business is being affected and look for ways you can help.

According to Gregg Landers, director of growth management consulting at CBIZ Accounting Tax & Advisory Services, “Lasting relationships are built in hard times. And look for new market opportunities, recognizing that when the business climate changes, customer needs will change as well. That may mean new markets will open up for you,” he says.

Amp up sales to land more customers. Jay Siff, CEO and founder of direct marketing firm Moving Targets and Loyal Rewards, has told his clients to literally steal customers from their competitors, if they want to see their companies grow.

"The pie is shrinking and the successful small business is going to have to win a bigger share of that shrinking pie," he says. One way to do this is to give your customers a better consumer experience. He also advises his clients to reach out to the new community members. “You should have an active campaign to greet and bond with them," he explains.

• too dense with information (or too spare);
• overly colorful (or overly bland);
• unnecessarily blighted with fine-print legalese; and/or
• completely ineffectual from a marketing perspective.

If you’re like most people, you don’t notice other people’s signatures except in rare occasions, when (a) you need to find a phone number or (b) the person’s signature cries out for ridicule (see: bad clip art, comic sans font, color magenta).

Internet Terms to Know

SEM: Search engine marketing is a form of internet marketing that tries to promote web sites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs). Some methods include search engine optimization, paid placement and paid inclusion.

SERPS: Search engine results pages. These are the pages that appear when you type a search term into Google, Yahoo, or MSN.

SEO: Search engine optimization is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN) via natural, or unpaid, search results for targeted keywords. Usually, the closer to the top of the page a site is presented in the search results, or the higher its rank, the more searchers will visit that site. Some efforts may include adding unique content to a site, ensuring that content is easily indexed by search engine robots, and making the site more appealing to users.

PPC: Pay per click is another way that web site owners attempt to drive traffic to their site. PPC considers what words people use when searching for certain things. For example, when searching for life insurance, a person may type “life insurance,” find life insurance,” “looking for cheap life insurance,” and so on. Web site owners bid on those key words and key word phrases. The higher the bid, the closer to the top of the page the ad appears. These results will show up in the sponsored listings, or the ads to the top and right of the page.

According to The Gerontological Society of America, the brain loses tissue from your 30s onward. Studies have shown that aerobic exercise actually improves cognition and overall cerebral health. Yet another reason to stop using that treadmill as a clothes rack.

But beyond physical exercise, how can you keep your brain sharp well into your golden years? Scientists believe that exercising your brain can create synapses that will help you maintain your mental acuity as you age.

Her are a few tips courtesy of wikiHow.

• Learn. As people age they tend to think they are unable to learn new skills. This couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, learning a language, how to play an instrument or to use a computer program not only keep your brain young, but keeps life interesting…and keeps you marketable.

• Play. Games and puzzles like crosswords, Sudoku, Scrabble and computer games keep those synapses firing.

• Read. Reading often and a variety of books, magazines and newspapers increases you vocabulary and exercises your brain.

In general terms, McCain wants to spur competition among insurers, increase consumer choice and reduce government intervention and regulation. He would do this, in large part, by allowing insurers to sell policies across state lines and by severing the employer-health insurance link (which earns him points in my book). He would redirect the tax break that employers currently receive to individuals, who would then be able to buy individual coverage on their own (which they could take from job to job).

McCain would also create a “guaranteed access plan” for those can’t find coverage through traditional methods, but there is some early skepticism about this ill-defined element of his proposal.

“The plan isn't expected to make a major dent in the number of uninsured Americans, and questions remain about how the plan would help older, sicker people who can't find insurance on the open market,” says the Wall Street Journal.

[Hat tip: WSJ Health Blog]

American Association of Managing General Agents AAMGA
5/7-5/9 Scottsdale, AZ

ACORD / LOMA Insurance Systems Forum
5/13 - 5/15 Las Vegas, NV

AAMGA University: MGA and Brokers Beginner's School
5/7-5/9 Scottsdale, AZ

Institute 2008
6/18-6/20 Moscone Center WestSan Francisco, CA

NAHU 2008 Convention and Exhibition
6/29 – 7/2, San Diego, CA

American Council of Life Insurers ACLI Annual Conference 2008
10/19-10/21 The Westin Boston, MA

Property Casualty Ins. Ass. Of America
10/26 – 10/28 Scottsdale, AZ

Before you hit the conference circuit, brush up on your networking skills.

I was about to send them to the bin when it occurred to me: In these times of climatic peril, it’s really not enough that Earth Day is only 1/365 of the calendar year. In fact, I propose we ditch Monday and replace it with Earthday. No one likes Mondays anyway, and they make up a whopping 15 percent of the entire year. So let’s agree to replace that soul-sapping day with the more inspiring Earthday.

Anyway, without further ado, here are those links I was telling you about. If you’re pressed for time but want to do something green that’s next to effortless, just turn off your computer before you leave the office tonight.

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/ten-ways-to-cut-your-carbon-footprint-at-work-459967.html
http://www.thegreenoffice.com/carbon/result.php
http://www.energysavingsecrets.co.uk/ReduceYourCarbonFootprintAtWork.html
http://green.msn.com/Articles/article.aspx?aid=3

The Genetic Information Non-Discrimination Act, 10 years in the making, is meant to encourage people to use genetic screening in order to detect latent medical problems, before they become more difficult to treat. The new law says that employers and insurers cannot deny employment or insurance to anyone who has opted to take a test, regardless of what the results show.

What does this mean for private insurance?

The adverse selection problem becomes huge. In the context of insurance, adverse selection describes a situation where, as a result of exclusive information, one party (either the insured or the insurer) has an advantage, and uses that advantage to the detriment of the other party.

Here’s an example of adverse selection will work under the new law:

If you, Joe Sixpack, get genetically tested and the results reveal that you’re predisposed to a bunch of different medical conditions, you’re likely going to run out at buy as much insurance as you can, and this new law will enable you to omit mention of your test results.

Insurance is something that people buy because they can’t predict the future. But in the case of genetic testing, a consumer can, to a certain degree, predict his future.

So, this is the nightmare scenario for private insurers:

1. Everyone gets genetically tested.
2. Every sick (or soon to be sick) person buys insurance, and subsequently racks up gi-normous medical bills.
3. Insurers pay through the nose and are forced to raise premiums for everyone.
4. Healthy people, feeling the sting of higher premiums, drop their coverage. (Their genetic crystal ball says they don’t need health insurance, anyway.)
5. Insurers are left with a bunch of sick (read: expensive) policyholders (and are forced to keep enrolling them).
6. Private health insurance goes belly-up.

Anyone have a more sanguine scenario to share?

A Singapore beverage company Out of the Box launched two complementary brands: Anything and Whatever. Anything is carbonated and comes in six flavors (Cola with Lemon, Apple, Fizz Up, Cloudy Lemon and Root Beer). Whatever is non-carbonated (Ice Lemon Tea, Peach Tea, Jasmine Green Tea, White Grape Tea, Apple Tea, Chrysanthemum Tea). Consumers don’t know which flavor they're getting until they take a sip. According to forums, teens immediately got the concept and love it.

The lesson: Use age demographics to your advantage. If your plan is to stay in the insurance game for 10 or 20 more years, you will have to sell to a generation you may not particularly understand.

Regardless, the next group of viable customers are the soda swilling, gum popping kids loitering outside your grocery store. Stay in the game by tweaking your product lines to better fit a twenty-something, thirty-something and so on.

Although generational marketing is no longer the rage, it still makes sense to modify your product lines to target specific age groups and to market to those individuals through different mediums. Diversifying your marketing methods will help you acquire a broader clientèle and make your business more recession proof.

His advice? Tell them they’re right to be upset.

When clients criticize you or your service in writing, they’re usually pretty miffed, and trying to argue with them—which amounts to telling them they’re wrong—is simply going to make them more irate, more critical of you and your service.

Tell them they’re right to be upset, and you’ll almost always diffuse the situation. The problem won’t go away, but you will have positioned yourself as empathetic problem-solver, not a defensive responsibility-dodger.

Godin: “Arguing with a customer who takes the time to write to you does two things: it keeps them from ever writing again and it costs you (at least) one customer. Perhaps that’s your goal. Just take a moment before you launch an unhappy former customer into the world.”

What Godin’s post amounts to is a restatement of this timeless business adage: The customer is always right. It’s now a cliché, but it’s no less true.

When a prospect objects to your spiel, what does it actually mean?

-Objections are the customer's way of getting a different view of the situation.

-Objections are the customer's way of collecting more information to evaluate the product.

-Objections will reveal the customer's primary needs or areas of interest.

-Objections can move the sales process forward.

-Objections are expressions of the customer's interest and involvement.

Read the entire article here.

In a recent article in New York Times Magazine, Dubner and Levitt make a compelling case for pay-as-you-go insurance pricing.

According to Levitt and Dubner, our current driving system (if you can call it that) has over $300 billion in unpaid costs (well, actually, they’re not unpaid. They’re simply not being paid by the people who are running up the tab). Here are the price tags associated with our current system:

~ Carbon emissions: $20 billion a year
~ Wasted fuel and lost productivity due to congestion: $78 billion a year
~ Auto crashes: $220 billion a year

Dubner and Levitt believe that the “externalities” (fancy word for negative results) linked with driving – CO2 emissions, crashes and congestion – could be curtailed with insurance coverage that rewards people who drive less and punishes (that’s a harsh word—penalizes) people who drive more.

To a certain extent, we already have pay-as-you-go pricing, but it's predicated on people self-reporting their annual mileage, “which has an obvious shortcoming,” say Levitt and Dubner. (In general, economists don’t trust anyone to do the right thing unless it’s in their economic interest to do so; maybe that’s why they call it the ‘dismal science.’) In the case of self-reporting of mileage, it’s pretty clear that the financial incentive is to under-report—and let's call that practice by it's true name: insurance fraud!

As things stand now, a person who drives only to the corner store on weekends pays about as much (give or take) in insurance premiums as the guy who burns up the highway every day. What’s unfair is that the latter driver contributes far more in terms of the evil Cs – carbon, congestion and crashes. Mad Max doesn’t care, though. Currently he doesn’t have to pay for his extravagant driving habits; he gives the tab (in the form of pollution and hospital bills and unlivable cities) to all of us.

Pay-as-you-go would give the tab back to Mad Max.

Despite these liabilities, Wyden’s campaign is getting some traction and is even airing the following ad, which calls attention to the most irritating part of our current health care system: the fact that, for most Americans with insurance, coverage is tied to the workplace. This tie—a leftover from WWII wage controls—has the effect of stifling not only personal freedom, but also the entire American economy.

Check it out.

http://www.standtallforamerica.com/page/s/careyoukeep

In a marketplace where companies are increasingly losing their product advantage, how you sell is as important as what you sell. Traditional sales training focuses on skills and what sales people should do to make a sale--talk to the decision maker, differentiate, sell value. Sales messaging focuses on how to sell--say the right thing, to the right prospect, at the right stage in the sales process, to motivate the right behavior, at the right value point, do it right now.

The answer to every sales challenge already exists. One of your sales people already has a great value statement, an effective way to position you against your competition and a unique way to overcome and objection.

Develop a message
• Mine those answers
• Debug—determine if it is true and meaningful
• Synthesize the message—put your English on it

If you have separate sales and marketing department, the tasks should be split between them. If you do not, delegate one person in your organization to collect information. Create surveys for your customers and conduct customer interviews. A second person should mine the sales force for tactics that work best for them.

Create a cohesive message that combines your sales force’s answers and information gathered from your customers. Then you must disseminate the message. If you have a small agency, you can do this at a weekly meeting. A larger agency can create tutorials and scripts for their sales force.

The key factor is that this is not a project wit ha beginning and end. The audience’s needs will constantly change, and so should your message.