Make it easy for people to do business with you please!

Today I have been actively looking to book a venue for a meeting. I have been looking for a venue with something a little different (a converted church, a community enterprise or cooperative with social values for instance).

In this process I have encountered numerous easily corrected barriers, which could be putting other potential customers off too. Before you expect people to do business with you think about the following:

• Have a webpage. If you don't you have immediately blown your credibility.


• Don't have Inactive webpages and links. There is nothing more frustrating than trying to find out about your company and getting directed to useless pages.


• Make sure you have details of rooms for hire - sizes, capacity, layout, pictures tell a story!


• Make sure you have clear contact details - this means telephone numbers too! Regardless of technology people may actually want to talk to you. One company simply had a ? in place of a number. Exactly what I was thinking.


• If you are going to provide meeting room hire facilities, make sure that your staff are fully briefed on what you provide, what the prices are, have access to this information or have the ability to find it out and get back to your customer.

In an increasingly competitive world, you need to make it as easy as possible for people to do business with you. If you don't then you could be unwittingly be sending potential good customers to your competitors.

The best socially based venue in Manchester, so far...Bridge 5 Mill. http://www.merci.org.uk/drupal/bridge5mill