Blog - Page 10 of 11 - The Visionaries Group

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Recently a friend told me their colleague’s email had been hacked, or compromised. It seems every week there are news stories of this website or that being hacked and emails compromised. Now, no website or digital file is totally secure. A skilled hacker can bypass even government secured databases as you’ve no doubt read in the news. In recent months passwords for such sites as Yahoo! Voice, AOL, E-Harmony, Gawker, Formspring, Plenty of Fish, and Linkedin have been compromised.

Now, let me share a little bad news. You can do everything right and the determined and skilled hacker will find a way in, just as securing the doors and windows to your home won’t keep the most determined burglar out. However, taking a few modest precautions with your digital life can prevent the majority of intrusions and losses. Most hackers are looking for low hanging fruit, just as most burglars are looking for homes or cars that are quick and easy to rob.

First and foremost, secure your computer with a good anti-virus product. A good number of passwords and data are lost through malware installed on a computer through programs you might have inadvertently installed by opening an email or clicking a link. Programs like key loggers are small and easy to load and phone home (wherever home is) easily. What might you think if you saw a 16 digit number come across your screen, followed by a 4 digit number and then a 3 or 4 digit number, but a credit card complete with security code.

I can hear a few of you smugly saying out loud you are immune as you have an Apple […]

By Daniel Feldman|2017-05-22T11:11:31-07:00July 17th, 2012|Social Media, Web Design|Comments Off

Framed…Who Are You?

What do your eyeglasses say about you and your personality? This infographic from ReadingGlassesShopper is a fun look at who we are through the shape and style of our eyewear.

By Daniel Feldman|2017-05-22T11:11:31-07:00June 11th, 2012|Fun|Comments Off

Blogging for Buyers

We are often asked why someone should blog. After all, there are close to 165 million blogs by some accounts. What could you possibly add to the cacophony of information out there? The answer is, a lot. Let’s start with the fact that no one expects you to be the next Hemingway or Faulkner. No one expects you to be the next David Pogue, Ariana Huffington, or Walt Mossberg either. They have full time jobs writing….you have a full time job running an optical practice.

Your patients and customers come to you because you have something to offer the shop or practice down the street doesn’t. It could be free parking. It could be your life-size poster of Lady Ga-Ga in a pair of the hottest new sunglasses. It could be for your expert opinions and advice. Why not share that experience and expertise with potential patients and customers in addition to your current clientele.

Blogging can be boiled down to curating and creating. There are times you will want to sit down and write something from scratch, giving your expert take on a particular subject, whether that be macular degeneration or the newest from Maui Jim. Feel free to discuss why you believe something should be treated in a particular way from the research you’ve conducted or why these new sunglasses are the best thing since the last great thing. There are other times you will take the work others have done or written about and you will present it to your readers (with attribution of course) and add your two cents worth…or 4 or 6 cents worth.

You want to blog because Google and other search engines want new content to index and each blog post […]

By Daniel Feldman|2017-05-22T11:11:31-07:00March 26th, 2012|Social Media|Comments Off

SELLING IS EVIL!!

C’mon, admit it! It’s ok to say it, we all know it: Selling is evil, it’s just plain evil. It’s awful and horrible. It’s despicable. Seriously, it’s just atrocious and immoral. And, it’s beneath you!

It would have to be all those things according to what most of you, as eye care professionals, tell me. When asked, in one of my surveys, to define selling, here are some responses from some of your peers:

“Selling is pushing someone to purchase something they may not need.” “Selling is convincing a person to buy something from you.” “Selling is persuading a person to buy an item you’re trying to profit off of.” “Selling is trying to get money from someone to buy something they don’t want or need.” “Selling is trying to deceive someone to get their money.”

These are actual responses.

Now ironically, and no matter what you do for a living, Selling is necessary. If there weren’t any sales, 99% of us wouldn’t have jobs. So, selling a product and/or service is necessary. But is it really a necessary evil?

Well, it probably is if you subscribe to one of the definitions above or have a negative perception in your head about what you think Selling is. And you probably do because negative perceptions and definitions about Selling is all that’s been taught to us.

Most of us accept the notion that Selling is all about persuading someone to buy something… Selling = Persuasion. So let me ask you this, do you personally like to be persuaded? Yeah, neither do I. And neither do most people.

So if Selling = Persuasion and most people don’t like to be persuaded, […]

By Robert Bell|2017-05-22T11:11:31-07:00March 19th, 2012|ECP, Sales Training|Comments Off

The Set Up

Much has been written about setting up a Facebook page. With over 850 million active members, it’s been done just a few times… The subject however keeps coming up. As recently as SECO and again at Vision Expo East we heard from many optical shops and optometrists who have yet to set up a Facebook page, or have yet to set them up correctly that we thought it worth giving a quick recap to setting up a business page and add to that setting it up for the new timeline structure all business pages will be converted to at the end of March.

Let’s start with the type of page you have. Many businesses have made the mistake of setting up a “friend” or personal page for their business. This is a violation of the TOS (terms of service) for Facebook and your page could be deleted without notice by Facebook, throwing away hours of your hard work, making you go through everything all over again. So let’s set up our page correctly. Point your browser to http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php. You will see a page that looks like this:

If you are a manufacturer, you would pick the Brand or Product button on the upper right. If you are an ECP, pick the Local Business or Place button on the upper left. For demonstration sake, we will pick Local Business or Place. We then get a drop down box with categories. We picked Health/Medical/Pharmacy and then filled out the information in the boxes provided for our business.

By Daniel Feldman|2017-05-22T11:11:32-07:00March 14th, 2012|Practice Managment, Social Media|Comments Off

So, Why Aren’t You in Jail??

An optometrist was very eager to give me his opinion on “selling”. His attitude was that “selling” cheapens and degrades the profession of optometry. Optometrists and their staffs should not be salespeople. Optometrists should be the best doctors they can be and their staffs should be a reflection of that.

Agreed! 100%!! Optometrists should be the best doctors they can be and their staffs shouldreflect that. Absolutely! Unequivocally!

He went on to say that people like me, who teach selling to eye care professionals, should be ashamed of themselves; that we appeal to the lowest common denominator of money-grubbing optometrists. Ouch! It’s not the first time I’ve heard this from someone who’s never attended one of my workshops.

“Doctor, are you telling me that you’re dedicated to the health and comfort of your patient’s visual health? 100%?”

“Yes, of course,” he replied.

“Wonderful! Would you happen to know the percentage of your patients that purchase more than one pair of eyewear from you?”

“Maybe 5 or 10%, if I had to guess.”

“How many pair does your average patient need?”

“On average? Three pair.”

“So, your patients are leaving with less than they need? Hmm, so how is it that you’re not in jail?”

I shared with this doctor the following information: A woman won a $2.1 million settlement against her cardiologist for failing to give her an aspirin. Yep, an aspirin! It was to be given to the patient before an angioplasty. But, because the patient received less than what was needed, she developed gangrene and lost a foot.

Think about this: If you put your trust into the hands of any other kind of physician… a cardiologist, an oncologist, an orthopedist, etc., and they gave you less than what […]

By Robert Bell|2017-05-22T11:11:32-07:00March 8th, 2012|ECP, Sales Training|Comments Off

Steal Success!

At the Visionaries Group, we often hear from ECP’s how they shop their competitors on a regular basis. When we ask what they have learned, we almost always get the same litany of comments.

“Their store was dirty…the showcases had fingerprints all over them”

“Their product mix was horrific…who the heck is their buyer?”

“Can you believe their greeting and sales approach?”

“Their pricing is off”

“Can you believe how many of that old X product line they have in stock?”

We wonder why anyone wastes time competitive shopping if all they come back with is what everyone else is doing wrong. Let’s face it, we could probably take a stroll through your store/practice and find plenty of things you are doing wrong too.

The best practices we’ve worked with, always go competitive shopping with another purpose. These entrepreneurs walk into not only their competitors, but every business with their eyes wide open not to see what others are doing wrong, but what others are doing right.

It is easy to point out what someone does wrong. Microsoft Word has done it 4 times in writing this blog so far. 🙂 It is far more difficult to find a good idea and adopt it for your business or practice. Imagine taking the best idea from a dozen other practices in your area and adopting them to your own. Imagine taking the best ideas from your favorite restaurant, salon, clothing store, and blog (The Optical Vision Site, dbadesigns or The Visionaries Group?) and integrating them all into how you do business. Who could possibly compete with you when you have collected and integrated the finest ideas from everyone […]

By Daniel Feldman|2017-05-22T11:11:32-07:00March 8th, 2012|ECP|Comments Off

How Pinteresting

Have you heard of Pinterest yet? Tag….now you have. What is Pinterest? You could ask the nearest twenty something female, or read on. Some have called the site a female Tumblr. Pinterest is a visual bulletin board social media site. Members create any number of their own boards . The subjects of these boards are as wide and varied as the over 4 million registered users could possibly imagine, from food to funny, beaches to brides, tattoos to TV shows. Users pin photos they find interesting to their boards with very brief description or caption for each photo. Users can now sign in with their Facebook login and their pins can be shared with their Facebook friends in their timeline too.

Once you have an account (which currently is by invitation only, though not hard to get an invitation from the company either), you create a board or boards of your interest. You can always create more boards or delete old boards. You then pin images to your board(s) with your short captions. If the image is shared from a website, the link back to that site remains with the photo for all to see (can we say backlink?). You can also repin someone else photo to any of your boards and the link back to their board as well as the source link follow onto your page.

So, you might be asking, what the heck does this have to do with my eye care practice? Don’t I have enough to worry about with Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Linkedin? Yes, your social media plate might seem a little full, […]

By Daniel Feldman|2017-05-22T11:11:32-07:00February 1st, 2012|ECP, Social Media|Comments Off

Social Media 101

We work with a number of eye care professionals who all want to participate in social media to help build their practices. There is no shortage of great social media sites. The question is almost always asked about what site does what and for whom? We saw a picture similar to this a while back explaining several of the top social media sites in a somewhat humorous albeit indelicate manner and thought we would update it with a few more sites and share it with you. We hope you get as many smiles out of it as we did.

By Daniel Feldman|2017-05-22T11:11:32-07:00January 30th, 2012|ECP, Social Media|Comments Off

The Email Casscade

We’ve seen a number of posts on Facebook as New Year’s approaches about people deleting email subscriptions as part of their New Year’s resolution. While getting rid of the old and welcoming the new is a New Year’s tradition, the way we saw a number of people approach this task seems off base. Without doubt there are email subscriptions that you might no longer wish to ever read (our emails excluded of course). There are those subscriptions where you might read 1 of 5 posts or 1 of a dozen even. The point is, you still find something worth reading a few times a month. The problem is not the number of emails but how we manage them. With our emails now being delivered to our mobile phones and tablets, we need to prioritize better.

Instead of deleting your name from everything you haven’t looked at in a while, why not take the time to establish primary and secondary email accounts as well as the prerequisite junk account(s). The email address you place on your business card should be on your mobile device. This is the method you want your customers and clients to reach you through. Your email subscriptions, whether they be for professional education or the latest daily deal should be delivered to a secondary account that you don’t put on your mobile phone or tablet. This way you can deal with the daily deluge while in your office and only the most important communication reaches you when you are enjoying family or personal time.

Since most every web hosting company offers unlimited email addresses, this is easy to […]

By Daniel Feldman|2017-05-22T11:11:32-07:00December 30th, 2011|Social Media, Web Design|Comments Off