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Have you ever come across the words ‘award-winning business’ in a business article or email tagline and wondered how you could add them to your business? 

Or have you been nominated for an award, but thought the work involved wasn’t worth it? 

Karyn Burger is the Managing Director of Phonestar.  She wrote the award-winning submission for Phonestar’s Professional Services Award in 2008, and has just been named finalist in the Small Business, Professional Services and Women in Business categories for 2009.

‘The impact of winning a small business award can be far-reaching and often surprising.  When Phonestar won the 2008 Professional Services award for their local Chamber of Commerce, against more established businesses such as Credit Union Australia, many were shocked (including us!).  The awards had been a last-minute thing, encouraged by a business mentor and squeezed in between BAS, staff training and normal operational priorities.  Winning gave us a huge credibility boost – we weren’t doing anything differently, but suddenly our customer service promise became well known and legitimized in the eyes of prospective customers.  The media coverage we received immediately raised our profile locally, and gave us experience in promoting our business through editorials.   It also gave us the perfect reason to thank our existing customers, increasing our customer retention and new referral rate.

These rewards didn’t come easy though, with the submission process requiring a huge amount of thought and effort.  There were certainly times when we almost gave up. Instead, the submission itself ended up being edited a dozen times and was 15 pages of tightly written prose, tables and graphs, and resulted in us being finalists in 2 categories.  Then the mystery shopping element had all the staff on their toes jumping at the sound of the telephone – not entirely pleasant, but a great reason to remind our team we were there to give our customers great service all of the time.  This year we have actually used the awards process as part of our annual business planning and skills review of our staff.  While we have been named as finalists in 3 categories including Professional Services and Best Small Business, this review will benefit our business no matter the final result.

So what makes an awards submission jump from being a dry business document to winning that coveted award for your business?  And how do you choose the award that will be right for your business? 

These are the points we feel most important to consider:

1.Start locally or within your industry.  Your local Chamber of Commerce is likely to run annual business awards in many categories, and your industry association awards will give you a valuable yardstick against which to measure yourself.

2.Think about what your business does really well.  We were initially discouraged from entering “Professional Services” because that’s not what phone companies do, right?  But we knew we were a customer service company first and phone company second, and getting that across made us stand out.

3.Read and understand the awards criteria and questions really well.  You will only have a small number of words to get your message across, so make them count by addressing the questions being asked.

4.Put yourself in the judges shoes and try to understand what they are looking for.  Though anonymous,we knew the likely judges were independent business leaders and Government small business advisors, so we made sure we illustrated how Phonestar excelled in fundamental small business practices.

5.Wherever possible, provide evidence and examples to back your claims. For example, what does professional service mean? We used this example – a real customer who lost $1000 per day in lost sales due to configuration delays and poor technology advice.  By having a Phonestar account manager, she no longer loses sales and doesn’t waste her business time on hold.

6.Check grammar and spelling.  It may be obvious, but remember this document is the key tool being used to judge you and the simplest mistake is likely to reflect on your business.

7.Finally, get the most out of your submission by re-using it.  We’ve used part of our submission for marketing material, editorials, training materials and internal process documents.  It can also be used as the basis for other awards submissions.

Good luck, and I look forward to seeing your business name up in lights.’

Please contact Karyn at Phonestar if you have any questions regarding awards submissions or to discuss telecommunications solutions for your business. Phonestar specialise in small business solutions.

What are your thoughts?

Have you entered your business in an award before?  How was the process?  Did you find the effort equal the reward?  Would you recommend to others?