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The following independent research findings came through to us today from Awards Intelligence, a UK-based consultancy.

• Smaller award winning companies were shown to have experienced a 63% increase in operating income, and a 39% growth in sales when compared to non-winners. Large award winning companies enjoyed a 48% increase in operating income and a 37% growth in sales when compared to non-award winners. Source: British Quality Foundation based on experience in the USA.

• A study compared the financial performance of 120 award winning companies across Europe that met specific criteria against comparison companies of a similar size and operating in the same industries. The financial performance was tracked over 11 years. The study found that the award winning companies showed improvements in financial performance after just a year of winning their first award. Source: University of Leicester for the British Quality Foundation and the European Foundation for Quality Management.

• Three years after receiving an award, the 120 award winning companies outperformed the comparison companies by an average of 17% for sales and 36% for share value. During the final year that performance was tracked, the award winning companies experienced even greater increases as compared to comparison companies with sales growing by an average of 77% more and operating income by 18% more. Source: As above.

These facts and figures relate to the British Quality Foundation's UK Excellence Awards and European Foundation for Quality Management's Excellence Awards.

Add to the financial benefits all the other advantages award winners enjoy such as enhanced reputation, increased trust, a higher profile and better staff moral and the question is:

Can you afford not to be an award winner?            

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The Stevie Awards have three webinars planned for the next 60 days, and they're all about the options available to you for applying for - and winning - 2011 Stevie Awards in one or more of our four Stevie Awards programs.  Registration is free.  Each will last approximately 45 minutes, followed by 10 minutes of Q&A.

February 8: 1:00 pm ET Webinar, How to Enter The American Business Awards. 
In this webinar we'll provide you with an overview of the ABAs - the premier business awards show in the U.S.A., honoring achievement in every facet of the workplace - including everything you need to know to have the best chance of impressing the judges.  The ABAs feature many opportunities to win PR awards, marketing awards, management awards, customer service awards, HR awards, and more, and we'll cover it all in this webinar.

March 1, 15:00 GMT/10:00 AM ET Webinar, Creative Media Awards in the 2011 Stevies
Winning a Stevie Award has become one of the top honors for organizations and professionals around the world.  There are many opportunities for creative professionals in advertising, digital media, video production, event production, and other creative industries to be recognized in the Stevies.  But how can you and your organization participate?

In this webinar we'll provide you with an overview of the creative media awards opportunities in the four Stevie Awards programs in 2011, which include The International Business Awards, The American Business Awards, the Stevie Awards for Women in Business, and the Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service.  We'll discuss available categories, and how to review and select categories, how the judging process works, and how to prepare and submit entries.  You'll come away with a good understanding about how to compete for - and win - 2011 Stevies for web awards, advertising awards, video awards, event awards, annual report awards, and more.

March 8, 15:00 GMT/10:00 AM ET Webinar, How to Enter The International Business Awards 
In this webinar we'll discuss:

* The history of The International Business Awards, which are open to all organizations worldwide
* 2011 awards schedule
* What's new and different for the 2011 IBAs
* How the judging process works
* How to review and select categories
* How to write and submit entries

We'll review some best (and worst) practices, to help ensure that you submit the best entries possible.

All three webinars will be recorded and latest posted on the Stevie Awards Channel on YouTube, but you should plan to sit in on the live webinars so that you have a chance to get your questions answered about how your organization can participate - and win.

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The full-text of the Stevie Award-winning nominations in the 2010 Stevie Awards for Women in Business have been published on the awards' website.

The Stevie Awards for Women in Business are the world's premier awards honoring the achievements of women entrepreneurs, executives, and the organizations they run. Honorees in the 7th annual Stevies for Women were celebrated at an awards dinner in New York on November 12.

It is the Stevie Awards tradition to publish the full-text of Stevie Award-winning entries after a time in which honorees may redact any confidential or non-public information from their entries.

Reading Stevie Award winning entries is a great way to learn how other individuals and organizations are achieving success, and a great way to learn how to structure and compose entries that judges appreciate.

Just about every story in these winning entries in a gem in one way or another, but here are five we think you can't do without reading.

1. The story of Amanda Welliver, Stevie winner for Best Canadian Entrepreneur.  Amanda stirred the audience at November's awards dinner with her moving acceptance speech.

2. Ruth Elliott's (a Best Entrepreneur honoree) rise from rags to riches, which is just as riveting as her own acceptance speech.

3. A model of concise writing and achievement summarization: Teresa Poggenpohl of Accenture, a Best Executive honoree.

4. A great example of how well a PR agency can capture and express a client's achievements: Gutenberg Communications' entry on behalf of Blanca Treviño of Softtek in Monterrey, Mexico, another Best Executive winner.

5. One more rags to riches story to inspire you: Sandy Forster of WildlyWealthy.com in Mooloolaba, Queensland, Australia, a 2010 Stevie winner for Best Overall Company of the Year.

Those are five of our favorites.  Which are yours?

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Finalists were announced yesterday in the 5th Annual Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service, an international competition recognizing excellence in disciplines that are crucial to business success.  

Organizations as diverse as Apple, Capital One Financial, India’s Tata Motors, and Telecom Italia are among those recognized in the customer service awards, call center awards, and sales awards categories.  Organizations with Finalists in multiple categories include CIGNA Government Services, Austria’s Competence Call Center AG, Direct Alliance, the UK’s Everything Everywhere, Marsh U.S. Consumer, PetRays, Canada’s SMART Technologies, and SurePayroll. For a full list of Finalists, visit www.stevieawards.com/sales. 

Stevie Award winners will be announced during a gala banquet on Monday, February 21 at the Eden Roc Renaissance Hotel in Miami Beach, Florida.  Tickets are now on sale. 

Entries were up 60% this year for consideration in more than 90 categories, including individual and team sales categories as well as individual and team customer service and contact center categories. Several new categories were added this year, including 12 categories to recognize new products and services for sales, contact/call center, and sales professionals as well as seven categories to recognize the achievements of solution providers to these professionals.    

Members of the Awards' Board of Distinguished Judges & Advisors will select Stevie Award winners from among the Finalists during final judging later this month.   Finalists were chosen by business professionals worldwide during preliminary judging.

Sponsors of the 5th annual Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service include American Support, Infogroup, The Sales Management Association and ValueSelling Associates.

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Voting is now open for the People's Choice Stevie Awards for Favorite Customer Service.

Vote now for your favorite providers of good customer service at http://www.stevieawards.com/Service.peopleschoice. 

Winners of the People’s Choice Stevie Awards for Favorite Customer Service in eight industry categories will be determined in mid-February and honored at the Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service gala in Miami Beach on February 21.  These are the world's premier sales awards, customer service awards, and contact center awards.

Last year more than 87,000 votes were cast and people's choice winners included FedEx, Hilton Worldwide, and Macy's, among others.

Who should win this year? You get to decide - vote now!

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Enter the 2011 Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service, the world’s premier awards, with more than 90 categories recognizing call center, customer service, and sales excellence.  To enter,

1.    Review the online entry kit
2.    Choose your categories and write your nominations
3.    Submit your nominations

Questions?  Contact us at info@stevieawards.com.

Finalists will be notified and announced next week, and this year's Stevie Award winners will be announced at a banquet in Miami Beach, Florida on Monday, February 21.  (Attendance is not required to win.)

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It's that time of year when most companies are firming up their PR and marketing budgets and plans for 2011.  Many organizations are budgeting and planning to enter any number of business awards competitions in the new year, because they know that awards are cost-effective tools for a variety of purposes, with brand building and employee relations chief among them.

But here are the three reasons why you and your organization won't win a single award in 2011 - plus the #1 reason it won't matter a whit even if you do.

1. You Don't Enter
On occasion when I suggest to someone that they should nominate their organization in one of the Stevie Awards competitions, their response is: We don't believe in nominating ourselves for awards.  We plan to do such great work that awards will just be given to us.

Really? I want to reply. Which award are you hoping will make a beeline to your door?  A Nobel Prize? A MacArthur Genius Award?  Get real. 

Hope is not a strategy. If you don't believe that winning awards can help to burnish your organization's reputation, provide a low-cost reward to your employees for their good work, and provide one more incentive to your executives and workers to excel, I could persuade you otherwise, but at least that's your opinion.  But if you do believe that winning awards can offer these benefits, why on earth wouldn't you plan to pursue them?

Sure, it can take hours to prepare entries, and entry fees for a few awards programs can run to several thousand dollars, but the work and the cost are minor compared to the benefits of winning - and leveraging - a prestigious award.

2. You Aren't Smart About Picking Your Competitions
While we think our Stevie Awards competitions are the best there are, we acknowledge there are many awards programs worthy of your attention around the world for corporate awards, PR awards, marketing awards, IT awards, web awards, HR awards, and so on.  Picking those that are right for you and your organization is important.  And picking the categories within those competitions is also key.

When someone calls the Stevie Awards to enquire about whether their organization might be a fit for one of our competitions, we ask them two questions: one, what do you want to be recognized for?  And two, is it important to you in which category you might be honored?  Their answer to the first question is important, because that will tell us which competition, and which category(s), will be a fit for them.  The answer to the second question is also pivotal, because that will tell us whether we should recommend only the most popular (i.e. "prestigious") categories or can recommend secondary categories to them as well.

3. You Don't Tell Your Story Well
It's my experience that most organizations aren't very good at formally summarizing and articulating their achievements in an engaging way.  Storytelling is a vital part of corporate - and career - success.

When someone says to me, I'm not sure we're ready to enter the Stevie Awards, I don't know that we've achieved enough yet, I ask them to give me their elevator speech, their one-minute summary of what they do and what they've achieved.  Without fail their elevator speech is captivating.  It seems that most people have honed their ability to put into a few words the essence of their capabilities and achievements.  But few people can translate that pride and excitement into a longer document that's well written, well structured, and supported with examples, work samples, and the like. 

Until the day when we can transmit our thoughts to one another via telepathy, the written word will continue to be the way to communicate data-intensive information.  So if you can't write well, you don't stand much chance of winning many if any awards.  If you don't write well, hire or contract with someone who does to write your awards entries for you.

Even if you do enter the right categories in the right competitions, and prepare and write your entries extremely well, and win a raft of prestigious awards, they won't mean a thing if you don't translate those wins into meaningful tools, by

* Publicizing your wins to the media and stakeholders
* Congratulating and celebrating your employees for their recognition
* Using the resources provided by awards organizers, such as winners' logos, to create a long-term association between your products and your brand and their mark of excellence. 

The Stevie Awards are pleased to announce that we have partnered with Meltwater News to bring you live, updated feeds of press clippings about the Stevie Awards and business awards in general.

There are separate scrolling feeds for each of our four awards programs:

The American Business Awards feed is here, where you'll find clippings about the premier business awards program in the U.S.A., with news about the program's marketing awards, PR awards, web awards, human resources awards, IT awards, and more.

The International Business Awards feed is here, and it contains worldwide coverage of the IBAs and their management awards, corporate awards, new product awards, and more.

The Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service feed is here, offering up-to-the-moment coverage of its sales awards and customer service awards.

The Stevie Awards for Women in Business feed is here, full of recent clippings about this year's honorees.

Wednesday, December 15 is the second early-bird entry deadline for The 9th annual American Business Awards, the premier business awards competition in the U.S.A.  This is your final chance to save money on entry fees for all categories - for marketing awards, PR awards, HR awards, web awards, management awards, IT awards, new product awards, and more.

If you miss the December 15 early-bird, don't fret.  The final deadline is March 31, and even then we'll accept late entries, with payment of a $35 per entry late fee, through April 27.

The ABAs are open to all organizations operating in the U.S.A. - large and small, for-profit and non-profit, public and private.

First step to submitting entries is to get the entry kit.  Get your entry kit for the 2011 ABAs here.

Ready to enter?  Begin here.

The full-text of the most of the Stevie Award-winning entries in The 2010 International Business Awards have now been published at www.stevieawards.com/iba, and there are three reasons why you should read them.  If you're not familiar with the IBAs, it is the all-inclusive Stevie Awards competition that's open to all organizations worldwide.  The "international Stevies" typically receive nominations from organizations in more than 40 nations, in categories ranging from Executive of the Year and Most Innovative Company of the Year to web awards, marketing awards, public relations awards, and more.

The awards were presented at a ceremony in Istanbul, Turkey back on September 27 that was attended by close to 300 executives from more than 20 nations.

You'll find the complete lists of honorees, with links to the full text of Stevie-winning nominations, through the following links.

Here are three great reasons why you should explore and read these winning nominations:

1. Every organization should be adept at summarizing and publicly expressing their achievements, and these are great examples of organizations that have done this well
2. There are household names galore among this year's Stevie Winners, including Acer, BASF, ING, and Procter & Gamble, among others, but there are many more companies, executives, products, and initiatives that you've probably never heard of, whose stories will surprise, inform and enlighten you
3. If you're planning to enter the IBAs in 2011, the winning entries from 2010 are great models on which to base the structure and tone of your own entries.

Creative, Advertising, Web Sites & Blogs, Literature, Interactive Multimedia, Video, & Live Event Awards Categories
Categories that recognize excellence in all forms of advertising, web sites and blogs, interactive multimedia, annual reports and other literature, interactive multimedia, video, and live events.

Management Awards Categories
Categories for executive management including Management Team of the Year, Executive of the Year, and Chairman of the Year, among others.

Company/Organization Awards Categories
Categories that recognize the achievements of entire organizations.   Includes Multinational Company of the Year, Corporate Environmental Responsibility Program of the Year, and Most Innovative Company of the Year, among others.

PR Awards Categories
Includes Communications or PR Campaign of the Year categories, among others.

Customer Service Awards Categories

Human Resources Awards Categories

Information Technology Awards Categories

Marketing Awards Categories
Includes Marketing Campaign of the Year, among others.

New Product Awards & Product Management Categories
Includes the categories for Best New Product or Service of the Year, among others.

Support Awards Categories