Stocking stuffers - good gifts for small business owners include the 365 Sales Tips for Winning Business desk calendar and 'The Business Traveler's Guide to Inns & B&Bs' - Brief Article

Nation's Business, Dec, 1996 by Michael Barrier

What to buy for the small-business person who wants---excuse us, has--everything? A lot of materials describing a lot of products pass through our in-box on their way to the wastebasket, but a few manage to rise up from the inexorable flow and claim our attention. Among them:

The Business Traveler's Guide to Inns & B&Bs is a piece of Software that lets you roam around from state to state, checking out bed-and-breakfast places that can accommodate a business traveler's needs. You can find out, for instance, which B&Bs have conference facilities and which have "access to business machines" (elastic terminology that would embrace at least a fax in most cases). The software runs on Windows 3.1.

We played around with the guide for a while and liked it, although we didn't find a suitable B&B at the destinations we had in mind. We'd like it even better if (1) it included more inns and (2) there was some way to narrow its geographic focus within a state. Perhaps those features will come if the guide sells well enough.

The publisher says a second edition is not yet in the works.

It's been our experience that B&Bs can sometimes be a welcome change of pace for the hotel-surfeited business traveler, especially when you're going to be in one place for a while; we have particularly fond memories of the now-defunct Eastlake Inn in Los Angeles.

You can order The Business Traveler's Guide to Inns & B&Bs from Williams Hill Publishing, R.R. 1, Box 1234, (603) 523-7877. The price is $15, plus $3 for shipping.

Desk calendars are a glut on the market at this time of year, of course, and a lot of them are so cute that they make our teeth hurt, but we've run across a couple that seem genuinely useful--the kind that make you look forward to tearing off each day's new leaf.

One is titled 365 Sales Tips for Winning Business (Day Dream, Inc., $9.99); each page of the calendar delivers exactly what it, promises. Inevitably, given their number, some of the tips are a little superficial, and a lot of them will sound familiar to experienced salespeople--but that's probably just the point.

The calendar isn't a course in salesmanship but rather a daily reminder of what works.

Another appealing calendar is Merriam Webster's 365New Words Calendar (Workman Publishing, $8.95). Not only do you get a new word and its definition every day (use "fugleman" in conversation and amaze your friends), you also get its history.