The Team

Making a customer instead of a sale sometimes means doing the work of building a bridge between their needs and your product or service. This may come in the form of either simple communication: what does your customer need to know about your product or service in order to make it work for them; or in the delivery or your product or service: how can we make it work for this customer in a unique way -- can something be added or changed to make it fit? As business managers we're trained to make the delivery and support of our wares as efficient as possible to avoid cutting into profits with time-consuming and expensive tailoring to fit and it's [...]

A common mistake many of us make is to forget, over time, that our audience really is unique. We depend on luck to find a message that connects. Don't lose sight of the true face of your best customer! Here is a quick exercise to help focus your marketing effort where it counts the most: Get specific. Consider your top 3 customers for a moment: What are their characteristics? Are they an aggressive go-getter? Nurturer? Authoritarian? Anti-establishment? At work by 6am? Dressed up? Dressed down? Social butterfly? Detail oriented? Focused on the numbers? Focused on the people? Focused on the task? Get personal, intimate and specific. What's their poison? News junkie? Pop culture junkie? Caffeine junkie? Is it family, [...]

Negotiation is give and take, but if you remember the basics, you'll have much more flexibility to give the customer your best work, and more of it. If the only answer you'll accept is a yes, you'll be working too hard. NO's are fantastic...they allow us to keep our good energy and keep moving, rather than the slow torture of a sales exercise that leads nowhere! If you give people your product before they pay for it, you're working for free. A small sample is great, but giving away the recipe before the cake is ordered will put us out of business fast. Yet many of us do just that with comps, extensive proposals, presentations, and other giveaways of [...]