Easily Forgotten: The Basics

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 [...]

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, [...]

They say you teach people how to treat you. But discovering how your customer is used to being treated can help you learn how to treat them. If you're working with customer who deals with angry customers in their own business, they may feel it's ok or even necessary to show anger to get results. If you work with someone whose customers haggle with them, on price, they'll likely haggle with you too. If your customer has customers who treat them as as team member or even a member of the family, then your relationship may be more intimate and positive with them than your typical customer. So when you're forming up your proposals, [...]

#1 There is never a bad time to ask "Why?" Why are we doing this? Why are we doing it this way? And why are we expecting it to work? Even the best of strategies sometimes (always) require frequent check-ins with your critical self to answer these questions, and to get re-centered and re-focused. And then? Then it's all go -- full steam forward without nagging doubts. #2 Problems ― We Were Made to Solve Them. We may as well face it. Mankind is good at problem-solving. So find the problems you love to solve, and you'll enjoy your work. And while you're at it, consider allowing others to solve the problem you hired them to solve. Give them [...]

The new year rings in reflection and for business owners and managers it's often a time for mental review of their brand. Here are some simple but important questions to spend those mental energies on: Logo ― does it answer these questions? What do we do? Is it immediately obvious through our logo? Does our brand's logo reflect the industry? Is our logo unique and memorable? Does it make an impact? Is our logo easy to use? Is it easy to place on materials whether the space provided is square, rectangle, or vertical without losing its proportions? Marketing ― does it do this? Can customers find us in the crowd? Do they know we exist? (Have we targeted our [...]

What are you working on today? What percentage of your day will be spent on action items that are "part of the plan?" Can you trace today's actions to a strategy in your marketing or business plan? Interruptions, delays and changes are normal, and handling them is part of the plan. But recognizing when you've been diverted from your own vision is essential to moving forward with your plans, and not someone else's. Whether you've been diverted by external or internal forces, it's important to recognize when your path has been diverted. Clues you may have been diverted: You can't remember or clearly see your vision -- your end game.  It happens. Life changes and we try hard to focus [...]

They have always been there, that big crowd, "The Masses", but now so are their profile pics, and blog posts and social media profiles. It seems like there is more we can know, more we already know, and more information we should dissect, examine and compile if we want to be successful marketers. The relatively microscopic amount of information we have in our virtual networks -- those people we have instant access to -- is extensive enough and scattered enough to make us wonder if we possess a data goldmine or if we're trying to hit a moving target in a data wasteland. So how do you market to YOUR crowd, and not THE crowd?   Tie a string from these [...]

Making a customer instead of a sale means looking at needs of your customer and doing the work of building a bridge between his needs and your product or service. This may come in the form of simple communication: what does your customer need to know about your product/service in order to make it work for him? Or in delivery: how can your product/service work for this customer in a unique way -- can something be added or changed to make it fit? 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, but if we're aware of the areas in our workflow [...]