Tips and techniques for achieving success in business.
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Business & Marketing Strategies
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Published in Business & Marketing Strategies
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One brand, one message, one voice
Your brand is much more than a logo or tagline. It’s everything your company stands for. It’s the quality of your products and services, the attitude of your employees, the altruism in the community and so much more. When your customers and the public at large see your logo or hear the name of your company, they get a...
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Use statistics wisely in your communications
Readers can relate better to a personal story than to a statistic. Stories show. Statistics tell. It’s always better to show than to tell when trying to communicate a point. Showing helps readers imagine themselves in the story – especially if the point you’re trying to make is a positive one, like buying your product...
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Make your message clear with active voice
Active sentences specify who does what. Passive sentences only say that something must be done. Passive tends to sound apologetic and wishy washy. Worse, it can leave the reader wondering if he’s the one who must perform the action. For employee communications, this confusion can wreak havoc on performance. In custome...
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Avoid utilization of esoteric verbiage! (I mean, don’t use big words)
If the purpose of your writing is, “to impress readers with my amazing vocabulary skills,” then by all means, break out the fancy prose and five syllable words. But, if you want your readers to act on your message, buy your product, or simply to “get it,” then check your thesaurus at the door. Write conversationally a...
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Inspire trust and brand loyalty with pronouns
Here are some techniques that can put you face-to-face, sipping coffee over a cozy table with your reader, instead of you being high up in a cold corporate tower looking down at your nameless subjects. Start by reviewing your marketing materials, form letters and other communications (both internal and external) to se...
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Write easy-to-scan brochures, articles, websites and more
In last month’s articles, Win Over More Readers with Better Headlines , we talked about grabbing your readers’ attention in about one second. Now let’s keep their attention with scanable subheads. Subheads are just as important as your main headline Eight out of ten readers merely scan the largest type in the document...
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Win over more readers with better headlines (Part 1 of 2)
Even though they make up a small percent of your overall communication, headlines and subheads are the most important real estate on the page. That’s because 8 out of 10 people merely scan the largest print. If the few pieces of big copy don’t draw them in, there’s no chance they’ll read the little copy. Remember, we’...
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Test Your Business Communications for Effectiveness
In today’s age of information-overload, reader preferences have shifted to quick and helpful, rather than bureaucratic and stiff. Do your business communications measure up? Here’s a checklist you can use to spot-check the effectiveness of your company’s internal and external materials. “Effective” means readers can f...
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How to Get More People to Read ― and Act On ― Your Message
You can lead a horse to water… but sometimes you have to make it easier to drink. We’re smack in the middle of the Information Age. Everywhere you turn, you see words ― in books, magazines, television, junk mail, not-so-junk mail, computers, tablets, smart phones, billboards ― even the tag on your child’s bedtime bear...
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Help Balance Your Benefits Budget with Better Workplace Wellness Communications
It’s no secret that healthy employees can mean a healthier benefits budget. Study after study shows that employers who create and sustain a culture of wellness in the workplace really can spend less on health benefits. They also see less absenteeism and fewer disability claims. And let’s not forget their employees are...
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Effective Employee Communications is a Leading Indicator of a Company’s Financial Performance
Companies with highly effective employee communications show an average of 47 percent higher total returns to shareholders than companies with the least effective communications. It’s easy to see how communicating effectively to employees translates to better earnings. After all, employees are the backbone ― as well a...
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Using Your Brain
Have you ever heard that we only use about 10 percent of our brain? If that is the case what in the world is going on with the other 90 percent? Well, here are some answers to that question. The 10 percent of your brain that this is referring to is actually your conscious brain. This is the part that we use while we’r...
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Half Full of Half Empty?
The downturn in the economy has been dragging on for quite some time now. We keep reading and watching the news reporting that things are starting to turn, all very slowly they add. Many large businesses have announced improved earnings. Although many of them have cut costs instead of increasing sales in order to repo...
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Why People Buy
“People buy based on emotion and rationalize their decisions based on facts.” This is a common quote you will hear from most sales trainers, or you will read it in most sales improvement books. It’s true. If you don’t embrace this philosophy in your business and sales process you will not reach your potential in sales...
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How to Fail at Business
Most of the “how to” articles you read, including the ones I write here, tend to advise you on what to do in order to improve and be successful. There are many books that do the same, like . . . The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People , The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing , and 40 Strategies for Winning in Business . H...
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Who's On Your Bus?
Most business leaders feel that the vision and mission of the company is all important. They determine “what” they need to accomplish and then determine “who” should be part of their team to help them get there. Jim Collins , in his book Good to Great , observed that great companies identified the “who” first and seco...
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When Customers Complain
Have you ever experienced bad service and complained about it only to realize your complaints are falling on deaf ears? Some businesses feel they have enough demand for their products or services that they can ignore complainers. I will warn you this is a dangerous game to play. When a customer complains about somethi...
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Fail to Succeed
How many of us started out in life hearing the words from peers, parents and professionals that failure is bad? Schools around the world predominantly are run on pass/fail systems. Is not failure a judgment placed on us by others? If so, then what judgment they pass on us is, in truth, none of our business! It all com...
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The Absence of Trust
I recently recommended a book to a colleague of mine titled The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni. It seemed the organization he was part of was struggling working together as a cohesive team. There was a lot of back-stabbing, poor communication and a lot of conflict that was nasty rather than constructi...
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Managing Salespeople
Many owners of small businesses get to a point when they want to hire salespeople. They do this for a couple of reasons. They don’t like to sell. Or they’re not good at selling. Or other parts of the business are demanding their attention and they don’t have the time to put into selling. Whatever the reasons, they fee...
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Keep 'em Coming Back
Many businesses spend a lot of time and money trying to get new clients. It seems to be an ongoing process. So much time is spent generating leads, having conversations, submitting proposals, trying to close the sale. Unfortunately, I witness many businesses not spending as much time trying to get their existing clien...
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Seal the Deal
You have generated the leads and set up appointments with qualified prospects. You have read all the sales training books and are ready to close some sales. You go on your appointments and follow the process you’ve learned. You build rapport, you ask the questions, you expose their pain, you offer the solution, you de...
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Warm Up to Cold Calling
Most business people hate cold calling. Why is that? Primarily it is fear. Fear of rejection. Or maybe fear that you will be perceived as being aggressive or pushy on the phone. Or just that you are uncomfortable interrupting someone during their busy day. Whatever the issue is, I highly encourage you to get past thes...
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The Bad Perception of Salespeople
In a recent workshop I facilitated I openly asked the business people in the room what they thought of salespeople. Now, mind you, most of the people in the room were business owners or employees all of which had a major role of growing their respective businesses. Here are some of the things I heard. “They lie.” “The...
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Do You Own a Business or a Job?
I’m sure you have heard these statistics before. Fifty percent of all businesses fail within two years, 80 percent fail within five years, and most businesses never come close to the original projections for revenue and profit. In his book, The E-Myth Revisited , Michael Gerber states that much of this has to do with...
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Dealing With Employees During Hard Times
Managing your business during hard times is difficult. But managing people, the culture, the emotions, the behavior, can be doubly difficult when the business isn’t doing that well. Especially if you had to let some of the staff go. How do you keep the team upbeat and motivated when all there seems to be is bad news?...
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Staying Focused
How many of us have vowed to get back in shape? We want to start working out on a regular basis and lose that extra few pounds. So we join a gym or start an in home exercise program. We are gangbusters for the first couple of weeks but there is that one morning when we wake up and say, “maybe I’ll skip today, I just d...
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How to Take Risks
As many of the people I have met know I am an avid golfer. Playing golf in this part of the country is primarily a summer sport unless you’re willing to layer up and confront the cold, which I am not. So what do I do in the winter months? This is where many people that I know are not aware of another passion I have. T...
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Making Mistakes
Who hasn’t made a mistake? We all have at some point. We would all like to think that we are perfect but we all know that is impossible. Yet we all try our hardest not to make mistakes. Some of us even get very anxious about it to the point it paralyzes us from doing things. We get fearful of making a mistake. It migh...
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How to DELEGATE
As a business owner are you exhausted at the end of the work day? Are you tired of doing everything yourself? Are your team members unwilling to make decisions and are coming to you for even the smallest of issues? The truth is that most business owners, who are skilled at just about every task in their company, strug...
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Investing In "YOU"
When people talk about investing, they immediately think of investing money somewhere. Maybe in real estate, in the stock market or possibly bonds or maybe something relatively safe like CDs. They may strategize and make sure their portfolio is “diversified.” However, when I talk about investing I like to think about...
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Why Do People Fail?
If you have read enough articles and books or listened to the many self-help experts out there you will find consistent factors as to why people fail. We could be talking about many different kinds of failures. Certainly business failures but also failures in many other endeavors such as weight lose, improved health,...
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What Do These Objections Mean?
When selling your services or products I’m sure most of you get objections much like I do. “I would like to think about this,” or “I don’t have time to do any of this,” or “I’m not ready yet,” or “That seems expensive,” or “Call me back in a couple of months.” What does all this mean? Most likely they are afraid of ma...
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Changing Habits
We all have them. Some of them good, some of them bad. Habits are those things we do without too much thought. We kind of go through our day and they just happen. We’ve all heard the saying “keep doing what you’re doing and you’ll keep getting what you’re getting.” We conclude from this quote that we need to change in...
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Help! My Sales Have Fallen and I Can't Pick Them Up!
We’ve all experienced it. Sales have been down and for some reason you can’t get out of the hole. Cash is tight. You start to get nervous. You start to blame everything around you. The economy is in the tank, your prospects won’t return your calls, your proposal didn’t get mailed on time, your car broke down going to...
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Article
Your Attitude, Your Choice
I have recommended to many of my clients the book titled “FISH”. It’s a book about how to improve moral in any organization and thereby improve results. There are actually four principles in the book but, I think, the most important one of them is called “Choose Your Attitude.” The philosophy goes something like this....
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The Cash Gap
In a previous post, I talked about planning and managing the financial aspects of your business. Included in that was the importance of managing cash flow. I’d like expand on that principle and specifically talk about the concept called “The Cash Gap.” What is the cash gap? Well, it’s simply the number of days between...
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Plan and Count Your Beans
As a former Director of Corporate Financial Planning for a large corporation and with a degree in accounting I have heard my share of bean counter jokes. Like this one: “what does an accountant use for birth control . . . his personality.” Jokes aside, for the past six years, as a business coach, I have found that my...
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Goals and Resolutions — How To Get Them Done!
It’s an annual ritual . . . setting resolutions and looking at the goals we want to achieve in the New Year. How did it go last year? Did the goals and resolutions you made start to fade after just a few months? Did you start out gang busters only to look back at the end of the year not even getting close to the goals...
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If It Ain't Broke, Should I Still Fix It?
When was the last time you really took a close look at how you are doing things and asked yourself “how can I do this faster, cheaper, simpler and easier while maintaining quality and customer satisfaction?” In the “old days” this might be something you look at once every couple of years. However, in today’s highly co...
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Do You See What I See?
In a previous post, you may recall, I wrote about the four mental laws and how they impact the results we get in our business and personal lives. The common thread among all the laws was that the results we get are tied to our thoughts and beliefs. If we think in a certain way our actions will follow those thought pat...
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The Four Mental Laws
I was listening to a CD produced by Brian Tracey regarding changing yourself in order to change your results. These results could be business results or results in your personal life. He talked about the importance of 4 mental laws and how they shape who we are and what we achieve in business and in our life. I’d like...
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What's Your Plan?
You may have heard this quote before . . . “A failure to plan is a plan for failure.” I’m not sure who said it but in my experience I believe it is a very true statement. So when was the last time you sat down and put together your business plan? And if you have a business plan when did you last dust it off and see wh...
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Is Your Business Working?
I meet many business owners every day that are working a tremendous amount of hours per week. When I ask them “is this what you expected when you started your business?” . . . most say they thought in the beginning they would have to work hard but as time went on they had hoped to work a lot less. They had dreams of s...
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D.I.S.C.: What Is It and How Can It Help?
There have been many times in my consulting practice when I have used the DISC analysis to help people understand human behavior. Why would this be important in business? Well, if you have customers or employees (and most businesses have both) I’m sure you can see how understanding their behavior traits might help you...
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Leadership— How Well Do You Influence Others?
Your ability to influence other people determines how successful you are as a leader. As a leader you need to change people’s beliefs, thoughts and actions in order to have them follow you. This is true certainly in business but also in life in general. Parents try to influence their kids, kids try to influence their...
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Customer Service That PAYS
Customer service is a cliché if there ever was one. And it must be one of the most misunderstood concepts in business today. The name of the game is making customer service PAY. I am always amazed at how most businesses go about tackling the question of customer service. What most businesses do is spend lots of money...
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Identity Iceberg
I think we all can agree that in order to get better results in our business we need to make changes. Most people would define that as making changes in your behavior or in the actions you take. However, there are elements that you need to change much deeper than simply behaviors and actions in order to make the neces...
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Dreams and Goals
Dreams are different from goals. Both are essential in running a successful business. Dreams are what you want your business to become. It’s the big picture. The big Kahoona. It’s your vision of what your business will look like when it is finished. Have you ever asked yourself that question before . . . ”what will my...
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The Fly on the Window
You may have heard this story or my guess is you have witnessed this first hand. There you are in your home or at work in a conference room on a warm summer day and you hear a nagging buzz sound near the window. As you approach the window you witness a fly futilely attempting to break through the glass to get outside....
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You Need More Time? Impossible!
We all have the same amount of time to use in a day and yet I always hear from people I talk to that “I don’t have enough time!” or “I wish I had more time!” We all have 24 hours in a day, 60 minutes in every hour and 60 seconds in every minute. We all have 86,400 seconds per day to invest in making our lives and busi...
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