What Would The Enlightened Marketer Do?

When the email subject line contains the words ‘urgent alert’ there’s no doubt about the sender’s intention. His metric for success is the number of people who open the email today—the more the better. Instead of baiting people with messages to make them act, the enlightened marketer thinks about how his words will make customers…

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How Could We Have Done Better?

Whether things go right or wrong, we instinctively understand there’s always room for improvement. And yet, remarkably, we rarely stop to ask ourselves exactly how we could have done better. Instead, we beat ourselves up about our failures—playing the disappointment over and over in our head. Or we self-congratulate without taking the chance to build…

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Anticipating The Next Move

Every successful business strategy is dependent upon making a good decision about the next move. In a commercial world, we spend a lot of time planning to create growth. Often those plans rely on getting the customer to do what we want them to do—so we can make our next move. The businesses that not…

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Louder Than Words

We’re obsessed with finding the right words to communicate our value. We finesse our LinkedIn bios, agonise over product descriptions and sales pages. Of course, words have enormous power. But they are worthless without the actions that support them. It’s no good describing how great your product is if you haven’t put in the work…

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What Do The Best Salespeople Do?

A young couple spent a while ‘just looking’ in the furniture store before approaching a salesperson to ask about fabric choices on a particular sofa. She showed them the swatches and said nothing. The guy asked if they had anything like it—a large squashy four-seater in leather. They didn’t. “What size exactly are you looking…

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The First Rule Of Standing Out

If you want to stand out, do the thing that’s in short supply. When everyone is fighting for attention, be the one who earns permission. When everyone is looking for an angle, be the one who acts with integrity. When everyone is chasing growth, be the one who deepens connection. When everyone seeks scale, be…

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The Art Of Making Progress

If only your business had more media exposure. If only you could get the materials cheaper. If only all the reviews were positive. If only the website had more traffic. If only your colleagues responded. If only every employee listened. If only more browsers bought. We spend a lot of time thinking about how to…

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Is Your Business Reacting Or Responding?

It was impossible to walk down any high street in June without running into a notice informing you fidget spinners were BACK IN STOCK. The fidget spinner was clearly ‘the thing’ of the moment. A month later we’re already beginning to witness its decline. Another fad bites the dust. A fad by definition is transient.…

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Noticed Vs. Remembered

For every ten things we do today to get noticed we will do one thing worthy of being remembered. The irony, of course, is what we want deep down is to do work that’s remembered—not just noticed. We only achieve that goal by redressing this imbalance—forsaking the desire for attention today, to double down on…

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How Much Do The Answers Matter?

Asking questions is a big part of our job whatever our role. We know we can enhance our products and services and improve client outcomes by asking the right ones and acting on the answers. So we send surveys. We listen to what people say and watch what they do. We go to the trouble…

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