We And Us

The group of colleagues on a business trip say goodbye as they board their respective flights. The boss congratulates them on a job well done. Their smiles slip as soon as he’s out of earshot. How could he possibly think that meeting was a success? The company is just going from bad to worse. It’s…

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The Limitations Of Marketing To Persuade

We assume sales and marketing are simply a case of fulfilling unspoken desires or unmet needs and making the people with those needs aware we’ve solved their problem. But there’s another piece of the marketing puzzle we often overlook—the doubts our customers must overcome. People don’t just want to know that our products and services…

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What’s On Your Y-Axis?

The strategy for any project or business and even our days, weeks and months could be plotted on a graph using an x-axis and a y-axis. What every endeavour has in common is time. This is plotted on the horizontal x-axis. What we can change or influence is represented on the vertical y-axis. In a…

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The Visibility Paradox

A bullet point list of tactics to increase your visibility might include; perfecting your elevator pitch, networking, forming strategic partnerships or creating a compelling press release. You don’t need to look far to see that we’re expending a lot of time and resources metaphorically waving our arms in an attempt to be seen. The irony…

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What Do You Need More Of In Order To Succeed?

If you had to pick one thing you need more of in order to succeed what would that be? Do you really need more time or more resources? Will more attention or more influence enable you to get to where you want to go? When we dig deeper what we find we’re lacking isn’t cash…

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Attention Deficit

Worldwide ad spending for 2017 is expected to reach $583.91 billion. That’s an increase of 7.3% on last year. We spend extraordinary sums of money and disproportionate amounts of time trying to get people to notice us—often without being specific about the end we have in mind. No business ever died from a shortage of…

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Three Ways To Sell

If you want to get more comfortable about selling, it’s helpful to consider which of these three sales techniques you use and to assess how they’re working for you. Describing This is the most common way to sell—one you’ve likely experienced or used. Describing the specifications, features and benefits of our products and services is…

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The Art Of Customer Loyalty

How many store loyalty cards do you have in your wallet? How many more will you be offered this week? Do you still carry a wallet? We’ve tried to turn customer loyalty into a data-driven science. A game of, if we do this, customers will do that. In our desire for something to measure, or…

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The Opportunity In Shifting Expectations

Your customers are changing. You are changing too. Notice how impatient we get now if we are second or third in a queue. In our world of one-click-ordering, instant downloads and movie streaming, we believe waiting is unacceptable. ‘Why can’t they just open more checkouts?!’ While it’s true that you can’t please all of the…

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Welcome To The Meaning Economy

In the 1950s and 60s when my parents were entering the workforce they created value by working with their hands in an Industrial Economy. Workers manufactured and moved things that would be consumed. In the era of the Information Economy, we began using our heads to produce value. We learned to use computers to design,…

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