Important

It isn’t just your mind that responds when you get an email with the subject line ‘urgent’ or ‘important’. Your heartbeat increases, your muscles tense and your breathing gets faster. You feel bad. Your day is thrown off course, if only for a moment. We hate these emails and resent people who fail to communicate…

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Knowing What You Don’t Know

The most unhelpful assumption we make as marketers is that our customers know why they need our products or services. From there we think our job is to offer proof—to tell people why we are the best alternative. The first rule of innovation, sales and marketing is to understand the customer’s pain points (often before…

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What’s Beyond Reach?

When U2 perform a stadium concert, their reach is the entire audience of 60,000 eager fans. As he sings the first note, Bono understands his job is to create an emotional connection with every member of the audience. If the concert goer isn’t changed by the experience, then she might as well have stayed at…

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Perfect Ten

When we think of our work or products and services, we imagine the perfect ten version of them. The days without a wrinkle, when we are in the zone, and everything is running like clockwork. Striving for ten while knowing it’s rarely achievable is not easy. The ability to live that paradox is how we…

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How To Get Better At Pitching

Every day we fail to convince people about the value we can deliver. For every yes, we get ten no’s. Why? We’re quick to blame the quality of our ideas or our storytelling when we fail. But sometimes we fail because we’re speaking to the wrong person at the wrong time. Rejections often happen because…

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Choosing The Customers You Want

More cafes in Melbourne have begun offering a 10% discount to customers who bring a reusable cup. It’s an intentional choice that says something about their values and those of their customers. Theses cafes are attracting the kind of customers they want to serve. The clothing store manager gets disgruntled when people rarely buy full…

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Why Not Make Something Great?

Like his grandfather, before him, Shane was in the textiles business. He made good socks for a living until the day he realised that pretty soon there would be no living to be made in a product that was good enough. His company was struggling to differentiate from and compete with big retailers who could…

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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 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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