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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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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