Your Secret Weapon

The following email landed in my inbox a few weeks back. You won’t have any trouble picking holes in this approach and avoiding them in your business. ——— Hi Bernadette, I was thinking if you need assistance with your cold calling efforts. We have a team focused on setting up appointments and generating leads to…

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In Praise Of Intangible Value

What did they do to create value? Design a new portable music player or give you 1,000 songs in your pocket? Serve coffee at $4 a cup or become ‘the third place’? Create a platform where people can rent a room or make them feel like they belong anywhere? Start a photo printing service or…

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What Change Are You Making?

The sales assistant at the pop up boutique glowed. She enthusiastically pulled things one at a time from the rails to show to the customer. “These pants will change your life,” she said. I thought that was a huge claim to make about what seemed like an unremarkable pair of trousers, but when the woman…

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Problem/Product Fit

Before you write the code, buy the domain name, design the logo, rent the office space or print the business cards ask yourself these questions. 5 questions for every entrepreneur to answer 1. Who is your customer? 2. What does she want to do, but can’t? 3. How exactly does your product or service help…

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How To Avoid Getting Lost In The Crowd

It’s natural to want to create something for the most people we think we can reach. The runaway successes we aspire to emulate seem like they succeeded by appealing to everyone. But if you look a little closer you’ll find that even the big hits started at the edges. Soul Cycle, Starbucks and Secret Garden…

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The Marketing Paradox

The goal of most marketing is to get people through the door, bums on seats and products sold. Because much of our marketing effort is front-loaded it’s easy to believe that once we’ve closed the sale, we’re done. And so we latch on to stories of six-figure product launches and multi-million dollar capital raises—often making…

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What’s The Endgame?

As anyone who has ever played chess will tell a beginner, every move must have a purpose. You don’t move a piece unless you have a reason for doing so, or before you understand what the next move is likely to be, and the one after that (depending on how your opponent responds). One single…

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Social Media: Just Because You Can, Does It Mean You Should?

To anyone who has ever paid for advertising social media seems like a marketers dream. As entrepreneurs and business leaders who want to attract more customers, it’s tempting to buy into the hype that social media is the answer to our lead generation problems. Now that we can access an audience in digital captivity, why…

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What’s Your Customer’s Worldview?

It was 10 am and the queue at the cafe serving coffee that’s less than 48 hours out of the roaster was ridiculously long. The line moved impossibly slowly, and yet not a single person left it to go to one of the many cafes that could serve them a forgettable drink in moments. Leaving…

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