Marketing Discernment

Much of our marketing is designed to convince or convert a customer in the moment. A particular colour applied to a ‘buy now’ button, the timely Instagram post or product placement at the checkout—tactics to get the lukewarm prospect over the line. Our customer’s path to her decision is convoluted. It’s influenced by the story…

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What Do You Want Your Brand Story To Do?

What’s the role of storytelling in your business? What are you expecting your brand story to do? Most of us tell stories to describe the value we create. Storytelling is a tactic used to convince or convert prospects to customers—a way to close the sale. We’re selling the power of story short. Before they had…

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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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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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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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What’s Your Failure Strategy?

Everything runs like clockwork when all staff members show up for the hectic Sunday morning shift at the cafe. Customers are greeted at the door, informed about delays and offered a drink while they wait for a table. The whole system falls apart when one team member calls in sick. Waitstaff double as greeters and…

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The Transformation Business

When a woman wears heels her posture shifts. How she moves and carries herself changes—not just because of the physics and her altered centre of gravity, but often because of how wearing the heels makes her feel. Both her gait and her behaviour are transformed. Similarly, once the coffee drinker pays $4 for a cup…

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The First Law Of Good Marketing

We can tie ourselves up in knots wondering and worrying about how to communicate our value to prospective customers. Which marketing tactics should we use? How can we improve our product descriptions? What’s the best strategy for converting leads to sales? How can we ‘get more eyeballs’ on our content? While these are all valid…

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