Why You?

Marketing exists because we have more choices than we need and less trust than we want. We tend to think of marketing as the thing we do last when we’re ready to close the sale—the tactics we employ and activities we undertake to convince the customer, tell our story or describe our value. It turns…

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How To Leverage Results Based Marketing

In sales and marketing and in life we devote an extraordinary amount of time to finding the words to describe the value we create. We labour over marketing copy, taglines and slogans that will attract, persuade and entice. We get so preoccupied with ‘the marketing’ that we forget the first step in the marketing journey…

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No Success Without Fear

When Elon Musk unveiled his audacious vision to colonize Mars this week, commentators had as much to say about his hubris and lack or fear as they did about the plan itself. They remarked that Musk’s greatest strength is probably that he has never been afraid to fail. That’s just not true. Of course he…

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The Weight Of Our Words

The laminated sign next to the order and pay point at the cafe read: “We can’t and we won’t serve you while you are ON the phone. We need to engage.” These are the first words that greet every single customer (not just the rude ones). On the flip side, when I email a colleague…

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Why Are Your Customers Here?

The city centre bookstore manager complains to her colleague on the phone about people wandering in on their lunch break to browse because they have nothing else to do. “They’re not coming in for anything in particular.” she sighs. She’s right, for two hours every day hundreds of office workers with nothing else to do…

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The First Step To Overcoming Any Business Challenge

Six months ago Melissa invested her life savings in establishing an online store. Sales are not going as well as she’d hoped. When Melissa isn’t making or photographing products and uploading them to her store, she’s worrying about generating more sales. The time she spends worrying and reacting to her anxiety in the moment doesn’t…

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The Difference Between Saying You Care And Caring

I’m not sure when we became defensive about customer care became. I suspect it might have been when we began to put more distance between the customer and us. In the days when there was a cash register that rang with ‘real money’, when we sold eye-to-eye and transacted hand-to-hand, instead of digitally, we had…

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How Will You Win?

All success at some level is about winning. Not necessarily coming first, but certainly reaching some kind of goal or destination. The truth is that most of us are terrible at articulating exactly what the plan to get there is. The ability to do this is probably the single most important competitive advantage of all…

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Owning The Story

The little deli around the corner just started opening an hour earlier on weekday mornings. Of course, it makes sense for a business located in a walkable neighbourhood to serve commuters who will grab a coffee on the way to work and maybe even buy a sandwich for lunch later in the day. The last…

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The Instructions We’re Looking For

It was probably Stephen Covey’s ‘7 habits’ that got us addicted to the idea that success had a formula, one that could be pinned down by a number and executed in stages. Now we’re wired to seek it out. The headlines we see in our digital publications are proof. We are tempted by the notion…

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