The Handoff: How Marketing Feeds Your Sales Team

Marketing and sales are distinct but related processes in your business. Marketing generates new leads or prospects. Sales converts those prospects into buyers, users, customers, or clients. It’s important that you recognize that there’s a critical handoff between your marketing and sales team. If you can’t make this exchange cleanly and well, your sales team is going to struggle and you're not Read More

Three Books Every Business Owner Should Read

I was having this conversation today and decided to make it into a blog post. These are three of the most impactful books I've read as a business owner. They cover a broad topic area - from building business systems to branding and messaging to advanced marketing strategy. But they've each been very valuable for me and my businesses. If you haven't read any of these, I think you should check them Read More

Five Reasons Your Marketing Isn’t Working (And How To Fix It)

This post originally appeared on Forbes.com. Every business relies on its marketing to fuel growth. Effective marketing produces a steady, predictable flow of qualified leads for a business, which their sales team converts into paying clients. But if the flow of leads dries up, so does business growth. This is a scary situation for any business owner. I've been there before, too. Sooner or later, you Read More

Why Marketing is “The Solution” to Your Business Problems

Too many business owners compartmentalize their marketing and don't spend enough time thinking about it. It's like they put "marketing" in a little brown box, seal it up, put it on a bookshelf, and only pull it out once every blue moon. If this is you, I understand where you're coming from. You're busy serving customers and putting out fires. You're working long hours. Marketing Read More

Expectation Management: The Secret To Happy Customers And Rapid Growth

This article was originally published on Forbes.com. Creating happy clients and customers is the key to growing your business. Happy customers are loyal customers, and they become the most powerful promoters of your business when they spread the word to their network. So, how do you make (and keep) your customers happy? For all of the thousands of books that have been written about happiness and how to Read More

Marketing 101: How to Track Your Results

Talking about their marketing, a cliché that a lot of business owners repeat is that “50% of marketing and advertising works - the problem is figuring out which 50%.” That statement may be true for many, but it doesn’t have to be. And if it is true for your business, it’s costing you money. The easiest way to go wrong with your marketing is to stop paying attention to results. I’ve seen business owners Read More

An Easier Way to Grow Your Business

The most expensive thing you do in business is acquiring new customers and clients. It takes a significant investment of time, thought, energy, and money to create new clients for your business. Here's an important fact: it's about fifteen times more expensive to create a new client than it is to sell to an existing client or customer.  It's far easier, cheaper, and more profitable to sell to Read More

Other Than Price, Why Should Clients Do Business With You?

You need a better message than "hire me because I'm cheaper than the other guys." Even if you ARE cheaper than the other guys! Because sooner or later, you will find yourself being undercut by the competition.  Not to mention, it's very difficult to build a business based on low-margins. You need a healthy profit margin to be able to hire staff, invest into marketing, and still leave enough left Read More

How to Take Control of Your Personal Brand, Part Two

This is a modified excerpt from my new book,  Marketing Simplified, now available on Amazon.com. In Part One of this series, we discussed why it's so important to invest time and resources into building your personal brand. Here, we talk about how to make it happen. (Click here to access Part One.) The first step to building your personal brand is to define the brand you’d like to build. How do you want Read More

How to Take Control of Your Personal Brand, Part One

This is a modified excerpt from my new book, Marketing Simplified, now available on Amazon.com. Your business has a brand. You, as an individual, have a brand as well - your personal brand. Whether or not you want to incorporate your personal brand into your business marketing strategy is a decision you’ll have to make. There are some disadvantages to creating a highly visible personal brand, but in most Read More