Frequent marketing meetings are often a sign of marketing struggles. Of course, when marketing is struggling, we tend to meet about it. But the meeting itself is part of the problem, or at least a symptom of a greater one.
The astronaut Chris Hadfield once provided perhaps the most important lesson in all of business, life, and marketing: “No matter how bad a situation is,” he wrote, “you can always make it worse.”
A recent spam message offered me the opportunity to get “10–15 appointments every week” for my business, as if more meetings is the secret to success. These cold emails, messages, or calls are unwelcome because they’re not interested in me.
Knowing ourselves—what we like, what we’re best at, what we value above everything else—is what makes us different.
“Because George believed he was supposed to find a solution, he did.” Whether we believe it or not, our beliefs affect our actions and our abilities.
The hardest part about creating a marketing position that’s right for your ideal customers is that it’s necessarily wrong for your non-ideal customers.
A large part of my day-to-day work is applying marketing strategy to help people make a successful transition into consulting. And some of the most common struggles I help them work through are variations on, “My industry is so price-sensitive.”
When I talk to the owners of service businesses, I often encounter the same struggle. Phrases like, “I just need to get the meeting,” or “I can make the sale, I just need some more leads or opportunities,” or, “If I can just get some face-to-face time with the executive, I can close the deal.”
Isn’t it often true that when someone—whether a government official or a friend—is too eager to tell us what should have been assumed, we doubt them?
People reportedly spend about an hour every week just deciding what to watch on Netflix. And more than two hours every week deciding what to eat. And that was before the pandemic.
This is the first in a short series on moving your service business up-market through marketing strategy. If the Ever Given container ship fiasco taught us anything, it’s that getting stuck is a lot easier than getting unstuck.
Abraham Lincoln told the story of an “automaton chess player,” a complex machine that, all the way back in the early 1800s, could beat human players at the game.
