Best practices are the floor
It’s frustrating when potential clients balk at your prices, even though you’re great at what you do. Even though you know and follow all the industry best practices.
position
100 posts
What is there to meet about?
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.
Getting better at the wrong things
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.”
Whose side are you on?
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.
The game of wasting money
Knowing ourselves—what we like, what we’re best at, what we value above everything else—is what makes us different.
Will your marketing work?
Your marketing position is a core part of the structure of your strategy, and of your business. In short, it’s the answer to these five questions:
Average is deadly
“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.
How to not fit in
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.
How do you suppose customers choose?
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.”
The more you address, the fewer you attract
I don’t know about you, but for me, August has always been the month that made me suddenly aware that the year is going to end at some point.
Pick something you actually believe in
Business owners usually want to know how to judge their market position before they make public moves to reinforce it. Beyond confirming it is within your current capabilities and that it has a credible opposite, how can you tell if you’ve come up with a good position?
The most wasteful thing in marketing
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.”
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