I LOVE reading about the psychology of marketing! Have you read The Art of Choosing by Sheena Iyengar? She's a social psychologist and a professor of business at Columbia University. She studies how people make decisions, which all small business owners can apply immediately when you market your services and products. It's an especially …
Designing Your Perfect Week
I've been spending a lot of time this week working on my Perfect Week. Have you ever done this exercise? You map out what you want to be doing during the week, by category, making sure the high-priority items get on your schedule first. It helps you set priorities and creates more productivity in your days. Then, in the future, when you …
Nurturing the Not-Ready Customer Through the Buying Cycle
Wouldn't you love it if you could close every sale with a new customer in 30 minutes or less? But that rarely happens. A sales cycle can last up to six months, depending on how much research the potential customer has done before he or she comes to you. Before customers are ready to sign on the dotted line, they first must go through a …
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Categories for Small Business Goal-Setting
One of my mastermind group members is working on her business goals for next year and she brought up a good question: How, exactly, do you set goals for your business? The first step is to realize there are categories of goals. This helps you to focus on goal-setting in a more structured way. Here are the categories I use, and some of the items …
Repeat After Me: Competition Is Good
No! No! No! I got an email from a student the other day who said he wasn't going to launch his class because he found out that a competitor had a similar new class. Do not give up on your dream just because someone else has a twin idea. It happens all the time! There's even a word for it: Zeitgeist. It means that the culture and climate of the …
Redesign: What Will Make Your Clients Really Angry?
Joyce was one of my "reinvent your business" clients who likes to take things to the edge, fall off the edge, and either soar or splat. We were discussing all the different aspects of her business model that she could reinvent: her target audience, her product/service offerings, her delivery model, her marketing model, etc. We kept focusing our …
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