Category: Business
4 ways you sabotage your sales process
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Sales is a crucial part of running any business. Let’s revise that — sales is a crucial part of any successful business. If you don’t want to run a successful business then by all means forget about marketing and sales. You don’t need to do them if your goal is failure (or at best, mediocrity).
A 3-step marketing plan for your business
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Don’t buy into the Hollywood fantasy that if you build it, they will come. I know it’s easy to get stars in your eyes when you see the “internet stars” who appear to have achieved stardom overnight. But if you dig deeper, you might learn that 99% of them worked for 10-20 years without anyone
There is a right way to end your projects
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We’ve already talked about ending a tough project, but we may have jumped the gun a bit since we didn’t establish how to tie up a project properly if everything went well. Most business owners send an invoice to the client — and then maybe a thank you email — and walk away. They don’t
It’s not all about email — get on the phone
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There are many benefits to email, one of them being that it’s asynchronous communication. You can send an email now and get your response when it’s most convenient for the receiver. You can batch process them and use email templates to make answering them faster. The problem is, a good business needs to have direct
The 5 Big Mistakes I See When I Critique Proposals
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Working with my coaching clients I regularly get asked to look at proposals before they’re sent out. Of the many proposals I’ve critiqued, here are the top five mistakes I see people make. 1. Rushing it. The first mistake — and in many ways the root of all other mistakes — is that most freelancers
What is the right price for your services?
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Get two freelancers in a room and at some point they’ll be talking about estimating and pricing their services. Get two agencies in a room and at some point they’ll be talking about estimating and pricing their services. For the most part these discussions are helpful to all involved. Each party picks up a few
Want great clients? You need to be picky.
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When you’re starting your business, you may not be able to afford to be picky about the clients you work with. When I started I contacted 10 people a day I thought could use my services. I’d troll Craigslist and job boards, and if I didn’t find 10 leads I’d check out the local chamber
How does marketing fit in with deep work?
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Internet companies have taken the original idea behind blogs and amplified it into a set of tools that anyone can use to tighten a tribe. With Twitter, tiny driplike updates reach the thousands of people who are waiting to hear from you and follow your lead. Facebook goes in the opposite direction of Twitter. Instead
What is commander’s intent, and why does your team need it?
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In July 2015 I was in Mexico, working with a team building a house for a local church leader. This is not the ‘nice’ part of Mexico where there are big hotels with slides and pools. This is the part of Mexico where they pick the fruit you eat out of a can. This is
Marketing the Duct Tape Way
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Over the years I’ve recommended Duct Tape Marketing more than once. I read it when I was getting my business started and found it very helpful. Any book that sticks with you for years is worth reading a second time. This is the real test of a book’s sticking power — if it holds your
