Some of our best business conversations happen in the most unlikely places, including our daily walk to the local coffee shop we fuel up in, and the dog park where Liz takes her border collie, Mike.

One of our dog park buddies is a woman we’ll call Mary. She’s a self-employed consultant who knows we’re always open to providing what insight we can while we throw tennis balls for Mike and his doggy pals.

We like what Mary does, so we took her along to meet a client of ours who needed the kind of services she provides. Now, when a colleague accompanies you to meet a client with a stated need, you can be pretty sure there is real business to be had and that you have a better-than-even chance of getting it.

Here’s how the meeting went. Client to Mary: “Here’s what I need (gives detail). What would you charge me for that?” Mary to Client: “That would be X dollars. But I could give you a discount if that’s too much.”

So Mary got the job, but gave away about 20% of what the client was willing to pay her because she didn’t know the Three Magic Questions she should have asked.

Magic Question Number One:

What is the biggest frustration, or the most powerful opportunity you have been facing in the last twelve months?

Magic Question Number Two:

If you had solved that problem, or been successful with that opportunity, what would that have meant to your company (In dollars? In market share? In profit? In store traffic? In lead generation?)

Magic Question Number Three:

On a scale of one to ten, how committed are you to solving that problem, or succeeding with that opportunity, in the next twelve months?

Can you see why these questions are pure magic? Because the client has the opportunity to talk about his favourite subject (himself) and is actually telling you exactly what he wants to buy and how much it is worth to him.

If the prospect had said his commitment level was eight out of ten or more, Mary could have said, “I specialize in providing solutions that (solve the biggest frustration the prospect has) so that my clients can achieve their goal of (what the client said he wanted to achieve).” She could have quoted a fee that was reasonable in relation to the answers to Magic Question Number Two.

If the prospect had said his commitment level was under eight out of ten, Mary would have suspected that the client was not willing to pay her usual fee. She might also suspect that the project might be terminated early, or even that she would have trouble getting paid on time.

In this case, she could have said, “You’ve said your problem is (restate the problem or opportunity) and that resolving it would result in (restate the results he mentioned). But it doesn’t sound like it’s your number one priority in the next year. I specialize in this type of work, and I feel that you should invest X (a reasonable fee). How does that sound?”

Based on the response she got, she would then be able to make a decision to accept the job, decline it, or negotiate a short-term contract she and the client would be happy with.

Increasing the value of your sales? All it takes is a little magic!

When looking for a product or service they’ve never used before, what do people most often do? Ask someone who has had experience with the product or service of course.

This would include taking the advice of an unbiased product review. By “unbiased” we mean reviews that are not paid for, or supported in some way, by the entity being reviewed, so the information is impartial-the reviewer has nothing to gain or lose by giving an honest opinion.

When taking the advice of others, you’re getting what’s called in the marketing industry a “third party endorsement” (TPE) and it’s one of the most powerful forces in the universe for anyone marketing a product.

It works because as humans, we typically are more inclined to believe what an uninvolved “third party”; a friend, neighbour, or unbiased reviewer; has to say than an advertisement or paid communication of any kind. This is not to say that advertisements don’t have credibility, all we're saying is TPE's have more.

So how do you put this tremendous force to work for your company? First of all, we’re assuming that your product is a good one so recommendations are a possibility-no one’s going to recommend you if you’re offering something of inferior quality or outright junk!

The starting point might be on your web site-do you have a list of client testimonials? People want to know what others have said, so start asking your happy customers if they’ll supply a testimonial you can use. Don’t use anything without their permission and don’t change what they’ve said to suit your purpose!

Make it a policy to always ask for these testimonials, not only will they be useful in your marketing, they will tell you what you’re doing right-so you can do more of that.

You can also slip a testimonial into your advertising. Now you’ve got that TPE right in the ads!

In many publications, there are columnists that write reviews for entertainment, automobiles, and housing developments and increasingly for consumer items and services. Make sure these people are aware of what you offer. Send them a letter asking to be reviewed and then stand back. Be prepared to accept what they write, after all, you asked!

Now, since the media is such a good vehicle for TPE there must be other ways to use it than just placing ads. Quite right, because people tend to believe what they read in quality publications. So harness the power of “media relations”-become an expert that the media will love to quote when writing on your field of expertise. Target the reporters that cover your market and keep them up to date on what’s happening in your industry. Don’t try to sell them your product or service, just stay available to answer questions they may have-guess who they’ll call and quote when they need answers.

Send out regular press releases on new developments and product improvements in your company. Make them factual and be sure they have an interesting story angle that will command attention-they should be newsworthy not fluff or sell.

Maybe your firm has a great story on how it was founded, or how the business evolved to its present state. Write it up and send it to a publication that may be interested in including it as editorial-be sure it’s a publication that’s sure to be read by your ideal kind of customer. People love stories so keep it interesting and be truthful!

These are just a few of the ways you can get the word out, you can probably think of many more, but keep one thing uppermost in your mind-a bad reputation gets around much faster than a good one. Always take care to do the best you can do and when others are pleased with you, tell the world!

Remember when a common expression was, “he (or she) lives on the wrong side of the tracks?” That was back when we all had only one address-where we lived. Business owners realize they have a home addresss, where they live, as well as a business address, where they do business. But there’s another very important address as well-your online address or where you live on the Internet. This is just as important as your physical addresses.

Here’s an example: you’ve probably heard of “Hotmail” or “Yahoo mail” just two of the many places on the internet where you can get a free email address just for signing on. Nothing wrong with these but they’re kind of like discount hotels-just sign in, not too many questions asked, if you know what I mean.

These places have their uses, they’re good to use as secondary email addresses if you don’t want to give your real email addresses out-you know, to avoid spam and other unsavoury email.

But why would you use one of these addresses for business purposes? Especially when you already own a domain? Are you hiding something? Is there something about your business you don’t want people to know?

So many times, we see a small business with an email address that leads to hotmail and the like, or are the free ones that come with your Internet connection provider so the hosts name is involved e.g. “yourname@hostname.com.”

This makes you look like an amateur or a business that’s not serious. Wouldn’t you rather have an address like: yourname@yourbusiness.com? We thought so! Well it’s so easy-and it will probably cost you under $10. Here’s what to do: go to a large hosting service online, we recommend www.1and1.com, and register a domain. That’s all. If you register a domain, using their search tool to find one that’s available, say “yourbusinessname.com” or .biz, .net, .info or whatever is available, you can then set up your email address to be, you guessed it, yourname@yourbusiness.com or whatever you like. And what’s more, you don’t have to change your current email addresss at hotmail or wherever, you can set it up so your new professional sounding, business-like email address “forwards” to your current email address. Sound simple? It is and what’s more, you’ve just moved from that trailer down by the river to a very nice part of the internet-your own domain. Congratulations!

Oh, and one more thing, if you’re still going to use your hotmail account, be sure to adjust your email settings so that the “send mail as” address is your new email address (with your domain). That way no one will ever know where you really live!

You are thinking of hiring marketing professionals for your organization. Many people use an RFP (Request for Proposal Process) as a way to feel confident of making a good choice. But beware! There are pitfalls in the RFP process that are easy to fall into.

If you've never worked with a marketing professional, or this is the first time you've hired an advertising agency, here are a few "secrets" that will save you time, grief and money.

1. Provide background
   Let prospective suppliers know how your organization is structured, who your buyers or users are, and what business issue you need your new agency to solve. They'll want to know what your budget is, and how you will make a decision. TIP: Share your value proposition and what you feel has made your company a success. WHY IT'S IMPORTANT: good agencies want to work with good clients. You may not get the best to response if they don't believe they can do meaningful work, even if your budget is impressive.

2. What are the "got to's"?
   These are the absolute minimum criteria for a company to be on your short list. They include things like years in business, previous experience in your industry, and geographic location. Provide a "fill in the blanks" form for their responses. TIP: Be very specific about your criteria. Instead of saying "seeking well-established agency", say "Must have been in business 5 years or more." WHY IT'S IMPORTANT: quickly and accurately evaluate responses, and exclude companies from consideration.

3. Ask about their processes
   You should understand how the agency works. What is their "sweet spot" - the typical account size range they work with? How would they communicate with you? How do you give them information? What is their approach or methodology for assisting you? How do they create plans and recommendations? How do they make the ads? How do they get paid? TIP: An agency with a defined business system they've used for many clients will be effective and efficient at creating solutions and getting them out into the marketplace. WHY IT'S IMPORTANT: assurance that you are guaranteed an efficient use of their time, since most agencies bill by the hour.

4. Ask about their people
   You want experienced people who won't have to learn on your dime. Get biographies of the people you will be working with directly. See the work they have done and ask about the results it generated. Get references and check them. TIP: Take extra time to check the "chemistry" between you and the agency team. WHY IT'S IMPORTANT: you will be sharing your most intimate business information with these people, so you must like and trust them.

5. Avoid this!
   Don't make the RFP form long and involved. Avoid intrusive or irrelevant questions. Don't ask for answers that can easily be found on the agency's Web site. TIP: Don't ask for ideas or ads "on spec". WHY IT'S IMPORTANT: the only thing an agency has to sell is its ideas. Goods agencies won't do the work before they get the job. The busy, successful agency you want on your business will likely not respond to your RFP.

Did you know that small businesses could actually double their sales by simply following up with leads and contacts? That’s right: 99 percent of small businesses do not consistently follow up with their prospects and customers.

Look at the math: If you close 25 percent of 100 leads or sell to a quarter of 100 store visitors, you have 25 customers. If you close 10 percent of the remaining 75 leads or visitors, you have 32.5 customers-that’s a 30 percent increase. Close 20 percent and you’re up 15 new customers, or 60 percent more. Follow up with customers to get them to buy one more item this year, and you’ve added another huge increase.

Why don’t we follow up? Because we fall prey to an insidious and dangerous belief about our business that’s so bad it’s like having someone’s hand in your pocket, just reaching in to take our hard-earned money. It’s called product management and it will guarantee you don’t make the money you need and deserve.

See if this sounds familiar. You are a retailer, and you know the margin on every item in your store. More than that, you know exactly what it costs to keep an item in inventory, and how many times you have to turn your stock to maximize your return. You know your sales per square foot, and what every area of your store delivers in sales and profit.

Perhaps you are a manufacturer. You run tight controls on your raw materials, and you insist on just-in-time delivery from your suppliers, and just-in-time manufacturing and shipping to your customers. You control your labour costs and capacity utilization, and you manage your receivables really well. You have a good handle on foreign currency.

What if you provide a service, say accounting, financial planning or law? You know your billable rate, and how many billable hours you must account for and bill during the year. You review the realization rate for the firm regularly. You know where you make money, and where it’s better to put lower-paid juniors on the case.

Now all this activity is laudable, and we are not denying the importance of managing costs. In fact, tight controls are vital to a well-run business. But focusing on costs won’t do the one thing you need more than anything!

Managing costs will persuade ZERO customers to do business with you. In fact, this approach is so insidious it can actually make your business fail.

We fall into it because we manage our relationship with products, not clients. And let’s face it, products don’t write cheques; customers do.

If you are spending more time following up on products, shipments, and inventory than on leads, prospects and clients, you are literally throwing away the opportunity to double your business.

If you are a business owner, we urge you to delegate everything that takes you away from communicating with prospects and customers. We’ll be sharing a way to automate your follow up to ensure you don’t miss out on that potential 100 percent increase from now on.

There’s an old story in the ad business about a man who ran a hot dog stand. He did really well selling his hot dogs. One day, a customer mentioned, while adding mustard to his hot dog, that he felt there was an economic downturn looming. The hot dog stand owner decided he’d better prepare for the worst so he immediately fired his helper, switched to lower quality wieners and stopped advertising. Sure enough, business dropped off and he finally had to close down. “It’s a good thing I was prepared.” said the hot dog stand owner, as he signed his bankruptcy documents.

The fact is, that when times become tough, the first thing many business owners do is stop marketing, and lay off staff. This most likely means there will be fewer customers coming in and fewer people to serve the ones that do show up-a good recipe for disaster.

This is what the Brick found out recently. We’ve always thought of The Brick (“Nobody beats The Brick”) as more of a finance company than a furniture company, but it’s certainly true that between it, Leons and Chinese imports, furniture retailing has fundamentally changed in this country.

The sector is worth $17 billion dollars a year, but profits are thin and the market is highly fragmented. The Brick has about an 8% share, and lost a ton of money in both 2008 and 2009.

But rival Leons, while facing slowing store sales and profit declines, were still making money. How come? Because The Brick made some decisions that seemed like a good idea at the time, and nearly drove their business into the ground.

Look at what they did and see if you would have done the same thing. We bet most of you would - and we bet you would face the same bad results.

The Brick “saved” money by chopping advertising and laying off hundreds of sales staff.

As a result, store traffic tanked. Fewer customers came into the store, and those who did come couldn’t find the help they needed, so they didn’t buy. Not enough commissioned professionals on the floor selling meant revenue dropped even lower.

Lax controls chewed up cash. Inventory did not match customer demand-too many items that didn’t move off the floor, too few of the high-demand items. The result: long delivery times that annoyed customers and kept them from coming back. And following that, problems with supplier credit, as inventory turns slowed and inventory costs rose.

New Brick CEO, Bill Gregson, figures that only ten percent of the company’s troubles were due to the recession. The real culprits were the wrong stock in the showroom, no expert sales staff on the floor, no advertising to get customers in the door and lax inventory and supply chain controls.

He’s figuring on a fast fix (their August long weekend sales were way up), by fixing inventory levels, hiring back the staff, running more ads and finding economies in some novel ways like holding inventory at the manufacturers rather than the Brick warehouses.

We are not saying you can’t find real economies by reviewing your staffing, inventory and advertising practices; in fact, much of what we do for our clients is to make these processes more efficient.

We are saying that it’s easy to “cut off your nose to spite your face” when you cut the very services that bring business in the door. Bottom line is: when the economy is bad is the time to increase your marketing and upgrade your service. Do so and you’ll be way ahead when the good times are back.

One of the great joys of our work is meeting a wide range of successful local business owners. Each has a wonderful story to tell about how they created and developed their firm, and each has special challenges.

Each owner has a set of talents that make his or her business unique, and some valuable lessons for all of us on what has worked for them.

On the principal that it’s easier to follow someone else’s best practices than spend time and effort making up our own, here are some lessons we can all apply from business people right in our own neighbourhood.

We are not sharing these ideas for you to change your business partners and suppliers-these are simply people we have met and worked with whose business practices have given them above-average returns.

One is an independent insurance professional. Now, you probably all know that selling insurance is tough-in fact, there’s a saying in the business that “insurance is sold, not bought.” This insurance guy has created long-lasting relationships using a basic practice we should all follow: he makes and retains detailed notes about every single conversation he has with a client or potential client. Over twenty years, he has made a lot of notes! So now he can instantly and accurately recall exactly what his clients needs and issues are and offer products and services that change as people’s lives change. Because of this, his customers see that he has a detailed grasp of what’s important to them-a welcome change in an often-anonymous world.

Another makes and installs counter tops and cabinets. If you ask him the single thing he does that makes him more successful than his competition, he’ll say, “I call people back quickly.” He calls his prospects to confirm an appointment. He calls if he is going to be even five minutes late. He calls to let people know the status of their job. He calls to say how a quote is coming along. “Hey, I have a cell phone,” he says, “it’s so easy to do.” As a result he closes more deals, gets more repeat business and is recommended more often by his contractor partners.

The last one is the Membership Development Manager at a nearby Chamber of Commerce. She uses new social networking tools like LinkedIn, where she has a personal profile and a special Chamber group to connect to chamber members and potential members. The Chamber website allows visitors to track using Twitter and Facebook. The site is updated regularly with information that directly relates to the Chamber’s core message, “Where business connects”. This chamber has a reputation for being forward-thinking and has attracted over one thousand members.

Keeping notes of customer preferences, following up, and using new tools to automate the process: things we can all do to make our businesses more successful.

We are working on a new campaign for a client and spent a few hours today looking at competitive web sites, ads and brochures.

After about three hours we looked at each other and said, “Can you remember anything any of these companies said that stands out?” Ken said, “I bet if I took all these brochures, and removed the company name and logo, even our client couldn’t tell them apart!”

Every single firm started their pitch with a description of their products and services, and lots of detail on how great they are. Then they added thrilling descriptions of their plants (usually with a picture of the parking lot) and a price list.

No one acknowledged any of the pain, concerns, questions or worries prospects or customers might have. It was all me! me! me!

It’s too easy these days to build your marketing around what you want to offer. The real trick is to package products customers want to buy .

People make buying decisions in ways that we may find hard to imagine. The mental, logical process and the emotional, feel good process come together at some point in every sale. The problem is that this process is invisible to the marketer.

The questions prospects ask are clues to what matters to them. So, forget about the shiny new features of your gizmo and address what’s really on their mind. Do it now, because some of your prospects won’t think to actually ask, they’ll just move on.

Every time a prospect or client asks a question, write it down. Collect these questions on an ongoing basis, and make every sales person note the questions they receive. In a very short time you will see patterns developing. If you are getting some of the same questions over and over again you can bet that your marketing materials need to address the answers.

FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) pages are popular on web sites. Create one for your sales team as well. Make a game out of getting good questions. Ask everyone in your organization to bring a client or prospect question to a weekly sales meeting. This can and should include everyone who has any contact with clients.

Develop the art of asking questions too. Every sales trainee has been schooled at some point to ask probing questions to find a prospect’s pain, but really successful sales folks go beyond that fully understand what a prospect is thinking.

Don’t take a prospect’s question at face value-your job is to help them understand what they really need to know. Sometimes all you need to do is ask them to “tell you more”.

For example, a stock question is “What is your customer service policy?” The temptation is to launch into how great your service is (just like everyone else), but a more valuable step is to find out what good service is to them or what bad experiences they may have had, so you can customize your answer.

If you really want to make massive improvements in your sales, service and communications technique, buy a mini digital recorder and record several sales calls. Some clients and prospects will be a little nervous about this practice so you will need to choose wisely and respect boundaries, but do this once or twice and you may make some pretty interesting discoveries.

Another great thing about gathering your list of questions is that it arms you with the questions and answers that your prospects may not ask but are thinking.

Our mentor John Jantsch suggests that every organization should create a marketing page and web page that is titled something like “Questions you should ask.” In some cases your prospect may not really know how to analyze a purchase from you. If you educate them on the best way to think about your product or service, give them the questions to pose to competitors, you get to frame the buying decision in a way that plays to your strengths.

Online surveys have become a powerful tool for the small business. By asking your clients everything from “How much should I charge?” to “What’s the best color for our logo?” you can test your assumptions before you push something out to the market. Creating simple satisfaction survey and serving them up to each individual customer allows you to find holes in your customer service and collect comments, good and bad, from the street.

Planning what your readers would like to hear more about in your next five newsletter issues is as simple as proposing topics in a survey.

Journalists love survey results and will often take great interest in the results of research conducted by an industry expert-that means you! Conducting some basic research about trends and habits in your industry is a great way to add some expert status to your brand and could land your results in a publication or two about your industry.

Sharing your survey results with prospects is a great way to help educate them on important information that may impact their buying decisions.

Take a systematic approach to small business public relations.

PR (public/media relations) is a powerful small business-marketing tool. By PR, we mean getting positive press mentions about your firm in local, trade and national publications.

These mentions are so powerful because they are seen to come from unbiased third parties, so they are more believable. People may think ad messages are just sales hype, but when they read about how great you are in the local business journal…well, it must be true!

A lot of people think that gaining positive PR is luck. No! It’s the result of a systematic commitment to generating media coverage.

The hardest part is getting the PR machine rolling. Once you get coverage, it just keeps on coming. The more coverage you get, the more the press will keep coming back to you. Here’s our step-by-step system for generating positive press coverage.

Step 1 - Build relationships before you ask for the order! Target your media sources, including a growing list of internet-based media and news resources. Start networking with these media targets today by requesting editorial calendars, sending industry information, commenting on stories they write, passing on surveys and data, inviting them to workshops.

Tip: Network with the advertising sales folks at the publications too, they will give you lots of good information about who does what and where in the course of trying to sell you an ad.

Step 2 - Create three or four central media themes for the years that support your core-marketing message.

Step 3 - Create a list of ten to twelve minor, but interesting, marketing related themes for ongoing PR. You need to fill in with volume while you are working on the front page feature.

Step 4 - Create a PR calendar (download one at http://marketing.about.com/od/marketingtools/l/blmktgcaltemp.htm) and assign a PR theme and goal for each month. Focus on one publication or one writer and you will be amazed at how much you can accomplish. Remember to target editorial calendars (Publications will often assign monthly themes, so match your pitch to the theme.)

Step 5 - Write a fully developed pitch (start with our sample Media Pitch Letter below), for each of your major themes-a pitch is a story idea that you can “pitch” to a member of the media. This is not a press release, but more of a sales job. Wrap your story idea around a news angle or trend and package the pitch to interest the readers of a specific publication you are pitching. You can change and repackage your pitches as needed. These are reserved for your central media themes.

Step 6 - Formulate one-page press releases (Send for the free Press Release Creator we talk about at the end of the article) with catchy headlines for each of your minor themes.

Step 7 - Once a month, target your core media list and distribute a press release or pitch for a major theme. Post all press releases on a national wire service, such as PRWeb, and send copies of your press releases to clients and prospects. Don’t forget op-eds and letters to the editor.

Step 8 - Follow-up with your core media list by telephone and offer some new piece of news or trend angle that you did not include in your pitch or press release.

Step 9 - Track media coverage in local and trade press, set-up Google Alerts for a number of key related terms and reprint for marketing purposes any media coverage received.

Step 10 - Send handwritten thank you notes to members of the media to thank them for an interview or mention.

Are you starting to get a glimpse of how combining advertising, PR and referrals can build momentum and create marketing energy? Try it and see the results.

You can get a free online press release creator that allows you to instantly create powerful, attention grabbing, perfectly formatted press releases in an instant at: www.ducttapemarketing.com/Instant-Press-Release.htm .

About a month ago, Staples and Angus Reid released their latest “STAPLES Canada Small Business National Quarterly Index,”

It looks like we believe we are over the hump. 70 per cent of business owners expect at least some improvement to their business over the next six months (compared to 58 per cent in March 2009).

Now that you’re feeling better, get out there and make sure that your customers will come to you rather than your competition when they are ready to buy.

Chances are you are a little tight for cash, so here are 10 low-cost ways to market better we’ve worked out with help from Joanna L. Krotz, co-author of the “Microsoft Small Business Kit”.

• Stop servicing break-even customers. By now you know this is a theme with us. Every second you spend with a customer who doesn’t help you make money you are short-changing those who do.

• Make every customer feel special. Always add something to the purchase, whether it’s a hand-written note to a consumer or a recommendation on the latest greatest business book to a business customer.

• Create business cards that prospects keep. How about a good-looking notepad with your contact info and tagline on every page? Or a free or low-cost trial offer on the back, real estate that’s valuable and often wasted.

• Develop an electronic mailing list and send old-fashioned letters too. E-newsletters are cheap to send, but you can quickly stand out by occasionally sending personal, surface mail letters to customers and prospects too. Just make sure the letter delivers something customers want to read.

• Boost your profile at point of sale, trade shows and conferences. You can quickly create your own signage, glossy postcards with your contact information, product news inserts or an event mini web site even if you are not a software professional.

• Combine business with pleasure - and charity. Spearhead an event, party or conference for a cause you care about. That puts you in the position of getting to know lots of people and shows off your small business leadership skills.

• Create a destination. Indigo Books & Music has its coffee bars. IKEA offers child-care centers and cafeterias. Steal this idea. Add a free advisory service. Add customer loyalty services, such as free delivery for second-time buyers.

• Become an online expert. This is the “free sample” approach to bringing in business. Research active e-mail discussion lists and online bulletin boards that is relevant to your business and audience. Join and start posting expert advice.

• Court local media. Editorial features convey more credibility with prospective clients than paid advertising does. (Check our recent article on how to get PR.)

• Finally, don’t let customers simply slip away. It costs a lot less to retain a disgruntled or inactive customer than to acquire a new one. Send a personalized e-mail (you can automate this process), inquiring whether all is well. For a customer who suffered a bad experience, pick up the phone, acknowledging the unpleasantness and ask if there’s anything you can do. A discount can’t hurt either.

Being kind to customers is the smartest low-cost marketing you can do.

In the last couple of weeks I had an occasion to witness extremes of communication between a customer and a business. It certainly hammered home the point that customer service and communication are critical.

Example #1: my wife phoned for service on a microwave which did everything except actually heat food. Admittedly, it was after hours, but she went through six levels of: “If you want this, press that” until finally getting to “our hours of business are Monday to Friday, 9-4:30”, please try our website. To cap it off, the website was down.

Example #2: I went to buy some software online. At the checkout for item A, I was offered a suite for the same price as item A, and I’d get A, B and C. As I was interested in C, but not to the point of paying an extra $400, I said yes. Now my checkout cart said: suite, download protection, and media kit. As the download was around a gigabyte, and I wasn’t in a hurry, I cancelled the download protection and said yes to the media kit, and even paid the extra $2 for next day delivery. Well, it turns out that next day delivery from Thursday evening was actually Tuesday, but that was the least of my problems. The DVD did not have item “C” on it; it was not the media kit for the suite. I emailed the address from the confirmation email. I had a reply saying they didn’t do refunds. I said I didn’t want a refund, I wanted the correct item. I got a “call customer service”. They said I got what I ordered. Two escalations later, I found I’d been talking to a software distributor, not the manufacturer. Two more calls got me to the manufacturer, and finally, an offer to refund my $25 so I could order the correct item. What about the $19 shipping? They don’t refund shipping. Period. Now, we’re talking about a $1 DVD in a 70 cent DVD case here. Couldn’t they just ship me the right DVD - it would cost them less than the $25. NO. NO. NO. I took the $25 and downloaded on a spare PC and burned myself a disk.

Example #3: bought a fancy phone on e-bay. After the deal was settled, I e-mailed and asked if the seller knew how to set the parameters to get internet on a pay as you go account. He answered within hours with a page of detailed instructions, and also warned me that at 15 cents a KB, I could go through my balance quickly. I bought on Saturday, the seller shipped the phone on Sunday, and the phone arrived on Tuesday.

The big companies showed contempt for their customer, the little guy did it right. Sometime in the future, when it comes to upgrading the development software I’ve been faithful to since the 1990’s, I’m going to think twice (it wasn’t Microsoft, by the way). If someone sees my phone and wants to know where I got it, I’ll go the extra mile and refer them to my seller, who also got a glowing feedback.

Some takeaways:

• Don’t let just anyone program your phone response system, use someone with training
• Phone in yourself from time to time - see if it makes sense, at all times of the day
• If you come up with a marketing idea, make sure the distribution system and web site programming can handle it. Don’t, for instance, leave the SKU for an accessory the same when you change the main item!
• Be clear in your communications who you are. If you outsource some aspect of your operation, be sure that their policy and communication match yours, and where appropriate they identify themselves properly
• Make sure your customer service arm (even if outsourced) knows about your special sales, so customers don’t have to explain it over and over
• When it’s necessary, especially if a mistake has been made, be flexible

The nice thing about this is that for a small business, all of this is easy. It’s much harder for a large conglomerate. Small business owners, this is your huge advantage. Don’t blow it!

I really enjoy stepping outside my comfort zone. For me, this can take the shape of taking a class in a subject area quite orthogonal to my career, or attending a random event or starting a project in a realm in which I hold minimal to no expertise.

Along those lines, I recently attended a little known event called "Podcasters Across Borders" (PAB), which is a cozy affair traditionally held in Kingston, Ontario, that attracts independent podcasters from across the world, though mostly from Canada and the USA. For those not in the know, a podcast is essentially internet radio (or sometimes video) usually "broadcast" in the form of streaming audio from a website or as a downloadable MP3 file.

Many mainstream media providers, such as the CBC in Canada and NPR in the USA, produce their own professionally rendered podcasts. Indeed, I had the very good fortune of having been recently interviewed on two CBC podcasts: the technology show "Spark", and Radio Canada International's "Indo-Canadian Report". Both shows are also broadcast on regular radio, but service a fair chunk of their audience through online downloads.

A new business partner and I have decided to try our hand at creating a high quality, regular podcast. The details will have to wait for another time, lest this unnamed partner beat me senseless for letting the cat out of the bag too early. But the important thing here is that I know nothing about the medium or the tradition of podcasting; that's her thing.

And that's what brought me to PAB. As someone who spends a great deal of time at conferences and public meetings relevant to my discipline, usually behind a microphone, it was a thrill to attend such an event as a complete naive newbie, with no expectations placed upon me for either expertise or vocal participation. So this is what relaxation feels like?

The content and participants of the PAB event are irrelevant to this article. Rest assured, it was a fascinating event in which I learned a great deal about technology, unseen electronic social networks, and a global phenomenon of private citizens sharing their personal tales with the faceless masses of the internet; and where I met some very nice people. In short, non-professional podcasting in its present niche format seems like blogging with a lot more effort.

What was curious, though, was how a presentation on the monetization of this free user-generated content was received. An interesting model was put forward wherein income could be effectively generated by selling ad space in around one's podcasts, supported by some sophisticated market research and product marketing. I could see where the podcasting purists might object to this seeming taint on the altruism of their efforts. But the fact remains that the sector likely will not evolve without considering its economic aspects.

And that's where my mind got going. I think there's an opportunity here to meld small business practices, regardless of one's sector, with the social media interactivity and subtle marketing of podcasting. I already lightly tie my business practices in with my day job as a university professor, and heavily tie them in with my extensive online activities, which are ostensibly pursued for fun. My Facebook and Twitter feeds, for example, are essentially silliness, but both drive traffic to my blog, which is sometimes a tad more serious. That in turn drives attention to other elements on my website, and generates enthusiasm from me to explore thoughts and avenues that may or may not end up being financial profitable, but always result in an interesting outcome.

In short, I'm now wondering how podcasting and other such rich media social networking can assist the process. Stay tuned, I'm sure I'll work it out eventually!

When I was growing up in the 1950's, Shell, the petroleum company, was advertising that their gasoline contained "TCP" an additive that increased horsepower and made an engine run better. There was no reference to fuel economy that I can recall-who cared? …gas was about 25 cents a gallon!

Anyway, Shell sold a helluva lot of gas with this tactic.

Thing was, all gas contained TCP, but only Shell took advantage of the fact.

Back then, there were a lot more gas station brands to choose from, so competition was fierce. And at 25 cents per gallon, there wasn't a lot of room for price-cutting. Gas company credit cards were in their infancy so there wasn't any brand loyalty coming from card usage either.

The mavens at Shell knew they needed to create a perceived difference and they nailed it with TCP-didn't matter that no one really new what TCP stood for-if it was in the product and made it better, customers were in the market for it …in droves.

Since then there have been zillions of product claims of "active ingredients" that make the product "new and improved" or in other words, "better than the stuff you've been wasting your money buying from us for years."

Advertisers are continually at war with one another to prove their product is better than the competitors'. In the ad industry this is known as the "unique selling proposition" (USP) and it is still one of the mainstays of advertising today.

So how is your product or service different, and therefore better, than the competitions? Take a look at what you're selling and ask yourself," What do we provide or do that makes us stand out? What could we do or add to our product/service that would make more people want to do business with us? What could we say we do that would make people ask for more information?"

One way to find out is to ask your customers why they do business with you. Tabulate the answers and see what comes up most often-perhaps it's the answer to what makes your business stand out from others.

Or, ask people about the problems or "pain" that your services might solve. This is a bit more difficult. Say you were a lawyer, and you found out that a great many people could not get to a legal office due to infirmity or daytime commitments-you could advertise that your firm has flexible hours or makes house calls. If you were a mechanic and you found out that most women hated to bring their car in because they thought they'd be taken advantage of, you could advertise that you were the garage that treats women like men! Get the idea?

If you find a niche that needs filling, why not fill that niche with your unique product or service and stand out from the rest? It's like having "active ingredient 90" only this one makes your business run better and be more profitable.

We have a client who has so many requests for quotes on his desk that he is way behind on filling them.

At first this seems like a problem we would all like to have. So many leads we can’t get to all of them! But there is a down side to this story. Our client has no way of sorting the leads into those that are “hot” and need immediate attention; and those that are “cold”. Maybe these cold leads are from qualified people, but who knows when they are going to close.

On top of that, he has recently learned that two of the leads in his pile assumed he wasn’t interested because it took so long to get a quote; they took their business elsewhere.

This raises two important issues: what is a hot lead, and what do you do with a lead that’s gone cold? Most of us are pretty good with hot leads. These are qualified prospects who have the cash to buy our product or service, a real need we can fulfill, and the intention to buy right away.

Cold leads are prospects who are qualified, but who simply aren’t ready to purchase right away.

What does your sales team do with a lead that is qualified, but won’t close for a while? 99% of small businesses throw these cold leads away, or let them fall through the cracks because it’s so time consuming and expensive to follow them up.

But those businesses who do follow up can literally double their sales in a year. Why? Because these folks will eventually buy - but if they haven’t heard from you in a while, they won’t be buying from you.

The best idea is to hand leads back to marketing for re-engagement and continued nurturing; creating opportunities for the sales force to pursue again in the future when timing is optimal.

Marketing can use tools like automated messages, newsletters, direct mail, events and public relations that are up to 90% cheaper than direct contact from a sales person. And, when the prospect decides its time to buy, they don’t need to be re-sold, because they have all the information they need to make a good buying decision - your product.

Let’s do the math. Say you have a showroom, and 100 people who are interested in your services walk in the door in a week. Your staff can only talk to 35 of them, so that’s 65 people who walk out again - you don’t know if they are qualified, interested, ready to buy or just there to kick tires.

Of the 35 people your staff talks to, let’s assume 25% of them are hot leads, and 25% of the leads close. So of the hundred people who came in, two actually bought your products.

Let’s assume the same ratios apply to the 65 people who walked out without speaking to a member of the staff. 25% are hot leads, 25% of the leads buy - that’s 4 more sales, an increase of 200%.

Now imagine those 65 people are the cold leads, qualified people who for whatever reason won’t take your calls, won’t see a sales person or put off making a purchase. And imagine what those incremental sales could do for your business.

It’s a great argument for follow up marketing, wouldn’t you say?

When the internet was new, finding a web site was largely a hit or miss proposition. Although there were relatively fewer sites, the sophisticated search tools, like Google, Yahoo, MSN and others were not around. People tended to “surf” going from one site to another via links on those sites.

Needless to say, things have really changed a lot; search engines are now indispensible as the way to pinpoint exactly what you’re after when searching the web. The development of “local search” has now made it easy to find goods and services right in our own neighbourhoods-who needs a tree trimmer if he’s in Nebraska and you’re 3,000 miles away?

A high “search ranking” is the all-important Holy Grail-you want your site to appear on the first page listing that comes up when someone searches for what you offer, and the higher up the page the better.

So how’s your site do in the search rankings? Search Google, Yahoo or MSN for what you’re offering, in the area where you do business, e.g. if you’re a plumber, key in “plumbing (your town name)” and see if your site appears in the listings. If it does, and you’re on the first page high up, congrats! If not, let’s see why.

Rankings in search engine directories depend on a few things like “keywords”, popularity and unique content. Keywords are words, and phrases, that are probably the very words people will key in when searching in a search engine, so if you’re a plumber, keywords like “plumbing, plumber, leak repairs” etc. will be necessary to add into your page code-even better if these same words are actually used in the page copy. For local search, be sure the names of all the places you do business in are included.

Popularity has a lot to do with the sites that are linked to yours and who you link to. The more quality sites that are linked to yours, the higher your popularity score, but I stress, we’re talking quality here. So linking to something completely unrelated to your business, or an amateur’s hobby site will not count. A plumber might link to a reputable plumbing supply, a kitchen and bath store, a manufacturer of shower stalls-all people he does some business with and who will provide “reciprocal” links. Up goes the popularity score!

Unique content simply means that if you just make a carbon copy of another web site with the same information etc., you won’t impress the search engines. Many times, a franchise operation will offer their franchisees a web site but it is really just a copy with a few pictures and the local name changed. No score. So write some interesting and unique stuff about you and your business that no one else can say. Find some fascinating facts about the business you do and write them up in your own words. Watch your score shoot up!

All of this is known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO). It’s a very complex and ever-changing craft. Too much to cover here but here’s a few more tips:

Be sure all your pictures have “alternate tags” that contain keywords. These are the words that show up when you hover the curser over an image. Our plumbing example might use the tag, “Leaking faucet repair in (name of town)” over a photo of a kitchen sink.

Be sure every page has a title, possible different from page to page-don’t use “Welcome to our plumbing web site”, make the title keyword rich e.g. “John’s the Plumber for fast reliable plumbing repair service in (town name).”

There’s much, much more involved, and if you are really serious, you can hire an SEO specialist to do this for you, but be warned, it’s pricey and it is an on-going job. Start with the suggestions here as the site is being constructed and you’ll be well on your way.

We subscribe to Marketing Experiments.com for its marketing research results. We get to see data we can trust on issues of real importance to our clients-like this investigation into how to make the subject line of an email work best.

It’s common sense to say that emails reaching out to clients and prospects won’t work if they don’t get opened, but this experiment demonstrates that there are other things you can and should be measuring if you don’t want to leave money on the table.

Let’s look at the experiment, and what you should learn from it:

In this case, a florist wanted to increase the effectiveness of a “Thank you” email campaign to previous customers, and entice more of them to increase their purchases. They sent out two emails, with exactly the same content but different subject lines. Any differences in results could only come from the difference in the subject line.

They used an email service that allowed them to measure the “who opened the email and who didn’t” open rate, and the “who clicked through to a web site and who didn’t” clickthrough rate. Customers could also order online, so they could also measure the sales resulting from the program. Both emails offered a 15% off special offer.

Subject Line #1 was “Thank You For Making Us Your Florist Of Choice”.

Subject Line #2 was “15% Off - Our Way Of Saying Thank You!”

Here are the open rate results: 20% of recipients of version #1 opened the email, but only 15% opened version #2, the one with the specific 15% off offer. That’s a 5% difference.

Does that mean putting a specific offer in the subject line is a bad idea? Based on this, many people might think so-it looks at first glance that being too aggressive will put people off.

But look what we see when we dig a little deeper. 60% more people who received version #2, with the 15% offer, clicked through to the website. And version #2 ended up earning 56% more dollar sales.

Sure fewer of them opened the email, but they spent a lot more money.

What can you learn from this?

First, what you measure is important. In this case, if the florist only looked at who opened the email, she would have been badly misled. She might have planned future campaigns that practically guaranteed she would miss out on sales by 56%!

Second, testing is important. This advertiser had at least a 50-50 chance of guessing wrong with “gut feel”-and a potential huge business loss.

Third, if you use email, you need a batch or broadcast email solution that allows you to do this kind of testing and measurement. Don’t just send out to a huge “to” list-you will never be able to get the measurement and practical, business-building knowledge you need. (Check out Constant Contact, SwiftPage and Infusionsoft web sites)

One of our favourite books is Why We Buy - The Science of Shopping by Paco Underhill. We’ve been learning from his research and applying it to help our clients for years, and today we’re passing it along to you. These tips are not just our opinion; after more than twenty years, Underhill, a marketing research expert, has compiled a hugely detailed data base of shopper behavior patterns.

Purchasers, spend an average of 11.27 minutes in a store, non-buyers at 2.36. Converting browsers into spenders greatly depends on store design and displays, because 60 to 70 percent of purchases are unplanned.

Even if they don’t buy, you want visitors to walk out with a better sense of what your store offers and where things are-reference points for the future when they may need something. Look at your store’s design through the eyes of a first-time visitor who is breezing through for an introductory tour.

Your overwhelming goal is to keep shoppers in your store for a longer time-longer shopping time directly correlates to higher sales. Here are tips you can implement to help accomplish this:

Make your window display a place people look forward to seeing. Change it every two weeks at a minimum, and make sure it has one prime message, not fifteen.

The “transition zone” between the outside and the inside of the store-that’s the space just inside the door, where shoppers are adjusting to the interior of the place-is a very ineffective selling space. Move displays, signs, flyers, and shopping baskets ten feet in from the door.

Put high appeal, high margin items to the right of the door. This is the way most people move once they enter. Slow them down with lots of reflective surfaces like mirrors and shiny displays that attract the eye.

Giving shoppers a shopping cart, access to a coat check, strollers and baskets frees up their hands to touch, feel, pick up and examine merchandise.

Canadian Tire CEO Stephen Wetmore is growing his “smart stores”. Some store sales have grown between six and eight per cent, and some departments have more than doubled. You can grow your retail business by copying some of his proven ideas. Here’s how:

Give more attention to growing categories. For Canadian Tire, these are sports, recreation, home storage and pet and auto care products.

Treat each section like a fashion boutique, with displays featuring the latest trends.

Identify the main “power aisle” and make sure it takes shoppers to your most-wanted section.

Set products out in a setting that shows products in use to help encourage multiple purchases.

Move the “destination” section-in Canadian Tire’s case, tools, to the back with an eye-catching wall of products on display.

Move impulse-driven items to the front-sales can double.

Put “go-together items” like hardware and tools, in the same section to capture more sales.

Take bulky items out of their boxes and display them.

Now that you’ve re-merchandised your store, don’t forget customer service. Here are some real words from actual customers about what they value in a retail shopping experience:

“They listen to my repair plan and suggest items, all the while realizing that I, the individual, in a Thursday evening panic, am their meal ticket. Something I will gladly pay for and will offer patronage for.”

“The owner himself walked with me through the cavernous store to find what I wanted and helped me take the item to the cash. Service is what motivates me to return to this store.”

“I do not have the patience anymore to run around in a big store to find items that I do not often buy. As an example, for all my plumbing stuff I go to a small store close by, pay a couple of dollars more but buy quality products and the person at the counter has all the knowledge that I need.”

This new approach to merchandising is paying off for Canadian Tire. Hockey and camping gear sales jumped 140 per cent from a year ago. Auto accessories have more than doubled.

Smaller, local retailers can learn a lot from national chains who are investing millions into store design. You may be positioned to do even better on delivering the personalized customer service that drives customer loyalty and margins.

Full disclosure: my business partner Ken Burgin and I both live in old houses, so we are regulars at Canadian Tire, Home Hardware and Home Depot, but we make a point of supporting small business whenever we can. We’d love to hear your comments.

There is no bigger source of future revenue and profit than the ideal clients you have now-at least the ones you really like to do business with, who don’t beat you up on pricing and who pay on time.

We want you to write a personal note to every person you deal with at every one of your ideal customers, thanking them for their business and asking for a personal meeting. At that meeting, present a customized overview of how you are going to focus on the one thing that’s most important to them. You should offer very specific new ways you are going to do this.

At the same meetings, launch your referral program.

Say, “We ask ourselves every day, what can we do today to get XYZ company (the one you are meeting with) to recommend us? Would the improvements we have presented to you today convince you to recommend us to other companies who need this approach?”

When they say “yes!” (they will), say “In that case, we are delighted to offer a referral price to you: at the end of our fiscal year, we will rebate 2% of the value of all revenue directly attributable to your referrals and introductions.” If you have a better idea, go ahead, offer it.

Here’s the real secret to a powerful referral program

Your referral sources will feel reluctant to actively recommend you, even though they like the work you do and they’ve promised to help. Why? Because who wants to risk making a recommendation that may turn out to be a disaster! And furthermore, who can remember to look for opportunities to recommend you.

Most of us ask for a recommendation and then wonder, usually about six months later, “whatever happened to that recommendation so-and-so was going to give us?”

This Referral plan will not run itself. You will need to tell your referral sources exactly what will happen when you contact one of their recommended colleagues or friends, so they trust you with that precious information.

Assign someone to getting case studies and written recommendations from your referral sources, following up every month to remind people about the program (a combination of phone calls, e-newsletter, and personal meetings).

Ask for introductions to colleagues at trade events or fund-raisers. Ask to be invited to club meetings. Ask to be invited to join organizations you need to be sponsored for. If you get a referral, make sure you let your referral source know you contacted the referral and what happened.

This looks like work and it is. But it’s also about 75% less work, and a lot less money, than cold calling, or selling to prospects without a recommendation. And it works.

Our favourite referral event for a home improvement company is the open house the homeowners host to show friends and neighbours their new space.

Another is a technology consulting firm which assigned an account executive to manage their partnerships with big software vendors like Microsoft, and tripled their leads.

I suppose it’s time I wrote on this topic. I was trying to avoid it... honestly! I tell you though – you can only turn a blind eye to so many “how-to make things viral” blog posts.

The first thing I do with every client is get to know them. You might consider getting to know yourself. I bet you have a lot of redeeming qualities, and probably some idiosyncrasies that drive people nuts. Sure, you might not, but then you’re just perfect and boring, and you would already have failed the first step to starting a conversation.

Case in point; Apple makes awesome products. They also charge you after the first support call. I know the reason – that’s not my point. My point is that they drive me nuts, but in the end I tell their story.

The second thing I do with a client is find a comfort zone. How quaint. Usually this is my way of gauging things like risk tolerance, the adaptability of their persona (especially important in small-biz land) and finally, the breadth of what they can speak to without sounding like a fence-sitter.

Case in point; Pepsi recently sponsored a Matt Nathanson concert held strictly for the web. Then it got cooler. As audience members (users), your typed comments show up on TV screens that Matt can see! He’s having a field day reading the comments between songs - most are pretty foul. In 10 minutes, I convinced 8 people to log on.

But it’s the third thing that really dictates whether a product, a business, a brand... even gets a chance to go viral. You must, at every possible instance, do something differently than you normally would. And there’s a very simple reason for it. Because if you don’t, then I already know how your story ends. That’s it! Who picks up a video game after their friend has beaten every level!? Who watches Titanic after they’ve been told Leo dies!? Who buys a Leaf jersey knowing that... okay, I’ll leave that one alone. PREDICTABILITY IS KILLING YOUR COMPANY!

Sure, some of what you’ve been doing successfully has been, well... successful. You’ll have to decide where to sacrifice. Just bear in mind that I’ve never written home about a great customer experience. If someone asks I’ll say it was pleasantly error-free, but I won’t start a conversation without a punchline.

I love public speaking. I don't get why so many people are put off by it. It's famously said that many people would literally rather die than speak in front of a crowd.

Yes, I get nervous just before an engagement. I can't eat or drink an hour beforehand, nor can I have a truly casual conversation, though I almost always have to try, given that addresses are typically preceded by cocktails and random shmoozing. But even the uncomfortableness is part and parcel of the entirety of the public speaking experience, and all of it must be savoured.

See, there will come a time when each of us will have to shout or beg in order for others to pay attention to us; possibly in our old age. So when an opportunity arises to make scores, or sometimes hundreds (and on the very rare occasion, thousands) of people sit quietly and listen to what we have to say, we should jump at it!

Between lecturing to my classes and giving public presentations, I speak so frequently these days that I wonder if it will ever become truly second nature and butterfly-free.... and the thought scares me. After all, I suspect that most of the fun is in being nervous. When something ceases to scare or excite you, that thing may not have much importance anymore. Savour the fear.

From an entrepreneurial point of view, I think public speaking is critical. It allows one to refine one's message, refine one's ability to defend a position and answer questions, and it necessarily results in a smoother conversational product, which reaps dividends in more intimate venues, like the boardroom.

From a marketing standpoint, a good profile as a public speaker not only allows your name (and the name of your business) to be broadcast to audiences in large batches, it establishes you as an expert in your field. And if not an expert, then at least someone with sufficient expertise to be able to communicate the content.

I've been asked to give lectures on topics in which I do not have truly deep expertise, such as climate change, global hunger and even lunar mining! At first, I balked at such opportunities, arguing to myself that there exist people better qualified to do the job. But then I realized that the quality needed by an audience isn't so much content expertise --though a healthy and defensible familiarity with the content is mandatory! Rather, what is needed is the ability to marry sufficient expertise with style and fluidity of presentation. Thus, the world expert on a topic may not be the best equipped person to speak on that topic.

In essence, in the realm of public speaking, my skills as a storyteller are more marketable than any hard expertise I may have acquired in my various technical disciplines. A typical audience wishes first to be entertained, and then to be educated.

So if an opportunity to speak in front of a large group presents itself to you.... jump at it!

Change is hard. And the harder it is, the more you’re going to love it.

We’re in a fortunate position at a fortunate time. There are lots of “tried, tested and true” models that are flying right out the window. The basic reasoning for why, follow this premise...

The consumer can reach further than ever to find exactly what they need. There are just more options. Because of this, the consumer’s perceived needs are both more, and more refined.

In an information age, some successful businesses will become successful businesses because they bring new information to the consumer. However, the more likely scenario is that a successful business will come to be that way by re-packaging the unending sea of information to become exactly what some group of people thought they needed. The web calls this a mash-up. We have barely tapped the keg.

The good news is that your business has all the right pieces. You have great people. You have cool products. You have competitive advantages here and there. You might even have a brand, a corner lot, or a cute dog that your customers come to visit (nice one Pete!). The anxiety around changing might actually be the only thing holding you back from being somebody’s (or a lot of body’s) eureka.

Re-purposing, re-packaging, changing... any way you slice it, it will probably hurt just as much as changing your domain name after a decade of e-mail marketing. But once you’re there – amidst the change – it will feel just as good as those first days you spent naming your company.

Look at your business. Study its pieces. Any good consultant will ask you, “Why are you winning?” Don’t kid yourself and say that every piece is pulling the same weight. Then, when you’ve separated the finest grains from your field, ask yourself – “What is the single greatest combination of these pieces? What’s my mash-up?”

We all need a reason to change. If your newly verbalized script is what you would do if today was Day 1, isn’t that reason enough?

“I do not mean to suggest for a moment that all it takes to be a top executive is a custom-tailored European suit. You also need the correct shirt and tie.” – David Barry, American Writer, Humorist, known best for his newspaper column with the Miami Herald.

Working for many years in a corporate office it became customary to help your executive prepare for an important meeting or dinner and this preparation included helping them fix or tie their tie. It always amazed me how so few of them knew so little about tying a tie or even picking a tie out, sometimes they would pick these horrible colours or patterns and all I could say was “you look great” (I lied through my teeth) – I mean they didn’t actually look bad but the tie always seemed to be a problem. I had to wonder if they picked these ties themselves or if someone else had picked it for them, was it the suit or the shirt. Don’t get me wrong I am no fashion guru by any means but even I knew that the tie looked bad. I thought perhaps that when I became a small business owner that would change…wrong it only got worse! Small business consultants often talk about making an impression on clients or potential clients through your business image and I mean beyond your logo and business cards but amazingly many small business owners don’t seem to worry that their clothes are saying all the wrong things, especially men’s ties. Colour, Pattern and the all important Knot are everything when trying to make a good impression.

The first step in pursuit of the perfect tie is Colour. Its important to pick the right colour when buying a tie - it tells a story about who you are and what your trying to achieve, think about the kind of impression you want to make on that potential client or existing client and what your tie is saying about you. Obviously, don’t forget about the colour of your suit, shirt, and shoes but be sensible about your tie colour, below is a small colour guide to help you in your own personal pursuit of the perfect tie:

• Green Necktie – conventional and traditional
• Yellow Necktie – positive, optimistic, detailed
• Orange Necktie – enthusiastic, open-minded, humor
• Red Necktie – action, drama, advancement, eye-catcher
• Turquoise – open-minded, young, impression
• Magenta – dignity, self-confidence, creativity
• Black – traditional, respectable, non-attention getter, mystery
• Brown – stability, earth, self-confident, goal reaching
• White – distant, innocence, clarity *in the orient white presents death
• Blue – intellectual, reflective, peace, honesty, honor

Once you have found your perfect tie colour come back and read Step 2 where we will discuss different types of tie knots and sizes, why its important to have the right tie knot and size when your looking to make that great impression! Stay Tuned!

This is a question that I get all of the time. My usual answer is “How long is a piece of string?” followed by some explanations. As there’s no real answer to the first question, and as the usual sub-text is: “How little can I pay and still get a decent site?” what I’ll try to address today is what you can do to keep costs to a minimum:

Do your own domain name search and registration. This can be quite time consuming and therefore expensive. It’s also a good idea to put dibs on your preferred domain name before someone else snaps it up. To start, do an internet search on “domain registration”. Almost every company will have a simple method of entering a prospective domain name and letting you know whether it is available. When you find one that you like and is available, it is simple to register online. Doing this also has the advantage that you know the name is registered to you personally, and under your control. Typically this will cost less than $25/year for a .ca, and can be a lot cheaper for .com — if you can find one!

Get an idea of web hosting costs. While it’s probably better to take the web designer’s recommendation for your first web hosting service, you can get an idea of costs for a basic site from the same outfits you found looking for registration. $8-$12 a month is a starting point for an uncomplicated site.

Know what you want before you call. You don’t want to pay someone to help you decide what you want! Look at your competitors’ sites and get an idea of what you want to say, and create a simple document (no formatting). As long as it does the job and makes sense, keep the number of pages to a minimum. Typically, you’ll have a home page which introduces the site and has links to other pages; a Contact us page with addresses, maps, phone numbers and the subject pages for each major topic.

Determine the “Look and Feel” for your site. Creating this can be a major time commitment for a designer. Having examples can help, but even better, you can provide your designer an actual template! Search on “web site templates” and you’ll find thousands of mostly free designs that a web designer can use and modify. If a small contribution is requested, pay up, it’s a real deal! A typical design will set the fonts, colours and patterns for a website, so that every page looks like it’s a part of the whole. Point your designer to a favourite template to work from, or let them use it as a starting point.

At the very least, if you do these things you will have given the designer a very good idea of what you want and allow him to give you a pretty exact estimate.

While you’re at it, think ahead to making changes. Are you going to go back to the designer and pay him to make basic textual changes, or will you do it yourself? Decide which pages you want to make frequent changes to and ask the designer to create it in such a way that the words can be easily edited by a non-expert, without special software, and uploaded without help.

Life isn’t all one sided, and while saving costs is important to you, creating a good relationship with an IT or graphics expert is also important. You’ll want to work well with the professionals who can help you on your way to becoming rich and successful, so explain where you are coming from in a cooperative, not confrontational, mode and the good guys will understand. If one declines your business on these terms, listen to his reasons and make your decision accordingly.

We begin every client engagement with what we call the 100-Point Audit.

The Audit process is like gold mining - sometimes you find nuggets, sometimes you find the mother lode! The one thing I can pretty much guarantee is that there will be at least one surprise, and a better understanding of what you have to do to get your business where you want it to be.

Before we begin the Audit, we ask our clients, “What is the single fastest and easiest way to guarantee a substantial and predictable flow of new clients who value what you do so much they will give you ALL their business? Who not only will pay more, but expect to pay more, for what you do?”

It's an important question. And so far, none of the clients we work with have had the answer. In this series, I’ll walk you through our approach, and our response.

Why Businesses Fail
Recent Statistics Canada data show that over two-thirds of micro-sized firms (less than 5 employees) and almost half of small sized firms (5-99) fail within five years of start-up. Nearly 80% of all new SMEs are gone within 10 years.

In other words, you can't count on organic growth past about the first five years you are in business.

The truth is, we start our businesses because we know how to do something: prepare taxes, assemble a gizmo, administer a network, create and invent, provide financial services or create a technology solution.

But most of us don't have the know-how to manage and market a business that does these things.

Almost half of the firms in Canada that go bankrupt do so primarily because of their own deficiencies rather than externally generated problems. They do not develop the basic internal strengths to survive.

Overall weakness in management, combined with a lack of market for their product, cause these firms to fail. Even worse, failed firms neglected to avail themselves of the services of outside professionals to fill the knowledge gaps.

Here are the 5 questions we ask before we begin the Audit.

1. What is the SINGLE biggest frustration you face as a business owner/manager? Please pick ONE - the biggest, hairiest, I-Can't-Sleep-at-Night, doesn't-go-away challenge for you personally. There are very likely a number of ongoing issues you face, but I'm asking you to identify the one that would make the biggest difference for you if we could solve it right away. It could be, "I can't predict my sales accurately" or "The activities we used to build the business don't work any more". Maybe it's "I never see my family because I'm always working" or - and this is a biggie for most of us - "If I'm so successful, how come I don't have any money?"
2. What do your Best Customers have in common? By Best Customers, I don't necessarily mean those who spend the most money with you. I'm talking about the ones you look forward to seeing and working with, the ones who stick with you even when there are problems in a program or delays in delivery. The ones who pay you on time and don't nickel-and-dime you into reducing your margins.
3. What are your business goals? Over the next three years and the next five, what are your business outcomes in terms of total revenue, profit, personal income and number of customers?
4. What is the lifetime value of a typical satisfied client: how much profit are they worth for the length of time they do business with you? (Lifetime value may be as short as three years, or as long as thirty - you'll know what it is for your industry).
5. What do you offer your customers they absolutely cannot get anywhere else?

A website doesn’t automatically market your business, you have to market the website. Like many of the other activities that I wrote about in the earlier articles, this can be surprisingly time consuming.

To recap quickly, my assertion is that a web site per se doesn’t bring in a single new client unless that client was actively looking for your product. Once a visitor reaches your site, your content can help market your product, but the hard work is getting them there. So, how do you go about getting more people to your web site?

Just like the real world, one way is through advertising. Don’t overlook the “free” options: everything you produce should have your website address (URL) printed on it. This includes your business card, your e-mail signature, any brochures you print, an instruction sheet, your invoices—anything that goes to the public. If they already have something you produced, they are a far better prospect than any hundred random members of humanity, so don’t leave them wondering how to find you! Some directories will include your contact details for no cost; phone directories typically charge, and charge more to include a website address. Regular advertising (print, TV, radio, flyers, billboards) can also include your URL without a large increase in cost. To my mind, adding a URL is like getting almost free, unlimited extra space attached!

Unique to the internet is pay-per-click advertising. You’ll need to do your homework before signing up, and have a respectable initial budget allocated to trying out different schemes to see how they work. I am not an expert on this subject—my point is that as well as money, you’ll need to allocate someone’s time to monitor this and keep tuning it to get the results you want; otherwise you’re probably throwing the money away.

The web equivalent of word of mouth might well be links from other web sites. Links do two things. They bring visitors from sites which have already attracted people with associated interests, and they raise your profile in most search engines. However, getting other sites to add a link to you takes time and effort. Even if you indulge in “you add my link and I’ll add yours” you have to spend some time changing your website, and checking from time to time that all your links are still live.

On-line directories are a mystery to me. Except for the well known few, who uses them? Although many of the small ones are free, there is a cost associated with finding all of your entries should you ever need to move or change your phone number. But it does add to your link count.

Probably the most tried and true way to drive people to a site is to have exciting, fresh, readable content. Visitors might bookmark your site and keep coming back; the really big players aim for you to make their site your homepage! With the right content, you may persuade people to add your RSS data to their reader. More usually, for small businesses, a monthly e-mail to an established audience has a teaser with a link to your web-site for more information. All of these methods require a steady stream of new content.

Lastly, there is our old friend, Search Engine Optimisation. This is not a make it and leave it deal. If SEO is to be done well, it must be done continually. One book title, “Search Engine Optimisation: an hour a day” tells the whole story. Maybe you can afford to spend less time, but this task is another resource hog. Just when you think you have it made, the competition changes something, and you’re no longer in the first results page.

Just like marketing in the “real” world, marketing a web site takes time, and costs money!

One of the first things I did when I moved to the small town where I now live was to meet a bunch of wonderful trades people.

Many of you will not have had that experience - I sure have had less positive encounters in the past!

You know, marketing and small business often gets awfully complicated, and I've appreciated the whack on the side of the head these guys have given me.

My real estate agent, Laura, introduced me to Mike, my home inspector. Mike introduced me to Bill the painter, Sheldon the HVAC guy, Mike (2) the handyman, Mike (3) the electrician and Doug the floor guy.

The girls in the next chairs at the hairdresser recommended a vet, who introduced me to Angela the dog boarding person. Bill the painter invited me to the local BNI group where I met Ken the art director. Tina who works with Mike (3) found me Norm the plumber.

That's a fair amount of business with a cost of sales of zero. And it all happened in under a month.

The work these guys have done is miraculous. They showed up when they said they would, did excellent work, shared the learning they had gained in over 20 years on the job, told me when I didn't need to bother doing something so I could save a little money.

Here's what I learned:

1. A core value of small business owners in this town is counting on each other for referrals. Over and over, people have told me "we want to support each other."
2. They are motivated to do good work: their friends will know if they don't, and they don't let their friends down.
3. Making referrals and then hearing how well the deal went is fun! They don't need to prove how good they are.
4. They don't sell. They educate. They talk about the job and what you, the customer, needs, not about themselves.
5. They have all the work they want.

As a small business person, there are many things that you try to manage. By now, you’ve probably found out that if you can’t measure something, you can’t manage it. So, many people are stumped when it comes to managing their web sites. However, there are an amazing number of things you can find out about what is happening, and once you have some data, you can start to make changes intelligently.

The organization that hosts your website (the ISP, or Internet Service Provider) will determine how good your information will be. Although just about every hosting platform captures the same basic data, how the ISP presents the data as information will vary. In the hosting companies I’ve seen, some offer a choice of statistics packages, some offer just one, and some basic hosting packages have no stats offering at all. You might even get an option to download logs and run your own custom analysis. If you’re considering changing ISPs, statistics should be one area you check out. Even if the ISP denies you access to your stats (or wants to upgrade you to a better package for the privilege), you can sign up with a third party which will provide stats for a small monthly charge or even free for a limited sampling. Third-party stats generally require you to insert some code into each web page you want stats for.

So, your first task is to contact the people who look after your website, or if that’s you, contact your ISP, to find out what reports are available. Now you can look at what’s happening. Most likely, the things you see first will be the raw numbers for your entire web site. The folk who write the report packages tend to go in for showing you how the number of hits varies by day of the month, hour of the day and maybe even day of the week. Unless you are doing capacity planning for a web server, this is interesting but probably not incredibly useful, in terms of things you can fix. Here are some of the things that I do look for:

·
• Which other web sites referred the most visitors to your site (or the least)? ·
• What terms did people type into search engines in order to find you? ·
• Which page on your site did those queries end up on? ·
• Which browsers do your customers use? ·
• What size screens do your customers have? ·
• After you e-mailed all of your customers with a link to some page on your web site, how many actually went there? ·
• How long after your mailing were people still visiting that page mentioned in the e-mail? ·
• Which countries do your visitors come from (or, at least: in which countries do your visitors’ ISPs have their servers in)

With this information in hand, you and your web designer can tweak your strategy for encouraging other sites to link to you; optimize your search-engine strategy; determine which browsers and screen-sizes you should use to test your web site’s usability on; determine the success of a mailing campaign and decide when to remove a page you referred to; and much more, including whether it’s worth creating a parallel site in another language!

In an ideal world, your web professionals will already be looking at your stats. In reality, many small businesses may not be able to afford to keep professionals on retainer to maintain their web site all of the time and the tweaking may have to be done by the business owner or as an occasional service. However, taking some time to do the basic analysis yourself will save you some fees, and knowing what to ask about will change you from a gullible client to an informed client.

Personally, I’ve always preferred to deal with the latter.

Sooner or later, if you have a commercial web site, you will begin to worry about Search Engine Visibility, and its technical counterpart, Search Engine Optimization or SEO. In a nutshell, when a client types a search enquiry into a search engine like MSN, then you want your web page to come up, preferably as the first “hit” but at least on one of the first 10 - 20 items. If it does, you have good SE visibility; SEO is the process of changing a web site so that this happens.

Your web site designer, or an SEO specialist, will make the changes to help this happen, but they can’t do it without your help. Before you meet, here are some things you should know:

·
• It’s tough to be number one. There are 718,000 results for the search term “widgets” . What are the chances that you will beat them all and become the new #1? ·
• Winning is temporary. Suppose your designer creates a page that manages to mention “widgets” 3,492 times on one page, and you’re now number 1. How long will it be before Widgets ‘R Us change their page to use the term 3,500 times? Besides, most search engines realise what you’re doing and will de-list you if you use blatant tactics like that, and your clients will get really bored reading it! ·
• It can be expensive. Companies that consistently rank highly for competitive search terms spend a great deal of time and money to do so. A typical small business needs to find an affordable niche where they can perform well.

With that in mind, prepare for meeting your SEO specialist by considering alternatives. Maybe you specialise in antique widgets. A smart consumer who is look for that topic will give up looking through 718,000 results sooner or later and search for “antique widgets” (putting the words in quotes makes most search engines look for the exact phrase). Now you’re only competing with 15 sites for the best ranking. Beating 15 sites is a lot easier than beating thousands!.

What other phrases will describe your product? Make a list and prioritise it. Ask your clients how they found your web site. Bear in mind though, that asking clients or looking at your web site statistics will only provide data about words and phrases that actually found you. While you can work to improve your ranking for those phrases, somehow, you need to dig and find the phrases that people used which didn’t find you, because those phrases are the ones you need to add for the search engines to find.

Your web-site techies can do marvellous things, but you are the one who knows your business and your clients. Use that knowledge to help your specialists do their job.

PS - when I chose to use “antique widgets” as an example for a search term, I had no idea that over 80% of the actual hits on a search of this term were other pages dealing with SEO. And I thought I was being original!

Here are Steps Six and Seven from our Seven Steps to Small Business Marketing Success series.

Step Number Six - Automate and Dominate
You already know that it takes up to seven tries before you have a meaningful contact. And you are already busy!

One of the great things about technology is that it allows you to market automatically. There are some tremendous automation tools out there that can work for you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and make what may be a small business, a small marketing effort, seem much larger.

First, you need to have a web site. (Since you’re reading this on line, you may already have one!)

·
• Use an auto responder tool like A. Weber (that’s the one we use) to capture email addresses of people who visit your website, and send them the free report or white paper you created for your advertising. Remember, this is how they will give you permission to market to them. ·
• Blogs (web logs) can build trust, spread your expertise, and get PR opportunities. I’ve had more than one publication interview me just for the fact that I had a blog. It’s also a great way for search engines to find you and index content. ·
• Use local terms in your content and links. Instead of “kitchens.baths”, say “Kelowna kitchens” and “Kelowna baths”. ·
• Get listed with all the search engines in their local directories, Google, Yahoo and AOL, People will search “Graphic Designer Edmonton,” just like a phone book. ·
• Investigate pay-per-click and pay-per-call local advertising, where you only pay for responses from people who live in a certain geographic area.

Step Number Seven - Live by the Calendar
This last step is really more of a housekeeping one, but it’s amazing how important it is.

There really is too much for you to do in your business. And you didn’t start it because you wanted to be a marketing expert. I suspect most of you wanted to do whatever it is that your business does. What you probably found very quickly is that what that business does, consumes most of your day.

Unfortunately, marketing, which is an extremely important aspect of the survival of a business, is very easy to shove aside with everyday “making it, shipping it, fixing it”.

Some of you will just be overwhelmed by how much there is to do in marketing.

So, get a giant calendar that will stare you in the face, that you can hang on the wall and that everybody in your organization can see. Map out one thing you intend to do and the steps it will take to do it.

Even if it takes you six months - in six months from now you’ll have it done. In other words, make marketing appointments with yourself.

You can’t do it all today, but that calendar reminder shows you are going to start the lead generation process, for example. Some clients do a different theme each month so they don’t get overwhelmed.

So, where do you go from here?
Go back to Step One, and follow the Seven Steps, in order. At the end, you will have a powerful marketing machine that will drive business to your door, and let you work with clients who respect what you do and are willing to pay for it.

One piece of advice I have never forgotten makes a lot of sense: 80% of business success comes down to these three things: Say “Please” and “Thank You”; be on time; and do what you said you will do. I’ve always thought that was not a bad definition of being professional. However, there are a number of more mundane things that can spoil your whole image if you don’t take care of them.

Logo Design
If you are going to have a logo as a graphical representation of your business, it’s critical that it looks the same wherever you use it, so you get the full benefit of branding. However, as a practical matter, you will actually need different files for different applications. Either you or your graphic designer will need to create versions for a web-site (which will also do for e­­-mail) one or possibly two sizes for printed publications, and maybe a large size for lawn signs, car decals or other advertising. The worst mistake you can make is to design a logo in a (low) web-site resolution first, and then attempt to use it for high-quality printed items. It will look terrible. A rule of thumb is to use a vector-based graphics package for the design work, and convert to a pixel-based (bitmap) image in the right size as required.

Wordmark
If your logo doesn’t include your business name, you will probably print the name beside your logo. When this takes on a distinctive look, it is often called a wordmark. Choose a specific position, font and colour you will use for this purpose, and be consistent in always making your wordmark look the same wherever it is used. If the font is not one that you can expect to find on all computers, then in e-mails and web-sites, you will use an image (e.g. a gif graphic) of the wordmark and when you publish in a PDF you will embed the font so it will appear as you expected. (You’re also best to choose a font that you can distribute without running afoul of copyright laws!)

Colours
When a graphics professional talks about colours and the printing process, listen up! Some colours which look fine on a computer screen do not translate well at the printer’s. Some blues, in particular, will look quite different. An expert will be able to save you before you choose a Corporate Blue which you can never reproduce on paper. An expert will also advise on the psychological impact of colours, as well as how they “go” together-something I rely on my wife to tell me! Once you have your colours, use them consistently.

Business Cards
With those details attended to, you can think about your business card. My personal bias is against self-printed ones. When it’s possible to get professional full-colour, glossy, photo-quality cards for under $30, I say, go for it. I use a print service where I can upload my design and still add and edit text. The one thing I’d do differently next time is to include only the graphic elements in the upload. That would allow me to change an e-mail address or phone number without another upload charge.

Contact details
With all of these image-makers going for you, how do you think it looks when your e-mail address is joesmith23@cheap.mail.com? Even if you won’t be doing e-business, a web-site is almost a necessity these days. Get one, so clients can learn a bit about you before calling. Having your own domain gives you a unique e-mail address as well, and if you change your internet provider, your e-mail can stay the same. Naturally, the best time to do this is before you print up all of your business stationary!

A professional image-don’t leave your home office without one!

Here are three more ideas from our Seven Steps to Small Business Marketing Success series.

Step Number Five: Establish Your Lead Generation Trio

Your Lead Generation Trio includes advertising, a referral system and public relations. You will build or plan to build some component that routinely generates leads using all three of these strategies.

1. “Permission” Advertising
A lot of small business owners tell me they've tried to advertise, it doesn't work and it's a waste of money. For most small businesses, it is a waste because of the way they are trying to work it.

The purpose of all your advertising, be it radio, Yellow Pages, print, or direct mail, is to get prospects to give you permission to start marketing to them by generating a response. People who respond to you are likely to be qualified leads, because they give you their name and contact information.

Your advertising should offer a teleseminar, or articles like "Ten things you must know before you hire an accountant" or "Five ways to avoid being ripped off by your contractor". It can be a review of new tools and resources that people in your industry use, such as how to build a dream home for less than they think.

2. Referral System
The next step in your lead generation is to systematically generate referrals.

When you sign up a new client, when a new client retains you, or when somebody decides they want to buy a product from you, part of your sales presentation will involve letting them know what you'll do for them. You tell them that you know they'll be so thrilled with your service, product or application that at the end of 90 days, part of their responsibility will be to show you three more people whom they know need that result as well.

In almost all cases, people will agree. Not 100% of them will follow through, but a much greater percentage will than those you only ask for referrals months later.

3. Public Relations
People have mixed opinions on public relations, because they look at it as some kind of strange science. It really isn't.

It is a very powerful lead generation tool. If somebody else says you're great, a third party that seemingly has no reason or motivation to do so, your story becomes much more believable.

·
• Build a media list. Let the people who write about what you do. Look at the publications you know your target reads. ·
• Send those folks something at least once a month. Remember when you're trying to approach the media is that it's not about you. It's not about your company. They don't really care to promote your business. What they care about is themselves, their publication, and their readers. If you just have a new product or have moved your office, this is not very newsworthy, and the press will write about those only occasionally, dependent upon the publication. ·
• Marketing to the media is much like marketing to new prospects. You've got to take the time to build relationships. The way you do that is to be active and send them stuff on a monthly basis. Be willing to give. ·
• Ask your ideal clients what they read. Often you'll find people are just nuts about an industry newsletter or trade publication you didn't think was that big a deal. It's amazing to find out where you might want to advertise and certainly where you may want to target to get your name in.

Future articles will cover…
Automate and Dominate
Live by the Calendar

Advertising is never an exact science-sometimes you just have to keep throwing ideas up against the wall until something sticks. Even then, you can pour thousands of dollars into advertising and still not have anything to show for it.

The biggest mistake business owners make with their advertising strategy is to expect instant results. Some say that a person has to see an ad at least seven times before they even consider buying a product or service. That’s a lot of commitment on your end if you’re not seeing any response yet.

The goal of advertising is to create a clear awareness of your company and its unique selling proposition. Too bad most advertisers judge their ads by the comments they hear from the public, instead of measuring an ad’s success by a measurable increase in sales. The funniest and most creative ads do generate a lot of buzz but often don’t actually say anything about the advertiser’s product. When you confuse response with results, you end up with a whole slew of ads that don’t translate into dollars for your company.

Many business owners get poor results from their advertising because they are reaching people with little or no interest in what they are selling. This happens when the advertiser goes with the cheapest type of media to invest in, instead of picking a publication targeted to his or her specific market. Advertising in the right place is the key to success. Unfortunately, many people simply look for the lowest price for the number of readers they’ll reach.

As the owner, you have the most in-depth knowledge about your business but this same knowledge gives you a kind of tunnel vision where your advertising is concerned. You have a preconceived notion about what you want to say in your advertising, as opposed to what a consumer actually wants to know. You might think that the XYZ feature is wonderful, so you create a huge advertisement extolling its virtues when your target market is really concerned about the benefits of ABC instead.

Many businesses cut down on advertising when sales are great. This is a big mistake. As is cutting your advertising budget when times are tough. Consistency is the key to long-term success, so stick to a regular advertising schedule to produce steady growth, regardless of your sales volume at any given time. Even if you think that an upswing in sales will continue indefinitely, keep plugging away with your ads-you’ll appreciate the effort when business slows down again, as it inevitably will.

If you find yourself too busy to handle your company’s advertising needs, your advertisements need a more professional image or you realize that you’re not the best person to handle this responsibility, it’s time to call in the big guns. Hire an in-house marketing manager, a public relations agency or an independent marketing consultant to take over. Doing it right the first time helps you avoid the headache of a wasted advertising budget. The money you spend on their salary is a small investment that will reap big financial benefits down the line when your advertising finally starts to pay off.

Michael Urlocker is CEO of The Disruption Group and he writes in the National Post with insights from Don Tapscott, author of Growing Up Digital. I’m plugging these gentlemen because I think they are bang on in their insights about the Net Generation. As a Net-Gener myself (as many of you reading my column are), we tend to be very skeptical when older folks say they “get” us. I say give these guys a shot… Michael’s blog can be read at www.ondisruption.com if you’d like to decide for yourself.

Now that I’m done giving shout-outs to strangers…

It’s true that we communicate with the world differently. We were forced into this. We were overloaded with advertisements, products, and promises. 3500 messages a day will turn anyone into a poster child for ADHD. We had no choice but to tune most companies out. If you’re going to pretend that we can process information like desktops then we’re going to use the ‘Sort by’ function relentlessly.

Mr. Urlocker and Mr. Tapscott have identified that our generation needs choice in response to the proliferation of offerings out there. See, we look at it in the following way: if you’re going to send us a gazillion messages, then we expect to have at least ONE that fits us perfectly. Tapscott says companies “should consider employees as alumni to whom lasting ties can be built whether they stay in a job or not.” I’ve spent my entire summer doing ad hoc jobs in a consulting capacity. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been on roughly 50 interviews and even fielded some offers, but I often wonder if anyone is concerned with my professional development the way I am concerned about developing the company. As Net-Geners, we can build careers around the skills we have and the tools out there that help us develop new ones. As a company, if you can create a career plan that is flexible and pragmatic, we will surely be enticed.

Mr. Tapscott also speaks to collaboration and how we Net-Gener’s “expect to teach the boss something from day one.” Let me paraphrase. We EXPECT that there is SOMETHING we know that you don’t and we EXPECT that there are MANY things you know that we don’t. The bottom line is that if there are no channels for the boss and I to communicate (i.e. mediums that span across multiple levels) then you’ll never know my insights and I’ll never know how to live out the company’s vision. We all want to be a part of something bigger than ourselves and filing a report, without insight as to how it contributes to achieving the vision, is a waste of time.

Mr. Tapscott wisely notes that for Net-Geners, entertainment is not divorced from work or school - the two are integrated. Nobody wants to suck it up and go to work, we want to jump out of bed and know that today we are conferencing with other sharp minds in Hong Kong, Dubai, and Budapest. So how else can we be entertained? Well despite the isolation of video games, we actually love an interactive atmosphere. This is why we read each other’s blogs and listen to podcasts? We like to hear what each person thinks rather than be told what to believe from traditional media. Build your training programs around interactive tools. Build support networks. Build feedback into everything you do. You don’t have to be perfect for us, just be honest.

My guess is that it will be a few more years of expensive training followed by poor retention rates before companies clue in to how Net-Geners see the world. Already their brands are being affected more in social media circles than by their communications. When it does click, those of us who are entrepreneurial will breathe a collective sigh knowing we can keep our entrepreneurial spirit and strike a balance between our own intellectual property and the infrastructure a company can provide.

Here are three more of our Seven Steps to Small Business Marketing Success series.

Step Number Two: Find and Communicate a Core Difference

One builder looks like another. One accountant looks like another. One electrician looks like another. It may not be true, but unless you're spending millions of dollars in advertising to tell your story, prospects can't tell the difference.

So what do they do? They ask how much! They base their decision on price alone.

If you can find something that makes you the obvious choice, and then tell the world, you will quickly rise to the top of your market. Price is not going to be the issue for you at all.

Put it into a powerful short phrase, your core message.

Imagine you're sitting at a party or on an airplane and somebody asks what you do for a living. Saying I'm a builder, a marketing consultant, an accountant or a lawyer, just says what my title is - I haven't told tell anyone anything.

But suppose I said, “I teach small business owners how to double what they charge.” You could say you show homeowners how to get the most from their thermostat. Or you eliminate the need for call-backs. Or you reduce construction time by 30%. Or you have the most-wanted styles before anyone else in your market area.

You will almost force the person beside you to ask, "How do you do that? And now you're on your way to qualifying a prospect.

Step Number Three: Package Your Business

Create “products” from your services and name them. For example, I could print this series of articles into a booklet and offer it as a “Free Introductory Course" for our system, a great way to differentiate our business. You could create a product out of add-on services: the Platinum Maintenance Package. You could bundle a set of products into the New Business Package, or the First-Time Buyer Package.

The idea is to create something much bigger than just, say, providing accounting. What if you provided Platinum Level Small Business Accounting? You could then have other levels of services you offer - Bronze, Silver and Gold - at various pricing options. You could call your payroll service Jiffy Payroll because you provide faster, more accurate services than anyone else.

Step Number Four: Create Marketing Materials that Educate

Some of you have a box or two or five of glossy brochures and sales folders that you wrote marketing sales copy for and don’t use!

We teach all our clients to create a marketing kit in a pocket folder or file folder instead. You will print only as many as you need at one time, and you can personalize it for a lead or a prospect.

You’ll create about 6 sheets.

Sheet #1: "The Difference." Based on what you did in Step 2, pick out the three absolute biggest benefits of doing business with your firm or the three absolute ways in which you know you are different.

Sheet # 2: Case Studies. A case study is proof. Show prospects somebody who got the result you're telling them they'll get.

Sheet # 3: Your Story. How you got started, how you overcame adversity, how your business came to get into the specific niche that it's in. People love stories. Stories build trust.

Sheets #4 and 5: Testimonials and Client Lists. Ask clients for a whole page of testimonials to go with your customer list.

Sheet # 6: Process Descriptions. Tell people how you do what you do - a diagram is great. Go further. Prove how you're going to deliver by creating a checklist, or a description, of how your system guarantees something customers really want. It could be on-time delivery, or breezing through an audit.

There is no doubt that the key to business success is to have loyal, satisfied customers who brag about their business to others. Not only are they repeat purchasers, but also they become walking billboards for the company. What's the best form of advertising there is? Word-of-mouth. Word-of-mouth is the only method of promotion that is of the consumer, by the consumer, and for the consumer. Best of all, it's one of the lowest-cost forms of promotion there is.

People ask other people all the time for a referral. If they trust the person making the recommendation, they often act upon the referral. And some lucky business gets one more customer without having to spend a nickel on advertising or promotion. Keeping in touch with satisfied customers and encouraging them to talk up your business costs relatively little. Here are some word-of-mouth marketing tips that can help you build a network of referral sources:

1. Get your customers involved. Encourage your customers to become involved in the process of making or delivering your product or service. This personal experience creates a sense of camaraderie and positive feelings that lead them to talk about your business to their friends.
2. If your business receives referrals from another business, reciprocate. Refer business to the referrer. Or at the very least, offer the referrer a discount price. If your business can't offer a discount, there may be other ways to reciprocate. Consider a small gift or gift certificate.
3. Tell stories because stories illustrate a specific idea or selling point. They are an effective vehicle for spreading reputations because they communicate on an emotional level. If you have a company newsletter or brochure, include a story or two about your company that readers can pass along.
4. Educate your customers. By educating your customers, you can boost your reputation and customer loyalty. Pick a topic relevant to your best customers and make yourself the source of credible, current information about that topic.
5. Finally fix problems fast. Nothing grates more than the slow resolution of a problem. Speedy response is vital to prevent negative word-of-mouth from spreading. Negative feelings about a product or service may linger for years. Research shows that for every bad experience, we tell four friends. While for every good experience, we tell, on average, just two and a half. When faced with a complaint, the response of your employees should be, "How can I send this person away happy?"

The best form of advertising is word-of-mouth. And certainly the best way to get positive word-of-mouth is by providing a quality product or service that meets the needs of your customers. But there are ways to encourage your happy customers to spread the good word.

The sales letter is the key to any successful marketing strategy but I firmly believe that it is also the one piece that is most often undervalued and mishandled.

A good sales letter prompts an emotional reaction from the reader and compels them to take immediate action because the letter touches on one of the reader’s hot buttons. For example, it could answer their need for acceptance, to be smarter than others, to be richer, to have more time, to be better than the rest etc.

Unfortunately, I have seen a lot of bad sales letters where the company spends so much time talking about how great they are but never give the potential client the opportunity to find out “what’s in it for me?” The customer’s emotional needs are not being met. Your product or service may be great but unless your client realizes that it is needed, you are wasting your time. You must create desire.

The best way to overcome this sort of sales letter failure is to put yourself in your client’s place. What issues are they dealing with day in and day out? What are their ‘pains’? What do they really want-more money, more time, more productivity?

Once you have put yourself inside your client’s head, you can begin writing the perfect sales letter for them. Write like you speak instead of filling your letter with dry prose and jargon. Imagine you are writing to a friend-how would you describe your product or service to someone across the kitchen table?

The classic sales letter formula is defined by the acronym AIDA: Attention, Interest, Desire and Action.

Attention: State a startling statistic or a fact that will force your reader to keep reading. Create an emotional, yet accurate, response.

Interest: Describe a situation that applies to your reader. What problems or issues do they face? What are the client’s emotional hot buttons?

Desire: Tell how your product or service meets the reader’s needs and make them want what you’re selling.

Action: Create a call to action and tell the reader to call, email or fax in the order immediately. Make it easy for them to get in touch with you. Create a feeling of intensity by offering a bonus or a price break if they respond within a certain amount of time.

In this series of articles, we’ll cover 7 steps designed to make your small business a marketing powerhouse. We tell Small Business Owners and Independent Professionals you can attract all the clients your small business can handle, work only with clients who value what you have to offer and significantly increase what you charge for your services if you can follow these simple small business marketing systems, strategies and ideas.

Step Number One - Narrow Your Focus

Step number one is “don’t try to be all things to all people.” You must find a target market. That may not sound like new news or new information, but it is amazing how easy it is for small business owners to forget.

In many cases, small business owners describe their target market as anybody they think will pay them. Unfortunately, this means it becomes hopelessly difficult to distinguish your business from the guy down the street.

Take a financial planner who works with family-owned businesses or one who bills himself as a specialist in working with recently divorced individuals. If I’m a recently divorced individual or I run a family-owned business, whether his claim is true or not, I will be predetermined to believe that his business is more suited to my needs.

It doesn’t matter if it’s true. It doesn’t matter if that person who works with family-owned businesses has any more special knowledge or experience than I do. If I say I work with just anybody, my prospects will say they want to work with the other person - the one who says she specializes in what’s important to them.

It comes down to trust. One of your biggest challenges as a business is to overcome lack of trust. Prospects have never heard of you. Why should they trust what you have to say? People will trust you more if they believe you understand them, you serve their needs or if you’ve served somebody just like them.

If you have been in business for any amount of time, I want you to think of what makes up your ideal client.

For many people, it’s as simple as taking a really good hard look for common characteristics among your best clients. They may not be the clients you do the most business with. Sometimes they are. It’s great when they are.

For me, the best clients are those who really trust what you do, who really value what you do, who really look to your specific expertise in order to bring them the results they want.

Sit down and really describe your ideal client. Write the description down on a piece of paper as though he or she is literally sitting across the table from you.

This exercise is very important for several reasons. It not only helps you get a firm grasp on who makes up your ideal client and who to go after, it allows you to explain to your sales people, distribution partners, employees and other associates who you’re looking for.

Then, you can stop talking to everybody and stop taking work from clients who don’t fit your profile. It’s just as important to know who is not a client, as who is.

Many times I have taken work from clients who don’t fit my profile of the ideal client. Often these clients become my biggest headaches, because they don’t value what I do.

You can save yourself those headaches by having this firm description and narrowing your focus. You can say “no” every now and then when you know something won’t fit your profile.

Future articles will cover…
Find and Communicate a Core Difference
Package Your Business
Create Marketing Materials That Educate
Establish Your Lead Generation Trio
Automate and Dominate
Live By the Calendar

Where is corporate identity or brand important?
We’ve all read about and have a pretty good idea of what brand and corporate identity is. But it’s useful to point out that corporate identity is concerned with these four main areas of activity, and note that they cover a lot of ground.

• Products/services - what you make or sell.
• Environments - where you make or sell it, the place or physical context, and the electronic/internet context.
• Information - how you describe and publicise what you do.
• Behaviour - how people within your organization behave to each other and to outsiders.

Know your target audiences
You may need communications with a different emphasis or focus for each different target group. It’s important to know the range of communications you will require that will carry your corporate identity. You can make a list of all the different groups and audiences you’ll be communicating with - for instance, not only prospective customers, but perhaps possible strategic partners. Don’t forget your own employees, your bankers, the financial industry if you plan to go public, perhaps your neighbours and possibly mentors.

Applications
Once you’ve looked at the field you’re operating in and the various publics out there that you’ll be addressing, your designer will need a list of the key communications you’ll be using that will hold your corporate identity, as well as all the possible ones. These might include:

• Business cards
• Letterhead/stationery/fax sheet.
• Invoices, receipts, order forms and acknowledgements, etc.
• Company vehicles
• Prospectus and investment package
• Annual report
• Email
• Powerpoint presentations
• Web site
• Literature on your company, products and services
• Reports and industry papers for presentation at trade shows, forums, websites.
• Packaging
• Direct selling tools
• Newsletter, paper and/or electronic

Contributed by: Liz Nash

Whenever someone asks me what I do for a living, I have to take a deep breath and whisper, almost fearfully, "I'm an epidemiologist." Then I wait for the inevitable response: "So you study skin?"

"No," I have to then explain. "Epidemiology is not dermatology. It's the study of the determinants of health..." Blah blah blah, yadda yadda. It's such a common occurrence that I have the response pretty much memorized and parsed, much like a favourite speech. In fact, my new non-fiction book about epidemiology is tentatively titled, "Nothing To Do With Skin", in recognition of this most common public misconception.

Therein lies one of the challenges of being, not just a scientist, but an obscure scientist: most people have a skewed idea of what my profession does, if they've heard of it at all. For most epidemiologists, this is not too much of an annoyance. They deal with it in a number of ways, everything from politely explaining the 200 year history of the science --and its root word, "epidemic"-- to deftly and rudely avoiding or ignoring the question altogether.

My sister, a political scientist, has a similar problem. Many non-academics assume her profession means that she intends to run for office. The same holds true for friends pursuing doctorates in English literature-- the world assumes they all want to be writers. Such is the lot of those who have lingered too long in the halls of academia: to be burdened with both student debt and a public misunderstanding of one's occupation and purpose. This hardly seems fair, since no one assumes, for example, that a lawyer aspires to a life of crime. But I digress.

As a self-employed epidemiologist, I really don't have the option of ducking the question or of giving it short shrift, no matter how tiring the perplexed response becomes. See, for a small businessperson, every conversation about one's profession is a marketing opportunity. This is especially true for a scientist, since --if we can think creatively enough-- our skills set can be useful to a range of clients outside of the scientific community. Thus, explaining what we do, even to someone who appears to be completely outside our sectors of interest, can generate dividends.

I am fond of explaining, for example, that an epidemiologist is typically an expert in designing and analyzing surveys and others kinds of data collection instruments. Indeed, we are the masters of population research. And pretty much everyone everywhere in every type of commercial environment will eventually have need of new data. I have since helped such non-scientific clients as mortgage companies and insurance agents with their customer survey designs and evaluation strategies.

What a scientist offers is objective, structured thinking, a specific organizational approach, creativity with respect to procedural problem solving and an unparalleled deftness with data. For those of us who have ventured into this lush land of entrepreneurialism, it serves us well to remember these general skills when we interact with the non-scientific world. By communicating who we are and what we do, we not only educate the lay person about our little niche, but can very often serve to pry open a new market.

It’s 9:22 on a Tuesday morning and my phone rings. It’s Joe Blow from the XYZ Company and he’s really excited. “Leanne, XYZ has just come out with a brand new widget. It’s really a big improvement over our last version, so I need you to write a press release about it and get us some national newspaper coverage. When can I expect the reporters to start calling?”

Every business wants to get as much free press as possible, but Joe was going about it the wrong way. Yes, I could write a press release about his new widget but I guarantee no reporters would be calling him to get the details.

Press releases are a great tool to help you get media coverage but unless you can connect your announcement to a real story that piques a journalist’s interest, the release is going to end up in the circular file as soon as it crosses the wire.

That is the real secret to press releases-they have to actually be newsworthy. Reporters aren’t interested in helping you make more money or driving traffic to your website-they want a snappy story that will grab’s their readers’ attention and please their editor at the same time.

Writing a press release isn’t difficult if you follow the basics:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE-should appear in the upper left-hand corner, all capitalized.

Headline-one sentence that sums up the main idea of the press release.

Dateline-the city where your press release is issued and the date it is going out across the wire. Lead Paragraph-the five Ws (who, what, where, when, why) to summarize what you are announcing and get your audience interested in reading further.

Body-the meat of your press release where you fully develop your announcement.

Company Information Boilerplate-every press release should end with a short paragraph that describes your company and its products and services.

Contact Information-include your name, phone number and email address so journalists can call for more information.

Once I filled Joe in on the secret to a great press release, we developed an angle to get him the coverage he wanted. When we were done, his press release didn’t come across as a puff piece about the company-it gave

Should you do your own logo?
Some entrepreneurs get their niece to do a logo and think they’re all set. Others try to design one on their own. Some of our clients are quite capable of creating a logo, but many simply don’t feel qualified or have other things they should concentrate on! We love to involve our clients in the process to whatever degree they are comfortable with. And they are delighted to find, whether they have a creative bent or not, that there is much they can do to reduce the design cost for a new logo or symbol. The cornerstone of a strong visual brand or corporate identity is the right logo or symbol, used consistently throughout your corporate graphics. Having a strong corporate identity or brand can go a long way to contributing to the success of your small business.

Building a design brief and benchmarking
The myriad of design choices can be narrowed down by doing some research, and benchmarking - making comparisons and learning from them, and summing up the results in what we call a design brief. A good design brief narrows the parameters your designer works within, and therefore cuts down the time you are paying for. You can also cut your costs by doing much of the work needed to build this brief. You may well find you can use some of the research you did for your business plan.

Know the playing field of your industry
For instance, you probably researched your competition for your business plan. For the design brief, it’s useful to collect a file of the communications commonly used by your competition. This helps your designer know the playing field in your particular industry. For instance, customers in one industry may be used to seeing very basic print material. Another industry might have the bar set higher; it may be the norm to have costly printed brochures on luxurious paper, or websites with extremely sophisticated e-commerce components.

Know your own likes and dislikes
Besides collecting a file of competitors’ materials, you should also keep a file of pieces that appeal to you, or that contain some aspect that appeals to you. These don’t necessarily have to relate to your industry. Although your image has to appeal to your buyers and other publics, your designer should also be taking into account your taste. If you’re a small business owner you will be living more closely with the result (for many reasons large corporations need a more homogenized solution). It helps inform your designer too if you accumulate examples of what you don’t like.

Word association list helps prepare for identity design
For those of you who are more comfortable dealing with words than pictures, you can make a valuable contribution by building a word association list. What words do you associate with your company’s image that will take you to a successful future? The list will spark ideas and focus on the feel your image should embrace.

Contributed by: Liz Nash

Think you’re communicating enough with your customers?

Consider this: TV viewership is down, Internet ads are usually ignored, and traditional radio is being challenged by Satellite radio.

With all these challenges to current marketing communications, is your message getting through?

Now I’m not suggested you cease all contact with these channels but consider a new wave of technology communications that SMBs are finding relatively inexpensive, yet simple enough to use.

Blogging, Real Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds, and Podcasting are changing the way SMBs talk. For SMBs, they can create new efficiencies and dynamic ways to communicate with customers.

Want to talk more about these technologies?

Connecting to your Customers:

A Blog is a Web log or online journal. Blogs can be created, posted, and updated very simply and very cheaply, giving small businesses a cost efficient communications tool. As you may already know, this article you’re reading is part of a Blog.

Imagine having a blog on content important to your customers. It could talk about new and upcoming products, have product reviews, and post testimonials to build a critical mass of consumers. Your blog becomes a way of building a community of engaged consumers together that you can market to.

RSS, or real simple syndication, is a way to subscribe to a website's regularly updated content without actually visiting that site. It allows you to look at headlines and stories from as many blogs or relevant sites as you like, all in one place.

Some businesses are using RSS feeds to deliver marketing content such as newsletters, catalogues, product releases, or flyers. Know someone who has an iPod or mp3 player? Podcasting allows you to deliver content to those digital music players. This means your content is available on demand, and can be listened to anywhere, anytime.

Digitally delivering this content can help you eliminate marketing costs such as: printed material collateral or staging events. It also allows you to easily reach out to consumers in a timely manner to keep your information fresh.

And guess what, Podcasting content can be sent via RSS Feeds.

All of the above tools can be combined to offer a varied mix of tools to compliment your current mix of online and off-line marketing to deliver what’s important to your targeted customers.

Is your business ready for new dialogues with your customers?

Brand identities aren’t just a luxury of big business like Starbucks and Nike. A brand identity can play a critical role in an entrepreneurial company of any size and at any stage of growth. While a logo is a symbol of what you do, a brand identity defines who you are, what you stand for and where you’re going.

People ultimately decide to business with people. You brand identity is the face of your business - and gives it a persona that your customers, your employees, your suppliers and your competition can all relate to and quickly identify with. A brand identity sets you apart, establishes credibility and opens the door to new opportunities.

The design of your brand identity, including your logo, business card and other marketing materials, work best when they embody your business values, not just your business function. Otherwise, your materials may in fact distort how people perceive both you and your business. Your company may come across as traditional when, in fact, you’re an innovator. You might come across as a local-based business when you’re competing on a global level.

The best approach for uncovering your brand values and creating a brand identity is to have a guide coach you through the process. But at the very least, here’s a quick test can help discover what your brand is saying about you behind your back.

Pass around your business card to colleagues or stakeholders. What are the key words that come to mind when they look at your logo? Are these words what you want people thinking about you and your company? If not, it might be time for a brand makeover.

Remember, regardless of what size your company is, you only have one chance to make a first impression. Your business identity is often times the first introduction to your company - so it’s worth it to make sure you’re putting your best face forward.

Ah yes… we all know this game. Remember? Think way back to the start of high school and you will come to fully appreciate the concept (and importance of) branding. Yup, I said it alright - branding is just like adolescence.

Even though, as young adults, we would never have admitted to trying to fit into a particular cookie cutter mould, the fact is… we were. Here was our first (and second and third etc.) attempt at branding ourselves. We were discovering our values and checking out who really appreciated what we stood for. Our friends were like a market segment we were trying to impress. The concept really isn’t that far off if you think about it: for-or-against drugs vs. for-or-against disclosure, for-or-against making curfew vs. for-or-against corporate governance. We were in fact branding ourselves.

Some of us were ‘rockers’ or ‘goths’ or ‘preppies,’ and when we walked the school hallways, members of the other groups would immediately recognize to which label we belonged. Compare that to the automobile industry where BMW brings performance to mind. Mercedes brings luxury. Volvo brings safety. Ford brings tough. These are the associations which are invaluable to a company and should also be invaluable to YOU! The moment someone decides they want performance, their first instinct is to look at a BMW. Imagine if the moment someone thought about public speaking, your name came to mind.

Heck, how do you think I got the opportunity to write this column?

I work with a great group of partners in our company, FieldLevel Innovations. I don’t have the time to describe our unique dynamic in depth but when assembling the team, the original managing partners would recognize a need in the organization and would list the people who best exemplified what would fill that void.

“We need to speed up our research methods” followed by “I know just the guy.” “We lack in this skill set over here” and then “I bet that this person could solve that.”

This is branding. Representing what you do best. As an entrepreneur you have to take your strengths and exploit them as far as they can reach. At the same time, recognizing your pitfalls will allow you to identify what other ‘brands of people’ can really add an element to your team.

Everyday I wake up and I make a conscious effort to stand for the same thing and I strongly recommend that whatever force is driving your success needs to become more “real”. Rocker, Performance, Entrepreneur - give that force a name and people will think of you first when faced with a need that you can fill. Like when they need an air guitarist… uh… I mean columnist.

Selling is the key to survival and profits in any business. Regardless of whether you sell products or services you have to sell. The selling cycle can be long or short, but a key component of every sale is the close. Your prospect fits your target market like a glove. He or she absolutely needs your product. They have the money and say they want to buy but, somehow, you can't get them to sign on the dotted line. In this article we’ll look at some effective ways to get that signature on the contract.

There could be many reasons why they haven’t signed. Perhaps they’re not comfortable with you or your company yet. Perhaps they have plans to buy elsewhere and are just gathering information. This is a particularly insidious situation as they’re really only looking for free information. Perhaps they just need time and will become a good customer eventually. No matter what the real reason is, you need to know what it is. Either it will be worth your while to spend some more time with this prospect or it's time to cut your losses and spend your time more profitably. That sounds like a tough attitude but it’s really the only way to go. Time is your most precious asset and you want to allocate it to your winners and not your losers.

The first step is to try to nail down the reasons why the customer isn't buying and to address these. Addressing them doesn't mean that you're going to overcome every objection but it does mean listening carefully and trying to find a solution. If the product is too expensive, perhaps you can lower the price if the customer doesn't take one of the expensive options. If your delivery is too long, perhaps you can use air-freight. Perhaps a different and cheaper model will meet the customer needs. In the service business, see if timing is critical. If it isn’t, you could look at scheduling the engagement at a time when you are not as busy and offer a discount. On the other hand, if the customer or client has a potential supplier which can deliver the same quality more quickly at a lower price, move on. Some sales are just not going to go to you.

One long standing way to accelerate the close is to make the customer aware of factors which are favorable now but may not be later. You really can’t get away anymore with the old come on - “we've got a special deal for you if you sign up right now but tomorrow the price will be higher...". However, there are often factors like price increases, exchange rates, financing, over-supply or new product launches which influence price and the customer should certainly be made aware of these.

In the end, you're going to win some and lose some. Your challenge is to find out which is which and to win those you are going to win quickly and not to waste time on those you are going to lose.