One of our favourite clients is a business training centre at a local college. For the past few months, we’ve been working with their team to find out what small business owners want most from training, and how they want to receive it.

We began by doing a telephone survey. It was illuminating to see how extremely satisfied the training centre’s clients are with the great customer service they get from the staff, and a bit daunting to think that we could help grow such a well-established business even more.

We could have asked a standard question like, “Is (subject) of interest to you?” or “Do you or your employees need training in anything?” …but our work with entrepreneurs has shown us that the answer to this question is usually “No. I don’t have time.”

We ended up asking “What topics would be worth taking time off from your business to learn about?”

Small business owners told us they would indeed take time off work if they could learn: a better way to find new customers; stay ahead of their competition; and spend marketing money more effectively.

This was a great start. But these topics cover a lot of territory and the training centre wisely wanted to do further research to hone the new offerings. To do that, they decided to offer a series of free seminars to businesses in three separate regions, teaming up with partners in each area.

The seminars will be samplings of the broader courses they are considering offering at the centre. They will gauge interest in the topics via the number who enroll for the seminars, and circulate a questionnaire to gather even more information. They will also ask for permission to continue sending information to participants.

The results should provide guidance on what courses to offer and what kind of businesses will be interested in each. Further, the seminars will kindle interest in training in those companies that participate.

Sampling is a standard strategy in package goods marketing. This project by a training centre shows how the same technique can be used to develop or improve a product and build new business.

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.

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)

Statistics show that 70% of entrepreneur-owned businesses do not survive the founder. Did you work this hard, for this long, to see your life’s work implode?

One of the most important features about good marketing process is its impact when it comes time for the owner to move out. Whether you plan to sell out or pass the business on, having a system installed that generates leads and converts them to loyal, profitable clients will significantly improve your business’s value.

Your marketing system should include a clear statement of how you are different and better; a complete sales kit filled with persuasive reasons to do business with you; a lead-generation process that includes the internet, advertising, public relations and referrals; and a process that effectively and efficiently converts leads to loyal customers.

Succession planning is more than just marketing, however. Here are seven other areas you need to consider:

1. Retirement isn’t death. Small business owners don’t plan for succession because they genuinely hate the idea of not working-no control, no work, no identity …so only about one quarter have a plan. Not planning leaves your staff and their families incredibly vulnerable.

2. Retirement isn’t just deciding not to go into the office anymore. It’s ensuring you have enough money to retire on from the sale of your business. Will your business even carry on or will you sell it? Who’s going to manage the business? How will ownership be transferred?

3. The biggest business “killers” are taxes and family discord. So succession planning is about management, ownership and taxes. Will an owner manage the business or not? Will all owners have the same number of shares? How will you reorganize the company to reduce your taxes?

4. Outsource. If you’ve been successful, you already depend on a network of help to manage your financial, tax, and legal; maybe even marketing, distribution and HR issues. Small business owners are typically too emotionally involved to make good succession plans, so let someone else you trust do it for you.

5. Train and mentor your successor(s). Okay we know you hate this one-who has the time? But how can you expect your business to continue to thrive without you if you don’t train? And remember, you’ll be throwing away your life’s work if you don’t.

6. Start business succession planning early. Okay we know you hate this idea too. But five years in advance is good. Ten years in advance is better. Many business advisors tell budding entrepreneurs to build an exit strategy right into their business plan.

7. Read. You owe it to yourself, your family, your employees and your suppliers to know the issues that will affect them once you’ve left.

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.

We are big fans of “growing loyalty” among ideal clients over pretty much any other business building tactic - it’s the lowest cost sales activity you will ever engage in, since you are already doing business with them, you already know what they want and need, and you can easily find out if they are being wooed by someone else. How easy is that?

And yet… we have hundreds of examples of business owners who not only don’t take advantage of this fantastic opportunity, they positively destroy it. See if you recognize yourself in these stories:

A client who spends $100 a month in your hair salon calls to make an appointment only to find her favourite stylist has left. Did you keep a database of all the clients who came to the salon which allowed you to contact them, tell them the news and offer them an incentive to remain a loyal client? If not, you lose $1200 a year.

A customer who has been leasing his upscale cars from you for years needs some emergency service. Your service centre is booked up so you tell him you’re just too busy. The customer not only takes the car somewhere else for service, he never comes back. Did you check to see how much that customer’s business was worth and find a way to accommodate him? If not, you lose a lifetime value of $500,000.

A customer buys over a thousand dollars in clothing and accessories from you. He is particular but happy to spend to get the quality he wants. He leaves the store and never hears from you again. Did you add him to your database with a checklist of his preferences so you could contact him when specials were available? If the answer is no, you lose the $10,000 he would have spent with you over the next five years.

What would it take not only to keep those customers, but “grow” their business by 25% without spending a cent you wouldn’t have spent anyway?

The first step is a database of every single customer who does business with you. If you can, link it to your point of sales system, so you know how much they spend, on what, and when. At least, set up a spreadsheet with columns as follows: first name, last name, street, town, postal code, phone, email, and a column you can put an X in for the kinds of products and services they buy. Since your computer already comes loaded with Excel, that’s free.

The second step is to sign up for an automated email service (we like www.ConstantContact.com). Sending to up to 500 customers, more than you will ever need, will cost you about $20 a month - almost free. And the first 60 days are completely, 100% free.

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.

In this article we’re sharing what we call “ideas to steal”. They are all real-life ideas from successful businesses - action steps you can pick up and run with right away, without having to research, test or otherwise delay implementing. And, you don’t need to spend money to do them.

Pick three that you can sink your teeth into, and don’t hesitate to contact us if you want more information or help implementing them - these days we all have to work together. .

• Bill faster. Your receivables can count for 40 - 50% of your actual assets. Don’t batch invoice: bill as soon as you can. (See The 10 Most Dangerous Accounts Receivable Pitfalls at: www.sterlingservices.ca).
• Simplify your business. Weed out the unprofitable and the hard-to-sell.
• Simplify your marketing message. Read Made To Stick by Chip and Dan Heath. (www.madetostick.com)
• Get your business and your web site listed in relevant directories. To find directories, Google the name of your town plus “directories url” (e.g. “cobourg directories url”).
• Learn to delegate. Figure out what you do that turns dollars. Then delegate the rest.
• Encourage employees to explore more efficient approaches to their tasks instead of relying on their standard way of doing things.
• Don’t forget suppliers. They might not be on your payroll, but they are more apt to do a few things for you at no charge because you really take care of them.
• Work faster. If you can condense three four-month jobs into three three-month jobs, you can do one more job in the year.
• Reward your team for meeting budgets and time lines. A 5 bonus is cheaper than a 20 increase in costs.
• Cut overhead by automating most of the non-producing items like accounting, customer care, voice mail, sales reporting, ordering and record keeping.
• Make sure you’ve clearly outlined project scope, and don’t be afraid to charge your customer for changes.
• Offer to be a spokesperson on your specialty when your local media need an expert opinion. Send them a relevant press release every month.
• Give something valuable away on your web site; at your front counter; when you send out your invoices; when you deliver goods. This should be free to you, but valuable to the recipient, for example, coupons or a “How To”.
• Highlight offers, features, promotions and news in your email footers, invoices and letter signatures.
• Start accounts with Twitter.com, Facebook.com and LinkedIn.com and post articles. (Get a good overview: here).
• Go where your audience is on the web. If your potential audience hangs out on forums, then post to those forums. Become a trusted advisor.
• Get your supporters to refer you. I’m going to upload another whole article to help you learn more about how referrals can build business.

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?

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.

Here is another of the ideas participants find most helpful in my Schulich School of Executive Education course Advanced Account Management and High-Yield Selling.

• How Executives Make Decisions
  The heuristics senior managers use to decide what to do under pressure

Many of you will already know Dr. Tom Sant, founder of The Sant Corporation. Tom was named one of the Top Ten Sales Trainers in the World in 2005 by Selling Power magazine, and was named one of the first Fellows of the Association of Proposal Management Professionals in recognition of his lifetime contributions to the profession.

Check out the Sant website for super podcasts and white papers that will focus, or refocus, your interactions with high-potential clients and prospects.

I found Dr. Sant’s work, along with that of Dr. Janet Barnard, particularly helpful when it comes to effective interactions with senior executives.¹

Let’s face it, talking to a C-Suite decision-maker when you’re not one yourself can be pretty intimidating. Especially when your client or prospect doesn’t let you get past slide two of your carefully-prepared presentation.

Over and over again, participants in our courses ask us to give them the magic formula for encouraging executive audiences to keep quiet!

At the same time, senior executives who ask us to help their staff with presentation effectiveness tell us these presentations make them nuts - they are boring, irrelevant and tedious.

Why are we doing this to each other? Because we don’t understand what senior executives want from presentations, or how they make decisions.

Failing accurate insights, we fall back on the thing we know best: talking about ourselves.

Here are some quick tips that will make your next senior executive meeting powerful and positive:

• As a subject-matter expert, executives expect you to act like a peer to them, not an employee or supplicant.
  
• More than anything they need you to provide a business case for your proposal. Someone else can take care of the details.
  
• Consider how your proposal impacts their firm’s ability to compete -quickmba.com has an overview of Harvard guru Michael Porter’s classic Five Competitive Forces you can use to your advantage.
  
• Understand how your audience makes decisions - and stop being surprised when decisions seem fast, not based on your brilliant argument or the available evidence.

Decisions that look impulsive are actually based on one of a few decision heuristics (ways they have learned work for them in the past)²:

People’s decision-making tends to come in two flavours: satisficing and "fast and frugal".

• Satisficing: decide what you need, then pick the first acceptable solution. Don’t even look for alternatives.
• Fast and Frugal: derived from experience. Collect all the data from past experience, and derive which offer the best decision with the fewest inputs. Often this ends up being one of:
  
  • Take the Best" assuming we know "the best" is from experience.
    
  • Pick the one we recognize.
    
  • Do what we did last time.

So What?
So, if you know how the decision is likely to be made, build your pitch around it.

If your audience includes “satisficers”:

• Probe for needs
• Stress speed
• Stress completeness of solution compared to needs

If you are in “Fast and Frugal” land:

• Probe: what factors they will use in making a choice? How have they made similar choices in the past?
• Supply good arguments for certain criteria
• Provide data, test scenarios and results
• Provide proof that you are the best: testimonials, reference stories
• Provide proof that recognized others recognize you

Here is another of the ideas participants find most helpful in my Schulich School of Executive Education course Advanced Account Management and High-Yield Selling.

• The Chunk Outline
  How to decide what to say in any situation even with 5 minutes or less to prepare

You’ve all been there. The Big Client calls and wants an update right now, or you’re in a meeting and the accountant needs a status report you hadn’t counted on giving.

How do you pull your thoughts together so you sound polished, even though you are frantically rummaging through the drawers of your mind searching for the missing sock of last month’s numbers?

Our experience is that sounding prepared has less to do with content than it does with how your comments are structured.

In fact, when we test this in seminars with small business leaders, they always rate well-structured presentations, even those with weaker content, as more satisfying than those where the presenter rambles around tossing out stray facts as they occur to him.

Here’s the process.

Let’s assume you are in a meeting and someone asks you to expound on a topic you know reasonably well, but have not prepared. Ask for a minute to gather your thoughts (really! Junior people are afraid to appear unprepared. Senior people know they are, and take the time to get it right.)

1. You need an agenda of no more than 3 points. Always advance-organize listeners with an agenda, even if you are only speaking for 5 minutes. Never have an agenda with more than 3 items. We like the “What, So What, Now What” approach. It sounds like this:
   
   
   • “I’ll cover where we are today, the implications and then the action plan”
     
   • “I’ll answer your question by reminding you of the situation and how we see its impact, and then I’ll share where we’re going with it.”
     
   • “Well we all know what’s going on, so let me quickly summarize our understanding and what we’ve learned, before I go over the action plan.”
     
   • You could use another organizing principle if it works better for you of course: national situation, local situation, next steps; past, present, where we go from here; what A said, what B said, what C said…in any case, the trick is to make the audience feel comfortable that you have a handle on the content so they can relax and listen.
     
     
2. For each agenda point, touch on no more than 3 to 5 key facts in the same order as the agenda. Do not give in to the desire to teach everyone the minutiae of the situation. They are not interested, and it will take too long.
3. Summarize each agenda point. Say, “So, the key messages are …” in the same order as the agenda.
4. Close by clearly recommending a course of action, and indicating what you are prepared to do to make it successful. Say, “As a result, I am recommending…and I am prepared to…if you will…”

The Chunk Outline Summarized



Next time I’ll close this system with How Executives Make Decisions, the 6 heuristics senior managers use to decide what to do under pressure.

We’ve been sharing the ideas participants find most helpful in my Schulich School of Executive Education course Advanced Account Management and High-Yield Selling

Here is another winner:

• Curiosity
  The secret weapon to create meaningful and relevant client relationships

Successful business owners are addicted to two really powerful hallucinogens: their own stuff, and being right. Now I confess to being addicted to both of these in the past, so I know what I’m talking about.

Here’s how it works: we spend hours working up a sales proposal, bolstered by our own expertise, facts, research and opinions from other smart people.

Maybe we spend more hours writing a document or the ubiquitous Death by PowerPoint presentation, with graphs, and exhibits. Perhaps two or three other people in our organization look at our work, give us their received wisdom, and we rewrite it maybe two-three times, more if it’s for a big contract.

Then we present it.

So let’s suppose someone in the audience at your presentation disagrees with you. Do we engage in a thoughtful exchange of views? Heck no! We argue the point with the customer, in effect telling him or her how wrong they are, and how right we are, because we have so much invested in our proposal we can’t give up being right.

When was the last time you spent a lot of money with someone who told you how wrong you were about your own business?

I’m with an old boss of mine who said, “Let’s be wrong all the way to the bank.”

Give up being right, and start focusing on winning the order. Here’s how: be curious! Don’t tell, ask. People do business with people they know, like and trust - and who better than someone who’s so interested in your point of view he or she gets you talking about it?

Here are some questions people have found provocative, enlightening, and winning:

Open-ended probes that earn you the right to probe further

• General Probes:
  • Run me through your thinking on this
  • How did we get to these assumptions?
  • Tell me more about how you (moved from these facts to your conclusions)
  • When you said... did you mean...?

• Issue Probes:
  • What's the most significant issue you currently face?
  • What would you like to accomplish with this (program, idea, information)?
  • To what extent is (growth, budget, deadlines, staffing) important?
  • What other challenges do you foresee?

• Implication Probes:
  • How do you calculate (how much money being late is costing you)?
  • How does (system downtime) affect (your customers)?
  • What would happen if (worst case scenario)?

Closed ended probes that demonstrate your competence
Asking intelligent and relevant questions tells clients you offer a higher level of competence, credibility and value. Prove you are an expert the customer can trust by asking technically demanding questions.

• If you compare the top 20% of your revenue and profit to the bottom 20%:
  • What accounts for the top 20%? Your bottom 20%?
  • How do your distribution and associated costs compare?
  • How does the buyer for the top 20% differ from the buyer from the bottom 20%?
• Describe your cost structure for each segment

You’ve find good reading on this subject in Secrets of Question Based Selling by Thomas A. Freese.

Last time, I started to tell you about the ideas participants find most helpful in my Schulich School of Executive Education course, Advanced Account Management and High-Yield Selling.

Now let’s take a look at:

• Gap Analysis
  How to reduce stress, improve client relationships and protect your margins.

Gaps occur between what needs to be done and what is being done - that's not new news! You can reduce stress, improve productivity and manage profit by focusing on the most important gaps - if you can accurately assess what the gaps are.

You can create practical profiles of recurring audiences, tailor every client interaction to individual needs and do the right thing - and it's easy! Here are the questions you need to answer to identify gaps.

1. Present Performance
   What promises has this customer received from me in the past 12 months? What have I delivered? What measurable results would the customer agree have been achieved?

2. Present Expectations
   What has this customer asked for? What conditions of satisfaction did the customer negotiate and accept? (e.g. delivery dates, costs, service, support, ongoing contact…) What things do they expect but not specifically discussed? Why?

3. Present Perceptions
   What conditions of satisfaction would the customer say have been met? What conditions of satisfaction would the customer say have not been met?

4. Customer Concerns
   What strategic business concerns do you know the customer holds? What strategic business concerns do you guess he/she holds?

5. Future Outcomes
   What vision of the future has this customer described? How is it different from his/her Present Expectations?

6. Satisfaction
   What complaints &/or recognition has the customer expressed? (Use actual customer language.) To what categories do they belong? (Process, Service, Cost, ROI)

7. Value
   Note the actions you’ve actually taken on the customer’s behalf, compared to the results actually achieved, and the customer’s perception of their value.

8. Doing the Right Thing
   Describe the customer’s perception of where improvement is needed in the type of service you provide.

9. Doing Things Right
   Describe the customer’s perception of where improvement is needed in the way you provide the service. To what extent would the customer say there was sufficient sharing on “how to get things done” between him/her and you? Why?

10. Process
    What data do need, but do not have, to accurately reflect your customer’s concerns and expectations?

11. Change
    What actions can you take to overcome gaps, but have not taken? What has stopped you from taking these actions?

    Now you can decide what Gaps you have with your customer. Good news! There are only six major Gaps: Satisfaction, Value, Do Things Right, Do the Right Thing, Process and Change.

    Be careful, though. It's easy - and misleading - to dump everything in the "Satisfaction Gap" pot. You'll need a thoughtful discussion with your colleagues, staff and managers on where to focus your efforts.

Last time, I started to tell you about the ideas participants find most helpful in my Schulich School of Executive Education course Advanced Account Management and High-Yield Selling

We’ve reviewed The Atom of Work; now let’s take a look at:

• Clientship
  The four attributes that must be present for high-margin, loyal client relationships.

The four non-negotiable secrets for high-margin, loyal clients
Years ago, I was involved in a project that hoped to solve problems facing retail bankers: how to improve customer loyalty, and, not incidentally, how to keep bankers from burning out as they ran between being super sales people, and advisers in the incredibly stressful world of complex financial decision-making.

A core issue was defining the relationship bankers had with very profitable, loyal clients.

How come these customers thought of themselves as the clients of a professional and happily took their advice with no questions asked, while others made decisions based on price and cost the bank a ton of dough?

How could the relationship be more like the one we have with our dentist?

When the dentist recommends cleaning, filling or even root canal work, we might blanch at the cost, and we might negotiate it if we don't have insurance - but we still buy with no questions asked. And we don't tell the dentist what to do as she works, or change the specs on the job half way through or decide at the end of the project we're not going to pay, or even switch dentists in spite of the discomfort of having the work done.

There seem to be four key attributes, and I'll bet they are familiar to you from working with the clients you like best.

Trust: Your client trusts that you will keep the promises you make, and act ethically. You trust that your client will do the same.

Superior Knowledge: You have the requisite expertise in your discipline or business to perform the work. Your clients accept that you know most about the product or service, and feel no need to challenge that knowledge. You accept that your client knows most about his or her needs, and feel free to probe for understanding.

Process Credibility: The fit between the results you promise, and the means you use to achieve the result makes sense to your client. The fit between your clients' actual needs, and what they ask you to do, makes sense to you.

Single Source Accountability: When something goes wrong or there is a problem, your client holds you accountable - no questions asked, no excuses offered. When your client sees fit to inquire about the work, he speaks to you, not a "Stand in". If there is a problem in how or when you get paid for your work, you hold your client accountable under the same terms.

I'll leave this post with a couple of thoughts for you:

Do you have any relationships like this right now?

What would you have to do differently to create a “Clientship” relationship with more of your customers?

I teach a seminar at York University’s Schulich School of Executive Education called Advanced Account Management and High-Yield Selling . There seem to be three kinds of people in the course: those who love new concepts, or frames of reference (i.e. saying the same thing in a different way, so you can see new approaches to a problem); those that love the analytical tools; and those who find the very structured approach to tasks a huge time saver.

I thought I'd take some time over the next few articles to share the ideas participants find most helpful. Thanks as always to my pal Al Offstein, who shares so much of his wisdom with me.

1. The Atom of Work
   How to guarantee you will get rave reviews, and maintain high margins for every product or service you provide a client.

2. Clientship
   The four attributes that must be present for high-margin, loyal client relationships,

3. Gap Analysis
   There are only 6 gaps you have to identify and narrow between you and your client

4. Curiosity
   The secret weapon to create meaningful and relevant client relationships

5. The Chunk Outline
   How to decide what to say in any situation even with 5 minutes or less to prepare

6. How Executives Make Decisions
   Understand the 6 heuristics senior managers use to decide what to do under pressure

The Atom of Work
How to guarantee you will get rave reviews, and maintain high margins for every product or service you provide a client.

Think of every project or interaction as a conversation between 2 players - the provider, and the client. Clients can be colleagues, direct reports or customers: anyone for whom you as the provider perform a service or deliver a product.

Before you can start work, there has to be an overlap between what's important to the client, and what's important to you. If you sell trucks, and the client doesn't need to transport goods, chances are you won't do work together. Or if you are an IT guru, and the client is my 86-year old mother, working together is possible, but unlikely.

It's interesting to think of work, or projects, or interactions - however you want to call it - unfolding in 4 steps centered on what's important to the 2 main players.

The steps seem always to occur in the same order:

1. Preparation: what are we talking about here? Are we on the same page? Do we have the same expectations?
2. Negotiation: what do you and the client mutually agree Value looks like? How will the client assess the end product or service you are providing? (note: if it's price only you're often better off to run away and not play!) Do you agree on the value of financial return, environmental impact, and other ways your work might be judged?
3. Performance: this is the stage when you deliver what you have negotiated. A word of warning: don't make a commitment to deliver something you haven't negotiated! And don't forget to go back and renegotiate as conditions change during the project's life.
4. Assessment: the client assesses how well you delivered against expectations. If you are really good at negotiation, you will always get rave reviews, because you will always deliver exactly the Value your client agreed

You don't get bad reviews for your work because you are incompetent.
Most often, you've left out a step: your basic premise for the project doesn't match your client's; you don't know how the client will judge your work, or you guess and you guess wrong; you don't renegotiate what will make you client satisfied with the work as conditions change. As a result the process or working together becomes so painful it's not worth whatever the final deliverable is.

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.

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

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.

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