Referrals and face-to-face meetings are the preferred tactics for marketing professional services. Most professionals will tell me that the "other marketing stuff" doesn't work, but if they can get in front of the right person, the usually close the...
Here are some of the most common mistakes I see when it comes to marketing a professional service practice. Skipping strategy and charging straight ahead to tactics – One of the fastest ways to lose money and become frustrated with marketing is to fall into the...
This post is as much of a reminder to myself as anyone else. I’m preparing to wrap up a series of workshops on using social media for small business and I’m struck by how much time we have spent discussing these new tools for talking and very little time talking about...
Today, I have guest post from Ben Johnson of Logoinn, a UK based company that provides design services to small and start-up businesses around the world. What three mistakes in logo design can destroy your business identity? While establishing a startup, one of...
Most of us have set revenue goals for the coming year. But do you have a system in place to keep track of the actions you take to reach those goals and the results of those actions? There are many reasons to track your activities and the results, but I think the...
Today I want to talk a little about three other items from Tim Berry’s 10 Business Fundamentals post: #2 Strategy if Focus #4 The more priorities in a plan, the less likelihood of implementing that plan. #10 Everything you do in a business rules out something else...
As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I am re-launching The Biz Academy, my service for the True Small Business owner – typically owners with 1-5 employees. I’ll be sharing more details of the program shortly (you can read about the details of The Biz Academy here),...
RainToday has a nice set of tips for sales professionals who use LinkedIn. Here are a few of my favorites from their list: If your profile isn't complete, I might not trust who you are when you reach out to me - regular readers here are familiar with building...
When professionals strike out on their own, they seem to face their biggest challenges in the areas of sales and marketing. I know that sales has been a difficult area for me. The skills and attributes that make us good at technical and consulting work are not the...
Does this ever happen to you? I receive 3 or 4 e-mail “offers” a week that make me think “why in the world are you sending this to me?”. These messages are what I call semi-personalized (they use my name and maybe my business name) but I don’t know who they are. It’s...