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Digg it UP - Small Business Marketing Mistakes To Avoid
The sales process includes many activities such as prospecting, making appointments, and closing. But one thing that you do each and every time in the sales process is you make a sales presentation. A sales presentation could be a sales pitch to one person, a presentation to a group of people, or a speech to an entire audience in an auditorium. Whichever it is, the end goal is always the same – to sell your products or services.Sales presentations are just as important as any other step in the sales process. With that in mind, here are some free tips to help you persuade, secrets to great sales presentations: Don’t use scripts - Don’t try to memorize what you will say. This doesn’t seem natural. It makes it seem like you don’t believe what you are selling. If you truly believe in your product, you’ll have more than enough things to talk about and people will be able to see that in you. Be informative - Know everything there is to know about your products or services. Sales presentations are meant to i
If you never ask your clients what they value, want and need from a business like yours then you're making a huge mistake. Use customer surveys, focus groups, and stay up on industry news all you can.
4. Not
The following describes a very successful businessman.Guess who . . .Sends 3500 birthday cards every year.Gets 250 e-mails daily and personally responds to 75% of them.Uses a Treo to stay organized.Gets to the office at 6:30 AM every day.Sends 25 handwritten thank you notes every day.Puts a 45 minute limit on all meetings.Tracks and charts how he spends his time every month.Visits at least 20 stores every week.You may not be able to do all these things, like Jim Donald, CEO and president, of Starbucks does.I bet you could do a few.You may be tempted to think, "Well, I could do all that stuff if I were a CEO of a large company."You may want to consider that doing this stuff throughout his career helped him land the big job.He's disciplined, focused, energetic, and knows how to get results.Well - he's only human and so are you.Start doing these things:=> Get up earlier every morning.=> Save the morning paper until the ev
One of the things that I've found is that most small businesses can do much better if they just start avoiding some common marketing blunders.
The good news is that if you're willing to critically evaluate whether you make each of these mistakes, you can find immediate room for improvement.
Here are some marketing mistakes to look for and avoid this year and beyond:
1. Not clarifying your purpose and vision.
2. Not having a marketing and sales system. You have a system for most of your major business functions - billing, accounting, human resources, etc. The one function that usually goes without a system is marketing and sales.
Without a marketing and sales system you'll never grow your business to its full potential. A marketing system will help you break your marketing down into a series of connected small steps to generate more leads consistently and convert them into clients.
3. Never really determining your customers' and prospects' needs. So many small business owners are stubbornly offering their clients and prospect what they want to do.
If you never ask your clients what they value, want and need from a business like yours then you're making a huge mistake. Use customer surveys, focus groups, and stay up on industry news all you can.
4. Not c
Branding is ‘the’ buzzword of the 21st Century. It is the consumer’s bible by which we live by to distinguish what is ‘right’ about certain products and services and what is ‘wrong’. Branding is there to create a connection with our inner selves, and just as we as humans are infinitely varied and different, so too are the brands that we are exposed to. Yet what if you turned your back on brands, or at least say you have. If a brand is a corporate identity, are you not in effect turning your back on identifying yourself to the general public? With the debut opening of the first Muji store in the New York Time Building at the end of the year I think it’s a fitting time to introduce the American public to the consumer antithesis, the ‘no brand’ brand.A lady, sitting next to Raymond Loewy (many call him the father of Industrial Design) at dinner, struck up a conversation.
‘Why’, she asked ‘did you put two Xs in Exxon?’
‘Why ask?’ he asked
‘Because’, she said, ‘I couldn’t help noticing?’
‘Well’, he responded, ‘that’s the
The good news is that if you're willing to critically evaluate whether you make each of these mistakes, you can find immediate room for improvement.
Here are some marketing mistakes to look for and avoid this year and beyond:
1. Not clarifying your purpose and vision.
2. Not having a marketing and sales system. You have a system for most of your major business functions - billing, accounting, human resources, etc. The one function that usually goes without a system is marketing and sales.
Without a marketing and sales system you'll never grow your business to its full potential. A marketing system will help you break your marketing down into a series of connected small steps to generate more leads consistently and convert them into clients.
3. Never really determining your customers' and prospects' needs. So many small business owners are stubbornly offering their clients and prospect what they want to do.
If you never ask your clients what they value, want and need from a business like yours then you're making a huge mistake. Use customer surveys, focus groups, and stay up on industry news all you can.
4. Not
Are you one of those bosses that people just love to hate? Maybe successful, maybe very intelligent, maybe organized and moving forward but just can't get along with people. Communication and other people skills are as important to the success of your business as your talent, knowledge and entrepreneurial drive. After all, you cannot do it all by yourself and you need good people.I remember being a very arrogant and egotistical program director back in the mid 1970's when my boss called me into the office and flat out told me "Mike, you got talent and drive but you need to learn some diplomacy". I'll never forget that meeting. This mentor taught me things like no matter how great my idea was it was probably going nowhere if I couldn't convince, persuade or lead people to buy into it. I learned that very few people want to negotiate with a bull-head. And if they do because they must then they will resent it for a long long time. Some will even look for the opportunity for payback. I relearned things that were taught to me in elementary
2. Not having a marketing and sales system. You have a system for most of your major business functions - billing, accounting, human resources, etc. The one function that usually goes without a system is marketing and sales.
Without a marketing and sales system you'll never grow your business to its full potential. A marketing system will help you break your marketing down into a series of connected small steps to generate more leads consistently and convert them into clients.
3. Never really determining your customers' and prospects' needs. So many small business owners are stubbornly offering their clients and prospect what they want to do.
If you never ask your clients what they value, want and need from a business like yours then you're making a huge mistake. Use customer surveys, focus groups, and stay up on industry news all you can.
4. Not
With all the inexpensive popup trade show displays on the market today, particularly on the internet, suggesting spending a little more money for a larger, heavier display may sound counter -productive. The following 5 reasons will help explain why that is not so:1) Expandability - Because most portable display truss is built in a modular fashion using easy to connect parts the display you design initially may be changed for future use. You can start with a 10' display and at a point in future (when you've discovered trade show marketing works) that very same 10' display's modular parts can be used in a new 20x20 island that looks completely new. No popup display can do this. The modular nature of truss displays allows for replacement parts to be obtained, if needed. Most popup displays require the purchase of an entirely new display or major component for repair.2) Utility - Because of the materials used truss has much greater utility that traditional displays. By combining modular truss parts
3. Never really determining your customers' and prospects' needs. So many small business owners are stubbornly offering their clients and prospect what they want to do.
If you never ask your clients what they value, want and need from a business like yours then you're making a huge mistake. Use customer surveys, focus groups, and stay up on industry news all you can.
4. Not
In our industry, one of our jobs as design experts is to maneuver pitfalls that arise for our clients both experienced and inexperienced. There are four primary areas where we provide this kind of guidance to our clientele; strategy, conceptualization, layout and production. The funny thing is the most detail-oriented area, production, seems to be the one arena where many clients retain an overwhelming do-it-yourself mentality. In the next series of newsletters, I would like to explain from a fairly high level view and from professional experience what goes into production of a project; vendor selection, production costs, file prep, press checks and the outcome.Vendor Selection Thinking that all printers can produce your file properly is like saying all cars are the same. As you know, some cars ride smoothly, some bumpy, some are sleek and others just plain get you from point A to point B (most of the time) but it all falls back to the old clich? "you get what you pay for." Each printer is setup differently with different equi
If you never ask your clients what they value, want and need from a business like yours then you're making a huge mistake. Use customer surveys, focus groups, and stay up on industry news all you can.
4. Not clarifying and articulating your uniqueness throughout all your marketing. How do you stand out and make your message memorable in a crowded marketplace of "me too" alternatives to your business?
Most small businesses never communicate their uniqueness. It's not that you don't have a uniqueness that's significant for your clients, it's just that most don't ever draw it out of their business and articulate it in their marketing. Spend some time to determine how and why your business is different and special. More importantly, clarify how and why that difference benefits your clients.
5. Launching into marketing without preparing. This might seem like a somewhat obvious summary point after the first four mistakes I listed above. Have you spent the time to clarify and define your target niche, your core marketing message, your uniqueness, your packaging, your results and benefits, your risk reversal, your irresistible offers, etc?
Too often I see people that get into business and feel like they have to just start marketing without any preparation. They throw together a brochure, get some business cards, buy some yellow pages advertising, and then rush out to start networking everywhere they can. These are all
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