When I was 19 I was a street musician for a year. I hitchhiked across North America, surviving off the kindness of strangers. (I tell this story in my book, Marketing Yourself. I'll tell you a bit more about how this story relates to marketing in this article.) I would roll into a new [...]
A sales process is just moving people through a pipeline. There's a typical progress that people go through, on the journey from stranger to customer. It might start with filling out a form on your website, or giving you a call, or requesting a quote, or walking through your door. Unless you sell on [...]
There are 4 steps in the Marketing Cycle: Know Like Trust Buy Giving a free consultation builds trust, and also gives you valuable intelligence that can help you make the sale. You can position your solution as the way they can achieve the outcome they want, by discovering the details of what they want [...]
Fix Your Lead Generation With a Simple Sales Funnel To make pavlova, a delicate seasonal dessert in New Zealand, you need eight ingredients: eggs, sugar, vanilla extract, white vinegar, cornflour, cream, strawberries, and kiwis. If I gave you a shopping list, you could buy everything that goes into the dish. But you would not know [...]
Sell to small groups of your most qualified prospects Every time a coin landed in my guitar case, I smiled and sang, ‘Do you have a couch for me? I’m looking for a couch for free.’ In 1997 I lived as a street musician for a year. I hitchhiked across North America and survived off [...]
It is much easier to find an existing audience than to carve a new one out of the crowd. Your future customers are already congregating somewhere. Go there and be valuable, make relationships, and gain customers. Photo by WoodysPhotos on iStock I think of marketing myself like I am a vagabond peddler. I have a [...]
A Lead Magnet is a short, digestible, nicely designed example of your work. The right kind of Lead Magnet will build you an email list of potential customers who all face the same problem. If you design your Lead Magnet to solve a small problem well, you can: demonstrate your expertise, qualify your leads, [...]