Perception is the reality-people buy based on differences They Perceive. It’s the differences that potential customers perceive that make them choose one business over another. And those differences make the customer feel more confident about their final decision as well. Unique Core Differentiators (UCDs) clearly articulate what makes your business different. They are the special [...]

The best sales people are ‘canned’. They know better than to wing it through a prospect meeting. They have a systemized sales process to work with. And the most effective system is relationship selling – selling based on getting to know a customer’s real needs and fitting your product to them. Relationship selling doesn’t involve [...]

Your promotions plan will keep you focused on marketing. It’s difficult to come up with marketing ideas when you are busy solving short-term business problems. So follow good time-management principles and set time aside for long-term planning. Take a global and strategic look at your business, gather all your marketing options and rough out a [...]

Your customers are generally only interested in product features that translate into benefits. So, whether you’re developing a new product or exploring a way to repackage an old one, it is important to think clearly about the benefits you provide. Product features are not important in themselves. Great as a product may be, customers won’t [...]

Have you ever been presented with that golden opportunity – a chance meeting with a potential big customer? Suddenly you scored one short window of opportunity to get this person interested in your products or services. And you blew it! You need to develop an ‘elevator speech’! An ‘elevator speech’ is a concise, carefully planned, [...]

Guarantees, and especially those that are in some way even better than ‘money back’, are a proven way to attract prospects. But how to develop such a guarantee? The best thinking on the issue of developing guarantees now involves using the concept of ‘risk reversal’.   There is no better way to change the perceived [...]

The most successful businesses are ones that recognize the value of their customer base and exploit that value most effectively. All too often businesses, especially small businesses, spend most of their sales and marketing time and money trying to find new customers, not realizing the value of the ones they already have. It’s important to [...]

The following is a letter I sent to  a prospect after our first meeting It was good to meet you and learn about your business. I understand the challenges you are facing and will try to be part of the solution. It is my experience that business challenges never have a single source and that [...]

A successful emerging growth business is likely to display many of the following characteristics: Sensibly financed (with prudent mix of equity and debt) Strong cash position (with access to follow-on or contingency funds) Offers above-average profitability (in terms of return on capital invested) Aims for rapid growth in revenues (with profits lagging but in prospect) [...]

This post too is adapted from RANONE As you are no doubt only too well aware, some customers buy only once and disappear forever. You could say that their lifetime as a customer with you was just that one transaction. So their lifetime value to you was just the profit on that one transaction. But [...]