“The difference between successful people and very successful people is that very successful people say ‘no' to almost everything.”   ~ Warren Buffett

Saying no is hard. No one wants to wants to see that disappointed look on someone’s face or feel that sudden awkwardness that often overtakes the room when someone gets turned down. Who really wants to hurt someone else’s feelings like that? Not us. We’re can-do team players, right? What if we might need that person for something later? And there’s always that voice in the back of our head that tells us we’re missing out on a potential steal of a lifetime.

In one of our recent articles we asked whether your marketing plan was ready for Q3. With Q3 almost over, it’s time to get your Q4 plan up and running. The principles in our Q3 article hold true for Q4 too. There are several great reasons to keep on target with your quarterly plans.

If you’ve been using Infusionsoft to expand your company’s marketing reach, you already know it’s one of the leaders in the field. The Infusionsoft suite allows you to view, manage and report on your sales and marketing activity, all from the convenience of one easy-to-use interface. You can get organized and grow your sales without having to rely on multiple applications that may not always play nicely with each other. If you haven’t given Infusionsoft a try, check out this demo to see what it can do for you and your business.

When we’re looking at a sales spreadsheet, it can be easy to think of our customers as just names and numbers. It’s important to remember they’re people, each as varied and complex as we are, and our interactions with them are equally complex.

How do we keep track of all that complexity? The best companies take the time to get to know their customers’ habits and preferences to better serve them. While that’s great, it also generates a lot of data. Where does all that data end up? How can we effectively use that data to improve our relationship with our customers?

Featured Resource this week - Wicked Reports

WARNING: Half Your Marketing Is Wasted.  Do You Know Which Half?  We Do.

We automatically pull data from your ad networks. We then apply over 10,000 lines of database logic to track sales revenue to specific clicks, ads, audiences, campaigns and emails (we’re the only ones who do this!).

We then translate all this data into easy to use marketing reports so you can make data-driven decisions about your business and make more money!

Check out others who we recommend - solid vendors and products that could benefit your business today.

Featured Resource this week - PureChat

The Best-Selling Live Chat Software for Small Business

Live chat and visitor tracking software has never been easier.

Close More Saleswith simple live chat software

• Provide instant answers on your website and see visitor history.
• See who’s on your website in real-time and start a conversation.
• See chat metrics over time and track customer satisfaction.
• Record every conversation and share them with your team.

Check out others who we recommend - solid vendors and products that could benefit your business today.

Featured Resource this week - ScheduleOnce

Make more connections with an integrated scheduling platform

ScheduleOnce is a field-proven solution for powering online scheduling with your customers and prospects.

Solutions for every phase of the customer lifecycle

Check out others who we recommend - solid vendors and products that could benefit your business today.

Featured Resource this week - StockUnlimited

600,000+ Visuals for Businesses & Professionals

Affordable Stock Photos, Vector Graphics & Clipart

SUBSCRIBE TODAY AND GET AWESOME UNLIMITED DOWNLOADS!

Check out others who we recommend - solid vendors and products that could benefit your business today.

Featured Resource this week - Swyft Mobile

Swyft Technology provides small and mid-market organizations with a robust suite of inexpensive, cloud-based software solutions. Swyft clients benefit from increased sales and revenues that come from the automated efficiencies and increased user productivity provided by the Swyft CRM solution.

Be sure to tell Swyft we sent you!

Check out others who we recommend - solid vendors and products that could benefit your business today.

Featured Resource this week - XtendIn

We LOVE this! XtendIn is a Google Chrome Web Browser Extension that extends ActiveCampaign / Infusionsoft / Xero Web Application Interfaces with a variety of features. (Get a 90-Day Free Trial, then inexpensive subscription - worth every penny!)

Check out others who we recommend - solid vendors and products that could benefit your business today.

Featured Resource this week - Zacaw Website Hosting

Multiple layers of hacker protection including web firewalls and VPN insulate your company’s valuable data and reputation from cybercrime. Look no further for an extremely secure and highly scalable hosting platform that’s backed by our personal support.

Check out others who we recommend - solid vendors and products that could benefit your business today.

They say don’t judge a book by its cover. It’s a great piece of advice, but honestly… how often do we follow it? We’re busy people, surrounded by a lot of information we have to process. If something wants to get our attention, it better darn well do it fast! In other words, we totally judge a book by its cover.

Do you like perfection? Sure, who doesn’t? When it comes to writing though, there’s a tendency to want to get it perfect, and if you can’t get it perfect, then why bother at all?

The trick is that few things are perfect the first time. Ask any famous author for the first draft of their epic novel and it will almost certainly be far different than what actually gets sent to the publisher. Revision is part and parcel of the game, and often the editing is just as important as writing.

We tend to think of great promoters like the legendary promoter P.T. Barnum as special people. For all their faults, these individuals are incredible salesmen who can sell the wings off a fly. We also tend to think that because many of their businesses involved putting on a show, their marketing legerdemain isn’t necessary for our business. We’re computers programmers or accountants or cosmetologists at heart, not sales people.

Do you remember those essays you had to write in school? They might have been about George Washington crossing the Delaware, Harriet Tubman or maybe what we did for our summer vacation. We churned them out as best we could and dutifully turned them in, sometimes flexing our writing hand to keep it from cramping. Of course, we weren’t really writing them for ourselves or our classmates or our parents. No, the one thing all these essays had in common was that we were writing them for an audience of one: our teacher.