Are you missing out on profit in your business?

Do you have parts of your business that you want to promote or automate that are languishing?

Newbie or experienced entrepreneur, it’s easy to get stuck in 2nd gear and have no idea how to get out.

You glance down the track a final time and head back to your mark. It’s a perfect morning. You can hear the crowd eagerly waiting for the race to begin. You do a brief stretch to make sure your calves and hamstrings haven’t tightened up and then settle in behind your mark. To your left and right, your competitors are crouched beside you. Their eyes are fixed forward, their faces taut with concentration

They’re ready. Are you?

A double or single what? We’re talking about whether you have your new list members double opt-in or not bother with that ‘extra’ step.

You may be asking what the heck is an opt-in anyway, never mind the difference between a single or a double… I’ll bet more of you know the difference between a single or double glass of fine single malt scotch. So, let me define what I mean.

If you’re in business, you’re in the marketing business. And you’ve been handed a gift worth $8.4 B (that’s billion!). In fact, this is a gift that repeats annually and has increased in value by 60% in the past 10 years. Run all the way to your bank with it!

Halloween is big business and there’s no reason you can’t cash in on some of it. Think about your audience and how to creatively engage them using Halloween to promote your business, your products, your services, your brand.

Happy New Year! I know I’m 4 months early but I just had to share this killer personal practice with you so you can use Q4 to get a powerful jumpstart on 2018.

If you’re not already one of the elite business leaders in the world, you can borrow their best personal practice that got them where they are and keeps them there.

There are people whose sole focus is uncovering and watching important trends in business and I, for one, am grateful for their persistence.

In an excellent article I recently read by Ian Altman on Forbes, he outlines 10 trends that will drive success in 2017. Realistically, not all of them will be critical to your business or mine but they are worth looking at and considering what the impact might be on your business and business in general.

Congratulations, you sold another product! Now you just have to confirm the order with the buyer, find a box, pull the product off the shelf and add it to the box with the correct paperwork and packing material, print the address label and get it to the post office for shipping.

All done? Hmm, what about their access to the membership site and the online part of the product or bonuses? Then what about support followup or education on how to use your product?

Recently a small business owner came to us with a lead conversion problem. She gets a solid stream of warm leads opting in for her lead magnet (free trial) but very few convert to her paid product. In fact, a minority of them actually engage with the trial. Sound familiar?

She has followup failure. Not that she doesn’t followup, she does, but clearly what she’s doing for followup is not working.

2017 is but a memory. As business owners and entrepreneurs, we are all in for 2018!

Understanding business trends and, better still, knowing which ones will have the most important impact on your business is critical. Sometimes it’s luck, sometimes it’s brilliance.

You bet they are. It’s the holiday season, after all.

Local and online retailers have been very busy boosting buying morale this season and, as a small business owner or entrepreneur, you can ride their coattails.

Take a few minutes to think about what you offer that your clients/customers/patients or prospects would ‘click to buy’ or take a trip to your location to purchase.

When you get a new lead, how many times do you touch them before you give up? By touch I mean contact, not physical touching obviously… but if you can actually meet them and shake their hand all the better, although that is frequently not an option.

Or worse, do you get a new lead and immediately hard sell them… bad, very bad.

When our son calls, his daughter almost always wants to get on the phone, saying “Daddy, I want to see Grandmom and Granddad!” (make the call a FaceTime call) and once we are visible, odds are she will say “Can you read me a story?” She usually asks Kerry, I guess her storytelling is better than mine, at least in our granddaughter’s eyes.

What’s the point, other than a cute antidote about Eva? The point is that we identify with stories from the time we are very young… we’ve been reading stories to Eva since she was just a few months old. We relate to stories, we learn from stories, we start to better understand our world through stories. Stories help us see things that cold hard facts would not allow us to see.

I think that you know by now we are big, big into automating everything but the kitchen sink (hey, maybe we can automate that too… hmmm). Anyway, one thing that you can easily automate is sending out holiday cards, for any holiday or occasion you want.

One of our clients is a staunch supporter of marketing automation. They manage all their lead acquisition, followup, and client nurture using email automation. And they are consistent and successful with it. That’s all they need, right?

Wrong.

With the lack of any other frame of reference, your prospects will default to a price comparison. An apples to apples comparison. Once they say something like, “The XYZ company will do the same thing for $Y dollars less,” you have virtually lost the sale, because the talk is all about price. When you tell them all the reasons (and they may be good ones) why your pricing is as good if not a better deal, you sound to them like you are making excuses to try to recover the sale. It’s over!