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The aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous. ~ Peter Drucker Can you imagine what your business would look like if marketing worked in a way to keep a continuous pipeline of business flowing? It would indeed make selling superfluous. Your products or services would be bought not sold. This
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Whether it comes to selling a new customer, persuading a boss, or doing a deal, negotiation is involved to drive a meeting of the minds towards agreement. Many books have been written on this topic. Over the years with both the empirical experience in the marketplace and numerous books I
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Many of us are playing out a script as buyers. We have our guard up and our default reaction to an offer is to decline or say, "No," before a seller can even explain what they do. Just try observing the salespeople peddling their wares at the mall
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Mastery This was a comment about Henry Ford's brilliance in putting together all the pieces to make Ford work. Everything from the mechanical design to the business structure, relationships and assembly line needed to be brought together for building early automobiles. It is a truly great American story
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I am often asked about how I arrived at what I do today with regards to strategy, process and consulting. It's typically a question for those that I interact with to put the pieces together in their mind on how I arrived. Not that I have arrived, but
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The older I get the more I am careful with dogmatisms. Insisting the world should work a certain way can create disillusionment when it is not so. One of the great aspects of strong leaders is their vision of how things should be but being able to connect with people
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Basecamp projects are a powerful way to work with your customers and facilitate collaboration with your team, regardless of where they are located in the world. However, one of the points of friction when working in the project business (And we are all in the project business) is the setup
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With Thanksgiving coming up, we are mindful of the many blessings and cool things that make it possible to do great work. The world is continuing to change rapidly and taking pause for our place in it as well as the opportunities for all of us is good. Here are
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Waiting on perfect can be costly. If you take forever trying to get a deal done to work on the last parts of minutiae, the deal can walk. If you trade time for a perfect presentation of a website, the enthusiasm from the customer can be much lower than the
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The choice of who to work with when there are myriad options for a buyer can be daunting. Everyone can look bland and similar especially when the marketing messages are about features, benefits and great service, none of which is unique compared to your competition. When everything looks the same,
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We were lied to by well-meaning people. Here are some of the lies: "Live a balanced life." "Don't work too hard. You might burn out." "Too much of one thing is not good." Think about the wildly successful people you have admired
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I was watching a dialogue between entrepreneurs and a technician last night. They were speaking two entirely different languages. The entrepreneurs wanted to drive towards a deal and value. The technician wanted control and precision in the details. I cringed watching the exchange. Michael Gerber's E-Myth is a