Ask any salesperson to list the most difficult obstacles for them to overcome and, inevitably, price resistance will come up. However, I don’t believe most prospects are hung up on price – they’re hung up on something else and are using price as the reason why they aren’t buying, because it’s the easiest obstacle to throw your way. Any prospect …
From a Harvard Business Review article, “Why CMOs NEVER Last”: Something is amiss in the relationship between chief executives and their marketing officers. Four-fifths of CEOs say they don’t trust or are unimpressed by their CMOs. Not surprisingly, CMOs have the briefest tenure in the C-suite, and their churn can mean serious internal business disruptions. The articles goes on to …
Of the four M’s of marketing – Market, Message, Media and Math – the one that many don’t like is the math. Marketing is, at its core, applied psychology plus math; you can get the psychology side really, really right (offers, message, USP, etc.) but totally and completely miss your mark if the numbers side of the equation doesn’t add …
One of the most productive and useful things you can do to work on your marketing and sales for your IT business is NEGATIVE PREPARATION: think of every reason a prospect won’t buy – every obstacle, concern and issue that causes anxiety – then go to work in preparing your process to address it EARLY and, ultimately, address it, minimize …
John Edwards, the psychic medium known for talking to people’s dead relatives, makes millions selling tickets to two-hour events all over the world where he performs (key word: PERFORMS) his psychic feat to people wanting to believe in the afterlife, the ability to connect with lost family members and who have an intense curiosity to discover if he’s the real …
When you want to show how filthy rich and successful you are, details matter. That’s why you need to have gold-plated staples, sold in packs of 24 for $175. Or how about a Tiffany tennis-ball-canister … for $1,500? And if you really want to show off on the courts, you can hydrate yourself with a $60,000 bottle of Icelandic glacier …
One night in 1936, Sylvan Goldman, owner of the Humpty Dumpty supermarket chain in Oklahoma, sat in his office trying to figure out how to get customers to buy more groceries. Observing clients as they shopped, he noticed that many of them were struggling to carry the normal shopping basket provided, particularly the moms with kids. Once they got to …
At every Rapid Implementation Workshop (www.RapidImplementationWorkshop.com), I take attendees through an exercise of secret shopping each other’s businesses. The scenario we give them is this: You are the Operations Manager of a company with 26 employees. Your server keeps rebooting, and your current IT company can’t come out to fix it until Tuesday of next week (three days from now). …
The United States government is the largest customer in the world. They buy millions of dollars in services and products every year. Landing an IT government contract can be a huge boost for your business. But it’s not about grabbing for any government contract you can find. You need to make sure it’s the right opportunity for you. Today we’re …
If you asked one hundred computer consultants what they want to accomplish with their marketing, over 90% would say “generate more awareness.” Here’s why that’s not the best approach for your MSP marketing message. While awareness is a worthy goal, many don’t realize how difficult it is. The average American is bombarded with over 3,000 marketing messages a day. With …
