MSP Marketing Blog

4 Questions You MUST Answer With Your Marketing

Which leads me to this week’s post. There are four tough, good questions to ask whenever you prepare an ad, e-mail, letter, brochure, website, etc.

1. Why should anyone READ it (or watch, listen, go to your booth, etc.)?
2. Why should anyone care about what you’re saying?
3. Why should they believe YOU or listen to you?
4. Why should anyone respond IMMEDIATELY?

As stated, TOUGH questions. The marketplace is saturated right now with CHOICES. No one is desperately in need of anything you sell, and it’s best you start with THAT premise rather than believing people are hankering for what you sell and interested in what you do. Desire and interest must be manufactured. Read full article and comment →

Use This Strategy To Grow Your Business In 2020

So here it is: JVs, or joint ventures – also known as strategic partnerships, promotional partners and affiliate marketing. Fair warning, the strategy comes with assembly required (a.k.a. hard work). Like EVERYTHING, it is not an easy button that solves all your woes; however, it IS by far my favorite way of acquiring customers for many, many reasons.

Clients acquired by JVs are akin to referrals on steroids. To that end, they are in a far better frame of mind when meeting with you, which means they close much easier, are less price-sensitive and tend to be better clients overall. The cost of acquisition is also far lower than traditional lead generation to a cold list; in many cases, the cost is $0. Read full article and comment →

Bill Gates And Warren Buffett’s Single Most Important Factor To Success

The new year has started and we’re back in full force around here. I have and will again share ideas with you to kick off the new year for your business. But this week, I wanted to speak directly to you, the person, about the one factor that can drive success in any initiative you have planned for the year.

A quick story: When Bill Gates first met Warren Buffett at a dinner party, their host, Gates’s mother, asked everyone around the table to identify what they believed was the single most important factor in their success through life and write it on a card. The story goes that both Buffett and Gates gave the same one-word answer, without collaboration or discussion of what it should be. And both provided the same answer: “Focus.”

The BIGGER question: what are you CONSTANTLY focusing ON?

I don’t mean “focus” this time as a time-management strategy, although it certainly is. I’m suggesting you consider “focus” as a lens through which you are filtering all experiences, a way of “seeing” situations, people and YOURSELF. Read full article and comment →

Resolve To Boost Your Revenue By NOT Doing These 6 Things

Everyone wants to know what they should DO to be successful in selling, but success is as much about what you DON’T do as what you choose to do. Many salespeople sabotage their own success and make a lot less money simply because they routinely repeat the following six bad habits: Read full article and comment →

The 12 “Musts” Of Marketing

1. 1. A HIGHLY TARGETED LIST. Without a doubt, the list is the single most important element of any campaign. It should direct not only the communication (what it says) but also the media used, the offer made, the copy and follow-up. Most do not spend sufficient time building, cleaning and organizing their lists, which is why they waste so much time and money on failed marketing attempts.
   2. AN ATTENTION-GETTING HEADLINE. The headline is one of the single most important elements of your campaign because its job is to “sell the ad” and grab your prospect’s attention and cause them to want to read and pay attention. To work, it must telegraph the big idea, news or a big promise, arousing curiosity and aligning with the thoughts and feelings of your ideal prospect.

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10 Questions You Should Ask Of Any Sales Person You Interview

FIRST and foremost: you hunt and constantly look. They are out there, although scarce; and when they DO start to look, you need to be present and findable.

That means you ought to be running ads 24/7/365. You don’t have to hire everyone. BE selective. Only hire the “HELL YES,” not the maybes. A productive salesperson puts money in your pocket, so they aren’t a risk.

NEXT: Build systems and processes that can make a good salesperson GREAT, so you don’t need to find the rare superstar but can have a very profitable and productive business on good people.

THIRD: Interview well to avoid wasting time and money on duds. To this last point, I recently shared the following list with a Rapid Implementation class that was asking me about how to interview a great salesperson. It’s 10 questions I’ll send to a candidate after reviewing their résumé and determining that, on paper, they look like someone I’d like to interview.

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Don’t Finalize Your 2020 Plan… Or Your Christmas Shopping Without These 2 Marketing Fundamentals

Raise your hand if you’ve ever bought a gift, confident that the recipient would absolutely love it, and totally missed the mark. As in, sleeping on the couch or in the doghouse, missed the mark.

You probably based your gift buying decision on your own opinion or something you thought the recipient might need, but not what they actually want. It’s also easy to make this mistake with your marketing.

‘Tis the season for both holiday shopping and annual planning, so I’m here to give you some advice that could make your Christmas a little brighter and your New Year more profitable. Believe it or not, the principle is very similar.

The CORE of what I teach is summed up in a favorite quote from my long-term mentor Nido Qubein: “Who your customer is today is a piece of data; who your customer should be is a piece of strategy.” Read full article and comment →

The Power Of Giving Thanks To Your Prospects And Clients

It’s a short week for many of us as we prepare to spend time with our families and celebrate Thanksgiving. So this week I’m going to share a brief, but powerful lesson: USE HANDWRITTEN THANK-YOU NOTES!

We send Jamie and Emily (my eight- and five-year-old kiddies) to Roots Academy for singing lessons. I recently received a handwritten note after Emily had her first trial lesson. Very, very well done. Even included some stickers Emily had mentioned were her favorite.

I’ve spent 100X the money with other companies and never got so much as a thank-you e-mail. LOTS to learn from this.

Jack Daly, international expert in sales and sales management, has spoken at several of my events. A few years back, he talked about his “money bag” idea. It was a simple bag he carried around with note cards, envelopes and stamps. When he met with a new prospect, regardless of the outcome, he’d write a handwritten thank-you note and drop it in the mailbox closest to their office to ensure it was delivered within the next 48 hours. Read full article and comment →