Marketing seminars are worse than useless.

Before I explain why, we need to acknowledge the following basic truths.

• The marketing strategies and tactics that work best for a private school looking for students, differ wildly from the strategies that work for a chain of strip joints.
• And the effective strip joint strategies are very different from the strategies required by an oven cleaning franchise.
• And the perfect oven cleaning franchise strategies, are totally different from those required by a tech start-up… or a long-established family law firm…. or a record label… you get the idea.

General, non specific marketing seminars deliberately ignore this fact.

They provide strategies and tactics that are intentionally designed NOT to be specific to anyone attending, based on the most general, of general advice. They’re designed to sell as many places on the seminar as possible. It’s a cookie cutter approach. The exact opposite of what’s required.

Different industries and professions need radically different advice. Business owners need marketing strategies that are, at the very least, specific to their industry.

But even industry specific strategies aren’t that much better. They’re marginally less terrible, that’s all.

The danger of general marketing advice

General marketing advice is what the majority of businesses in any sector already use. It’s freely available on websites, podcasts, webinars, Facebook, Linkedin and Youtube, etc. It’s available from well-intentioned industry bodies and institutes. It’s available in those For Dummies books. Which is why the marketing of most businesses, in the same sector, looks so amazingly similar.

Here’s what we see.

• They provide a very similar sounding range of services.
• They use very similar marketing promises.
• They offer very similar guarantees.
• They charge very similar prices.
• They target very similar prospective clients.
• And they suffer with the pain of very similar results, with (at best), a very similar slice of their marketplace.

The last thing they need is even more, general marketing advice; wrapped up as a so-called marketing seminar.

It’s worse than useless. It’s toxic.

Toxic?

Yes. Because as you can see, it makes your business less visible, less relevant and less attractive. It gives a prospective customer or client absolutely no meaningful reason whatsoever to notice you, contact you, hire you (or buy from you)… rather than hire a look-a-like competitor.

What’s needed is the exact opposite.

You need a strategy that will work for your specific business, based on your specific resources and designed to achieve your specific business growth targets.

That’s unavailable on any general marketing seminar.

Image: Harnoor Dhaliwal

It’s impossible to completely eliminate risk from your business. But you can have the best of both worlds, with low risk and maximum potential.

Let’s start by looking at risk and why you can’t (and shouldn’t) totally eliminate it from your business.

Think about it: Even if your results are fine right now, and you decide to just carry on with whatever you’re doing, you’re at enormous risk.

Really?

Yes, really!

You risk losing clients (or customers) to your agile competitors, who continuously seek to improve and target your client base with compelling offers. Sure, small and medium sized business are the most vulnerable, but even massive brands can be wiped out by the just carry on attitude. Remember; Blockbuster Video, Toys R Us, My Space, Palm Inc?

The question is, how do we get the best of both worlds; less risk and massively more potential?

I’m glad you asked.

Mastering the risk / potential balance

In seeking to eliminate risk, you also block yourself from every great opportunity. That’s because every genuine opportunity for your business comes with an element of risk.

So, no risk = no progress.

Therefore, rather than regard risk as something to avoid, consider the potential pluses as well as the potential minuses. Research the positives as well as the negatives.

And challenge your beliefs!

Challenging your beliefs is critically important, as one of the biggest barriers to your success are your inaccurate preconceptions. This is a perfect example. And I see equally damaging thinking with business owners all the time.

A well-balanced approach to risk and opportunity is behind every successful business. It reduces your exposure to risk, whilst simultaneously allowing you to fully benefit from the genuine opportunities your business must have, in order to grow.

I hope you found this useful. More importantly, I hope you do something with it.

Image: Medienstuermer

Some people are excellent communicators. The way they deliver words is compelling and their ability to motivate those they speak with is exceptional.

Which is usually great. If the person sharing ideas with us is a subject expert, we gain mightily from their guidance.

The challenge comes when they speak with great authority, on things they know nothing about. When they voice an opinion as if it were a fact. When they’re as compelling as ever, yet they motivate us to do something that’s absolutely wrong.

I was thinking about this earlier, when I received an email from a reader. I thought you might find it useful, so here’s what happened.

When things go wrong

My reader recently had a legal issue with a web designer, regarding a site they’d developed for her business. She wanted some advice on what to do and spoke with a business adviser, who had previously helped her with (great) general business advice. My reader took his advice and sent an email to the web developer, using the wording her business adviser suggested.

Nothing happened.

So she spoke with a lawyer to see if she could “get things moving”.

The lawyer read the email and sadly, the email content has ruined any chance of her getting the resolution she hoped for.

This is from my reader’s email, published with her permission:

“In the past, his advice has always been excellent. That’s why I called him. […] He speaks with great authority, on things I know very little about. I now know he also speaks with great authority, on things he knows nothing about“.

Note: I made a similar mistake myself (2 actually), when I started in business. I wrote about it here.

Obviously, we need to remind ourselves to only take advice from people with relevant experience / qualifications. It’s also a good idea to consider who we currently rely on for advice, and whether their advice is working for us or not. Daily, I see the damage caused when business owners take bad marketing advice from general business advisers and generic online courses.

Yes, expert advice will come with a fee attached. However, that fee is usually way lower than the price we pay for taking bad advice.

There’s an old saying that assures us, if we want better answers we need to ask better questions. Good quality questions cause us to think differently and often give us extremely useful answers, insights and ideas.

With this in mind, I’ve compiled some questions, which I hope will help you to identify opportunities to help your business thrive.

In no particular order.

1. What lessons can I learn from the most successful person I know… and conversely, what can I learn from the mistakes of the least successful people I know?
2. What’s the biggest challenge currently facing my clients (or customers) and how can I help them overcome it?
3. What’s the biggest challenge currently facing my marketplace and how can I help them overcome it?
4. How can I make my services meaningfully different?
5. Am I regularly using the 6 Idea Trick?
6. What is currently the weakest point in my marketing and how can I improve it?
7. How many non-essential fields can I remove from my contact forms, in order to increase the number of enquiries I get?
8. If I charged 300% more for my services, what extra value would I be able to deliver to my clients… and why don’t I build this as a new, highly profitable, premium version of my services?
9. Who let the dogs out? (Okay, just checking to see if you’re still reading along with me).
10. What’s the best thing about my services and how clearly do I communicate this compelling advantage to prospective clients?
11. How might it benefit my clients and prospects, if I slightly adjust my business hours so they’re a little different from others in my industry, and better suited to the needs of the clients I serve?
12. Is my face also the public face of my business or do I / we mainly operate behind a logo… and if the latter, why?
13. Who are the top 5 people I need to connect with and what’s my strategy to make this happen?

Let me know how you get on.

Today, I’m going to show you how to avoid creating an incorrect, damaging impression of your business. This is critically important, so let’s dive in.

You’re a professional. You have a superb business. You offer an excellent service. And you care passionately about your clients.

My question for you today my friend, is this: How clearly does that message come across in your marketing?

Greed, need or deed?

Think for a moment about the marketing messages you receive, from emails and social media updates, to advertisements, cold calls and direct mail, etc. Every marketing message is based on one of the following three motivations.

1. Greed motivated: I want your money. Buy my stuff.
2. Need motivated: I need you to buy from me. Please, please buy my stuff.
3. Deed motivated: There’s something that I believe will help you, so I created it for you.

Greedy marketing repels people. Greed is one of those universally disliked attributes. It’s ugly. It’s selfish. We avoid greedy people and greedy businesses.

Needy marketing also repels people. As soon as the marketplace thinks a provider desperately needs sales or needs money urgently, it sets alarm bells ringing. “What if they’re going broke!?!” These alarm bells make people way less likely to buy from them.

Deed driven marketing attracts people. It makes us feel positive toward the person or brand behind it. It’s an easy message to connect with. Deed driven marketing is about sincerely wanting to help the people in your marketplace with the products or services you provide. It attracts their attention, makes them feel good about you and creates a powerful connection between you.

IMPORTANT: Here’s where the challenge comes in. Many small and medium-sized business owners who are deed focused, have no idea how greedy or needy their marketing looks. And it’s seriously hurting their business.

A couple of very common examples

One common example is the use of freebies, such as free initial consultations. These are widely used by service providers, who dabble with their marketing and have no idea how much damage they’re doing to their reputation.

When you attach zero value to your time, you send a damaging, toxic message to prospective clients. The marketplace knows that the best service providers are busy professionals, who have no need to give their time away for free. So, if they see a provider offering freebies, it tells them that the service provider is under-employed, getting too few referrals, in need (needy) or all three! This keeps the service provider in a negative loop, as the best clients are repelled and freebie hunters (who grab anything that’s free), are attracted to the free consultation like moths to a flame.

Another common example is special offers.

These can also come across as needy or greedy when handled incorrectly. And that’s exactly how the vast majority of small and medium-sized business owners handle special offers. They put their offers together, outside of a professional marketing strategy. In doing so, they can cause the marketplace to think there’s a so-called fire sale going on. Equally, the use of special offers can train your marketplace to wait for the next special offer, which makes it hard to sell anything at the regular price. This eats profits and it’s totally avoidable.

In short, it pays to be highly intentional regarding how you market your business. Always look at the bigger picture from an outside perspective. Make sure you’re projecting yourself as eager to help, not greedy or needy.

Image: Sarah Kilian

I made a couple of epic mistakes when I started out in business. Here they are, along with a powerful lesson that you may find useful.

I was prompted to write this after a talk I gave to a group of young entrepreneurs. One of them asked me a great question. They wanted to know; what was the most valuable lesson I learned, from my first year in business?

The answer was easy.

I remember it well.

Because it was so painful.

Sincerely wrong

My answer began with a quote from Jim Rohn:

“Sincerity is not a test of truth. We must not make this mistake: He must be right; he’s so sincere! That’s because, it’s possible to be sincerely wrong.”

I explained that during my first year as a business owner, I’d made 2 extremely bad decisions. I made them based on feedback from a couple of people I trusted. I was in my twenties at the time. They were 20 or 30 years older than me. They were also good, genuine and sincere people.

Making decisions based on their advice seemed sensible.

It wasn’t. Oh man. It really wasn’t!

One of those decisions lost me an amazing opportunity. Another cost me a fortune and almost left me broke. I quickly learned that I had to be a lot more discerning, regarding who I went to for important advice. It was around that time that I discovered the above quote from Jim Rohn.

From that point onward, I decided the best source of business advice was from people, who’d already achieved what I wanted to achieve. I’ve followed that rule ever since and have never once regretted it.

My original approach failed me in 2 important ways

Firstly, their geographical proximity to me was not a useful way to determine the value of their feedback. I rely on experts today, who are located all over the world.

Secondly, they were knowledgeable, but they were not entrepreneurs.

• One was the branch manager at the bank where I opened my first business account.
• The other was the practice manager at my accountant’s office.

They remained salaried employees for the remainder of their careers; never actually going into business for themselves. They operated from the employee mindset.

They saw risk in everything. They’d advise me against doing anything, unless there was a guarantee, in advance, of success.

Business doesn’t work like that.

In fact, life doesn’t work like that. And it never has. Otherwise no one would ever start a business, or get married, or start a family, or buy a new home, or travel the world or do anything. Success comes from minimising risk. Not from avoiding potential risk. Both of the people advising me were sincere. But the advice they were giving me, as Jim Rohn said, was sincerely wrong.

Who is currently influencing your decision making? That’s a question worth considering. Especially if your business isn’t making the progress you want or need.

Image: Jametlene Reskp

The breakthrough result you’ve been waiting for is closer than you think. Here’s a trusted and proven way to make it happen.

I was prompted to write this, after someone emailed me with a request. His email opened with; “I need a major breakthrough, Jim!”.

In short, he wanted me to personally introduce him to someone who’s very wealthy and a friend of mine. The unknown emailer apparently has a proposal, which he’s sure my friend “will want to be in on”.

• Let’s ignore the fact that the person he wants me to introduce him to is not a friend of mine, but an acquaintance instead.
• And let’s also ignore why on earth I would personally recommend a total stranger to anyone.

Instead, let’s look at the mindset the emailer is using.

Because although his email was certainly unusual, a lot of business owners adopt a broadly similar approach.

Allow me to explain.

The thing about major breakthroughs

When looking for a major business breakthrough, the temptation can be to focus on a massive home run… a home run, which will save you years of effort and land you in the big time.

“If I could just get 20 minutes with (insert name of famous billionaire), maybe they would back my idea”.

That’s one way to succeed.

However, major business breakthroughs don’t tend to happen like that. There will be exceptions, but they’re called exceptions for a reason. They’re exceptional.

Instead, major breakthroughs are almost always the result of lots of mini breakthroughs. And the process is tried and tested. It follows the same, proven path.

• You decide exactly what breakthrough you want to achieve and put a plan together.
• You chunk your plan down into a series of steps (mini breakthroughs).
• You then apply intelligent activity to each step.
• You carry on taking steps forward, until you’ve achieved your major breakthrough.

Recommended reading: How to know if you have a winning idea.

It’s far less glamorous than scoring lunch with Jeff Bezos or Mark Cuban and being handed their full financial backing. But it’s far more likely to actually happen.

One of the best kept secrets in business, is something I call reduction. It’s a strategy I share with my clients and today, I’m going to share some of it with you.

Less can be more

Ineffective business owners strive to do more and more.

They focus on productivity hacks, growth hacks, life hacks and short-cuts. As an unavoidable result, they become increasingly busy, increasingly stressed, increasingly frustrated and increasingly disappointed.

Thankfully, there’s a smarter way forward.

The most effective business owners use a very different approach. They’ve discovered that the biggest wins come from doing fewer things. Less is more.

For example:

• Fewer unfinished projects, leads to more clarity.
• Fewer social media interruptions, leads to more focus.
• Fewer repeated errors, leads to more progress.
• Fewer dodged decisions, leads to more respect.
• Fewer missed deadlines, leads to more trust.
• Fewer hours wasted, leads to more productivity.
• Fewer angry words, leads to more happiness.
• Fewer broken promises, leads to more belief.
• And fewer excuses, leads to more achievement.

If you find yourself stressed, working long hours and making too little progress, don’t add even more to your workload. All it will do is create additional stress.

Instead, focus on reduction. Because with the right strategy, less can be more. So much more.