Photo by Elena Kloppenburg on Unsplash

When I was a kid, my dad taught me that a sharp bladed knife was safer to use than a blunt one. He explained that blunt blades cause us to use too much force to cut something. This renders the blade inaccurate and hard to control.

Sharpness in business is equally important.

For example.

• If our communication skills aren’t sharp enough, prospective clients will struggle to understand what makes our products or services perfect for them.
• If our creative skills aren’t sharp enough, we’ll fail to develop the compelling new products and services our marketplace needs.
• And if our motivational skills aren’t sharp enough, we’ll be unable to get people excited about those new products and services.

You get the idea.

Of course, when you run a busy business, the temptation is to keep your head down and plough through the work ahead of you. You have deadlines to keep. Clients to delight. People to see. Places to go. And only so many hours each day to cram everything in.

However, when we review the most successful business owners, we find they make time to sharpen their skills. They continuously invest in their professional development; doing the reading and the studying, getting the coaching and always improving.

Where to begin?

Take time out to identify the area of your business, which you would benefit most from improving. Something that would help you overcome a current challenge. Then, put some time aside to learn more about it.

Photo: Shutterstock.

It’s a massive source of frustration. You’re trying to sell your service or product to a prospect, but they just don’t get it. Here are 25 common reasons why people don’t buy from you or hire you. By learning what’s stopping them, you’ll find it easier to turn things around.

Here they are in no particular order.

1. You’re connecting to them using the wrong medium. You’re using email instead of sending a letter. A letter instead of a phone call. A phone call instead of Zoom. A Zoom instead of in-person.
2. They make decisions slowly. You move quickly. They’re still trying to process things.
3. They make decisions quickly. You move slowly. They’ve lost interest.
4. You’re assuming too much about what they know or what they need, etc.
5. They’re short term focused and you’re selling a medium to long-term benefit. Or vice versa.
6. You’re dealing with the wrong person.
7. You have a closing problem. Read this.
8. They’re under a great deal of stress. Which is really common right now.
9. You’re using too many words to describe your proposition. This is extremely common.
10. You’re using too few words to describe it. This almost never happens.
11. There are too many steps in your sales process. You’re losing them. They get half way through whatever you’re communicating, and they’re already forgetting the start.
12. You’re using incompatible marketing ideas, approaches or strategies from a different industry. This is a huge, HUGE problem for service providers. I wrote about how to avoid the problem, here.
13. They can see the value, they do want it, but are lying to you because they’re broke and embarrassed.
14. Your product or service, if purchased, would force them to admit they failed in some way.
15. You’re attracting poorly targeted leads, so they lack the need, the finances or both.
16. You haven’t given them a deadline to make their decision. Deadlines sharpen the mind.
17. They don’t trust you enough yet, to lower their guard and let your message land.
18. You’re confusing them, because there’s a disconnect between what you say and what they see. This is very common. The vendor says they’re professional and reliable, the vendor IS professional and reliable, BUT their marketing gives the opposite impression.
19. They’re very visual and your marketing or sales presentation isn’t.
20. You’re not enthusiastic enough, about your product or service, so they’re not enthusiastic enough to hire you.
21. You haven’t demonstrated the full value of your product or service to them. So, they wrongly believe it’s too expensive.
22. You haven’t explained the core benefits of what you’re offering, so they don’t even know they need it.
23. They’re apprehensive about making the purchase or hiring you and your level of reassurance isn’t cutting it.
24. They’re expecting the approach or marketing from someone in your industry, to look or sound different.
25. You haven’t made it easy enough for them to switch to you from their current provider.

I hope you find these examples useful.

Photo by Yassine Khalfalli on Unsplash

Marketing relies heavily on creativity. It takes creativity to attract your prospective client’s attention. It takes creativity to stand out against your competitors. It also takes creativity to write a great marketing message or land a new client. 

The enemy of creativity is fear. Specifically, the fear of failure.

Today, I’m going to show you how to overcome this challenge, so you be free to create without fear and improve everything about your marketing at the same time. It’s based on a strategy I discovered in the mid 1990’s and it’s worked for me ever since. I hope you find it as valuable as I have.

It looks like this

I decided to improve how I felt about creating, by reframing my marketing as a series of experiments. This was not only extremely helpful. It was also factually correct.

Think about it.

Everything you do to market your business is done to achieve some kind of result. That result is feedback. By measuring the feedback, you learn, and can then improve the result next time. It’s a process of testing and measuring akin to scientific experiments.

Marketing experiments

So, I switched, mentally, from spending my day on a series of projects, to spending my day on a series of marketing experiments. It was such a powerful exercise that I even renamed my first office ‘The Lab’.

What I loved about this approach is that it made me vastly more productive. That’s because the more I experimented, the more feedback I received.

And that feedback is extremely valuable.

• Sometimes the feedback is what I expected.
• Sometimes the feedback is a total surprise.
• Sometimes the feedback leads to a major success breakthrough.
• Sometimes the feedback leads to a massively more profitable, new direction.

However, no experiment ever fails! 

That’s because the feedback you receive equips you to make better and better marketing experiments. With better marketing experiments, comes better marketing results; more new clients, more product sales, better client retention, higher profitability, more enquiries, more subscribers and every other sales metric you need.

As such, fear was eliminated from my creative output. This freed me to become vastly more productive.

You and your business

Could this approach work for you?

Yes. Yes it could.

However, you’ll never know if it works for until you give it a try. So, go ahead. Test, measure and improve your sales results. As often as you wish.

P.S. Here’s why people criticise you and how to deal with it, in just 3 steps.