With 2024 less than 2 months away, I’d like to help you overcome one of the biggest barriers to business success. If you do, you’ll set yourself up for an amazing year ahead.

Ready?

Then lets go my friend.

It starts with one of the biggest paradoxes in business. The only way to succeed more often, is to increase your failure rate. (I’ll give you 3 examples of why this is provably correct in a moment).

The challenge here, is that many small business owners have not yet figured this out. They avoid taking action on their ideas, unless they are convinced, in advance, the idea will work out exactly how they want it to.

That’s an exceptionally high bar to set. So they tend to leave most of their ideas on the drawing board. Including the ideas that would have made them a fortune.

Broadly speaking, there are only three potential outcomes after you take action on a business idea. And you can benefit massively from all three of them.

1. It might work out just how you wanted, right out the box! A quick win. An instant hit. 
2. It might work later, after you make some adjustments. By putting an idea into action, you attract feedback. Feedback allows you to tweak and improve. And improvements lead to success.
3. It might flop. If it does, you get to learn from it and invest that learning into future opportunities. These failure lessons help you build an invaluable reservoir of feedback, which leads to better and better decision making. This is how ALL ongoing success happens.

When you fully understand the value of feedback, it becomes a lot easier to take action with your ideas and insights. That’s because you will have eliminated any irrational fear of failure. Just like every successful business owner before you. 

Failure is feedback.

And feedback is your friend. 

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 by Elena Kloppenburg on Unsplash

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: Shutterstock.

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.

Photo by Yassine Khalfalli on Unsplash

If you want to make dramatically more sales, you need to start by knowing what your prospect’s buying style is. Once you uncover the way your prospects like to buy, you massively increase the likelihood you’ll make the sale. Over and over again.

It starts by understanding that people buy based on feelings far more than logic. [Note] I explain why, here.

We also need to understand that the prospect is right. And that they’re right every single time.

• They’re always right about what constitutes value for money.
• They’re always right about their past experiences of the type of product or service you provide.
• They’re always right about the last experience they had with someone from your industry.
• They’re always right about their attitude to risk (real or perceived risk).
• They’re even right about whether pineapple belongs on a pizza or not.

That’s because THEY are always the most informed person in the world regarding what they think and how they feel. And as their thoughts and feelings are what determine their actions, you need to discover them fast!

This might include, what they value most when making a purchase, whether they’re in the low price crowd or the premium quality crowd, if they’re someone who likes to take their time or prefers to move along, what their past experience of your industry was, how they feel about risk and any other factor you would like to know.

If you try to get them to make a purchasing decision without you knowing that information, your chances are radically reduced.

• You’ll be making assumptions based on what you know about your service and what you feel are the most important points.
• You’ll be focusing on things that don’t motivate the prospect.
• You’ll be missing things that they need to hear from you before they will buy.

In short, you’ll be trying to sell to them based on hunches and guesswork, rather than knowing exactly what they need to hear or see from you.

How to get it right

Only when you have a good idea of how they think and feel from their answers to your questions, should you start to explain how your service will benefit them.

By matching the focus and tone of your conversation, or presentation, to your prospect’s thoughts and feelings, you’ll be fully aligned with them. Yes, this makes the sales process a great deal smoother and easier.

But more importantly, it can dramatically increase your sales results.

It’s not only okay to make marketing mistakes, they’re absolutely essential if you want your business to grow in any meaningful way.

Here’s why these mistakes are so important. And why you might want to re-evaluate how you feel about making mistakes with your marketing.

Let’s go!

Why are marketing mistakes okay?

They’re okay because they’re temporary.

Temporary?

Yes. Much of the marketing we do can be adjusted in minutes, with useful feedback sometimes obtained in hours.

For example, you can try a new call-to-action on your website. Then, check the conversion rate as soon as you have enough data in. If it’s worse or no better than the previous call-to-action, try a better one next time.

You’ll either win fast or you’ll learn fast. Not bad, eh?

Instead of thinking of your marketing as a somewhat rigid set of activities, try thinking of it as a series of temporary steps. Steps that you replace with something better, as you try new things. Because that’s exactly what the most effective marketing looks like.

Why are marketing mistakes essential?

They’re essential because you can’t possibly know if a new marketing idea or activity will work without testing it first. So, if you’re committed to growing your business, you’ll be committed to testing different ways to improve your results.

With testing comes measuring.

Measuring is where you find out what works.

It’s also where you find out what doesn’t work (the mistakes).

As such, the business owner who seldom makes a mistake with their marketing, seldom tries anything new and is leaving money on the table every day.

You may have heard the story about how Steve Jobs reprimanded team members, if they were not making mistakes often enough. Whether that’s true or just part of the Steve Jobs legend, the fact remains that mistakes are directly linked to progress. In trying to avoid mistakes with your marketing, by repeating what feels comfortable, you inadvertently block your business from the very success you long for.

So, expect marketing mistakes.

No… Scrub that.

Welcome marketing mistakes for what they truly are: A critically important part of the success of your business.

There’s something wonderful and extremely powerful about initiative.

Just think about this for a moment. No one gives you the initiative. You take the initiative.

It’s that last part that is easy to overlook. Initiative us something we take. This means it’s down to us to make things happen. And this is true regardless of where we are right now. Regardless of what season our business is going through. Regardless of how the economy is performing. Regardless of our age, industry, background or our past performance.

Initiative: Your free, always-on opportunity

Better still, not only are we free to take the initiative. We’re free to take it any time we choose to. We have the green light to make something amazing happen.

Those are not just empty words.

Any business owner right now, who’s looking to improve their current situation can make amazing things happen.

And that’s because:

• We’re free to take the initiative and build great relationships with the key people in our industry.
• We’re free to take the initiative and answer important problems, which prospective clients will eagerly pay us to solve.
• We’re free to take the initiative and massively improve the course of our business and our future.
• We’re free to take the initiative and develop a better version of an existing product, which customers will flock to.
• We’re free to take the initiative and endeavour to become a leader in our industry.
• We’re free to take the initiative and strive to provide the best customer service in our industry.
• We’re free to take the initiative and generously encourage others.
• We’re free to take the initiative and connect people who may be able to help one another.
• We’re free to take the initiative and improve one key area of our business, every week.
• We’re free to take the initiative and increase our knowledge.

And we’re free to take the initiative with a thousand other useful things.

Sometimes, what we need in order to turn things around is a gentle nudge in the right direction. A reminder to take the initiative and make things happen, rather than passively wait for someone to give us the initiative.

That’s why I wrote this today. I hope this brief message provides you with a gentle nudge of encouragement.