The 5 best ways to alienate your clients

Learn from your mistakes, examine your failures, and begin with your blunders.  We all know the importance of doing things incorrectly, as a way to learn to do them correctly. Thomas Edison is credited with saying: “I didn’t fail. I just found 2,000 ways not to make a lightbulb”.  Let’s embrace the value of finding…

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Three things you don’t do, but keep talking about

There are good ways to talk about your business, and there are bad ways to talk about your business.  The good ways make people understand what you do and want to work with you.  The bad ways leave people confused, uninformed, or bored.  The following are three bad ways to talk about your business: while…

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Did your employees mess up? It’s probably your fault.

Photo by Alice Achterhof on Unsplash

Raise your hand if you ever had a roommate.  Keep your hand up if you ever tried to pour yourself a glass of milk only to discover there were only 8 drops left.  So you tell your roommate to please add milk to the shopping list when they finish it, and your roommate answers: “I…

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The quick & easy definition of management

And does a business really need it? “Management” and “managers”? Yes and no.  A business can choose to ignore the word and all its derivations. But the truth is that “management” is happening anyway, whether intentional or not. So you may as well make it good.  What does it mean The problem with asking questions…

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Don’t tell me: show me

Raise your hand if you do not sell a quality service.  Hmm, it doesn’t look like anybody is participating. I suppose everybody here does offer a high-quality service.  And that’s exactly the problem.  If it is true for everybody, then it means nothing to anybody.  There is no such thing as quality Because if it…

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Best of 2020

That’s right: this is a summary post.  The best of the year from my blog posts, YouTube videos, and products.  Blog Posts The four most popular posts of the year touch on all the main topics: keeping happy and productive employees, trusting your clients, (not) offering discounts, and, of course, remote working.  The only two…

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Quoted: 10 Business Buzzwords It’s Time to Retire

(Photo: Gustavo Frazao/Shutterstock)

A big thank you to Meg Hall of Creative Kitsune and NCR Silver for using me as a source for their blog post: 10 Business Buzzwords It’s Time to Retire Following on my series of blog posts on effective messaging towards problem solving, and my ongoing series on buzzwords to avoid, Meg called me up…

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How to Understand Sales Jargon

Nobody likes a conversation full of buzzwords. Do your clients and colleagues a favor and forego the sales jargon along with the industry jargon. What is Sales Jargon As we are focusing on your customers in this series, let’s look specifically at the sales jargon people use when speaking with prospects. There are so many…

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How to Understand Your Jargon

To recap: the first step to problem solving selling – and better conversations with your prospects in general – is to remove industry jargon from your talking points. What is Jargon Some of these terms are easy, but others are less obvious. There are some perfectly common and everyday words that – when used within…

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