Posts Tagged ‘Communication’
Provocation or Obnoxiousness?
The concept of provoking our customers, getting them to think about their businesses differently is a key element of providing insights. Paraphrasing Brent Adamson, to help our customers “unlearn” we have to show them what they are currently doing may be wrong. That is, there may be different ways of operating that will produce superior results, or…
Read MoreLeadership Skills: How to Provide Corrective Direction
When discussing the “How to’s” of building an engaged culture, we hear lots of talk about “reinforcing the positive” and “catching people doing things right,” but what happens when people are doing things wrong and we need to provide corrective direction? Specific steps need to take place to get the person moving in the proper…
Read MoreClosing the Sale
Earlier today, I was interviewed for an article on “Closing The Sale.” The article is in a publication focused on small business owners. As we concluded the conversation, the interviewer said, “Your answers were completely different than I expected.” I think too many of us, entrepreneurs and sales people, alike, have mistaken impressions of closing…
Read More7 Superb Communication Solutions for Small Business
One great thing about running a small business: communication can be immediate and effective. At the enterprise level, communication is slower. Employees are often inundated with emails while talking on social media, instant messaging, and texting. Small businesses can take advantage of their size to ensure an advantage. This can happen in a number of…
Read MoreQuestioning the Conventional Wisdom of Storytelling and User Experience
As a follow-up to last month’s “SEO And Content Marketing Thought Leadership Is Diverging Again,” I wanted to take a deeper dive into the value of known “friction indicators,” like time on site and bounce rates, while calling into question the conventional wisdom of what makes a good user experience. Ask almost any SEO, or digital…
Read MoreHow Difficult Is It to Reach You?
Is your organization’s telephone number and email address buried deep in its website? How difficult is it for people to reach you? The last thing you want is for existing and potential customers and partners to give up on your business (or nonprofit) because you made it too challenging for them to communicate with you. Yet, there are so many…
Read More15 Web Tools to Help Small Business eCommerce
As the number of people using the internet grows steadily, as cell phones and tablets become more affordable, eCommerce has definitely become the norm. With 91% of adults in America owning mobile phones, physical stores are no longer needed as we can buy anything online with our mobile devices. Websites, once a novelty of the…
Read MoreWhat Uber Is and Isn’t—and How You Can Benefit
Uber is celebrating its fifth anniversary and it certainly has accomplished a lot in five years. It’s hard to imagine another company that has so quickly established a global presence. The last figures I saw said that Uber operates in 300 cities strewn across 58 countries. Let’s compare it to Starbucks, which certainly has an…
Read MoreMissing the Communication Target
I’ll never forget when an early business mentor told me, “Burg, when the shooter misses the target…it ain’t the target’s fault.” The older I get, and the more I study influence and communication, the more correct I believe he was. How often do we try and get our point across but fail? It seemed that…
Read MoreThe Killer Closing Technique
