4 Ways to Prevent Someone from Stealing Your Startup Idea
Steve Blank, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur-turned-professor with over two decades of experience, has over the course of his career founded or worked within eight different startups. And in that time, he’s lived through every entrepreneur’s worst nightmare: he had his ideas stolen. Twice. “The first time it happened, it was no big deal,” Blank recounted in a 2009 VentureBeat article.…
Read MoreIncrease Customer Loyalty by Maximizing Touchpoints
Improve customer experience, increase loyalty to your brand, and enjoy more successful touchpoints when you follow these guidelines on how to maximize every interaction you have with your customers. Analyze Your Methods Your company probably already uses a handful of different methods for reaching your customers, and each method probably varies in success. The first…
Read MorePrescriptive Selling
I’m seeing a trend toward increasing prescription in selling. By that, I mean marketing, sales enablement, or management are prescribing the activities, actions, scripts, conversations their people should be having. Many of the new technologies seem very focused at providing prescriptive guidance to the conversations sales people have with prospects and customers. At its simplest…
Read MoreHow Easy to Understand is Your Marketing Content?
Do you sometimes get bogged down when writing your business’ or organization’s marketing content? Is it filled with jargon or technical information? There’s an answer for you… Cut it out! When your marketing language is difficult to understand, and only “insiders” know what you’re talking about, you have a big problem. “Language is how customers get…
Read More7 Reasons No One Opened Your B2B Email & What to Do About It
Email marketing is still one of the most effective marketing channels to reach your audience. Studies still suggest that it has great reach, offers a high ROI, and is the preferred communication channel for a majority of clients. Despite this preference, it isn’t always easy to convince readers to open your email. If you catch them at…
Read MoreSuccessfully Launch a New Product with Practical Strategies
If you’re planning to launch a new product, you have to keep many different factors in mind. It obviously helps to have a great product, but there’s a lot more to it than that. You have to make sure there’s a strong demand for your new product. You also have to create a strategic new…
Read MoreUnconventional Ways to Get Customer Reviews
Reviews can drive organic web traffic to your site and help you increase revenue. Learn some easy ways to get good customer reviews. Well, the overall concept of getting reviews is simple. You simply have to ask. The real question is how to ask. The way you get good reviews is just as simple: provide…
Read More5 Free and Easy Ways to Promote Your Small Business Today
Twenty minutes. That’s all you need. Ten minutes to read this blog. Ten minutes to carry out one of the five actions below. Time: twenty minutes. Cost: zero. Not too much to promote your business is it? OK, so let’s get on with this. Tell one stranger you meet about your business In a supermarket…
Read MoreReferrals Don’t Happen by Accident
Referrals don’t happen by accident. When I talk to some small business owners they proudly tell me that most of their new customers come to them via referrals. And I congratulate them—there’s no better marketing than having a customer rave about your work. But relying on your customers to decide that they’re going to actively recruit new clients for…
Read MoreValidating the Business Model
When your business reaches a certain size, it’s only natural to explore options for extensive growth and scale. With PLAYLive, we chose the franchising model. The ability to scale without fronting the capital for each unit and the ease of spreading to different regions combined with the other benefits of franchising made it the best…
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