I’ve been locked inside my home with only my family for two weeks. With one day blending into the next in a quarantine induced haze, it can be hard to find the right tone to reach for in these emails. It can be hard to find a way to say what you want to say,…
When I started selling professional services the process was simple. Find where your ideal customers gathered. Go to that place and meet them. Follow up after the meeting to meet 1-2-1 for “coffee” Determine if they had a need and if there was a “fit” Schedule a diagnostic meeting (e.g. actual sales call) Close. That…
In my last message, I talked about the problem of retainers, they seem like a great way to smooth out revenue and make delivery more predictable. Still, in reality, they may turn into a bog of over-servicing and under profitability. I asked you to tell me about your experiences, and you were very generous with…
I was listening in as a client of mine conducted an initial phone call with someone who was interested in her services. The call was going well and the prospect came out with, This all sounds really great, how do we get started working on this together? To hear that sentence from a prospect is…
Running a business is so rewarding, but it can also be tremendously stressful and lonely. Business owners get so caught up in the day-to-day of the business that we struggle to see the big picture. We’re not sure why sales have stagnated, why we can’t seem to take a vacation, why we’re still second-guessing every…
You know when you are in a “tribe” because you do the things that your tribe does, you wear the things that they wear, you sound like them, you look like them… Seth Godin, in one of his most popular blog posts, called it “People like us do things like this.” So when you think…
I’ve been having a great time getting on the phone with some of you this last week. I heard about moving houses and offices (and the upheaval that brings). I heard about hiring and firing teams, about businesses that had tough years, and businesses that are on fire and are having their best year ever….
Just like children, businesses grow through predictable phases. We start life as baby startups, then progress to raging growth companies, before settling into a more stable “adult” phase. Here’s my version of this story focused primarily on B2B service businesses. See if you see any of your own experiences in it. Baby startup Once upon…
We’ve talked previously about how important it is to find more significant, scarier problems. My father used to say it this way; ”No one gets hired to tell a client to take his vitamins. You hire an outside firm when you have an artery spouting blood and they need a tourniquet!” Dad had a way…
After our last email where I offered Nedra Rezinas my best advice for kick-starting her business development engine I got one reply that really surprised me. In my answer to Nedra I said, “…the only thing you can control in the sales process is the top of the funnel…” and talked about how to get…