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How to conduct an interview like a pro

Testimonials are an essential part of your sales strategy This week I’ve conducted interviews on behalf of one of my clients with three of their customers in Stuttgart, Brussels and Barcelona. Today I do an interview in Colorado and next week I will conducting around 25 different interviews on a temporary green screen studio we [...]

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10 alternatives to selling on price

“If you sell on price, you don’t have a sustainable business” This is a topic drilled into small businesses from an early age, that you can’t sell on price. Some choose to ignore it – at their peril I’d say. Here are 10 things I think you should be selling on instead. You – as [...]

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What happens if you publish content and react in real time

The results of a fascinating experiment I’ve been publishing content online for 3 years now – regularly. This blog is starting to prove popular, but I guess a lot of my publishing has been through training video production for and on behalf of other clients. It’s more recently I’ve started to produce video for my [...]

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personalized-url-marketing

Personalized URL marketing really works

Want to get your business noticed? Read on… For the last 8 years I’ve been using a technique inside my businesses to get noticed and win new business from both completely cold approaches as well as with referrals. In the last week my success rate has been amazing and I thought it was worth sharing. [...]

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It’s time to get personal with your marketing

I have to say – and I’ve been saying it for a while, the days of mass marketing, mass email, unpersonal communications, lazy database segmentation and time consuming communications are over. There’s two very clear trends emerging: 1) No one has time any more. 2) If you want to get noticed, you’ve got to be [...]

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Is this how you greet your potential customers?

I’ve nothing against this company at all. I came across them the other day when researching. It appears they do good stuff when you really have a look around under the covers. The problem for me is that the headline above greets every one of their visitors. I’ve done a quick analysis on their wording [...]

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Know your audience

So many companies claim to, but so many fail to really know their audience. I couldn’t help smiling at this sign. It’s for the cafe at a local gym. A gym you have to pay a fortune to every month to be a member. A gym in the middle of a busy town. A gym [...]

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Direct mail can work – if you do it right

So much of what we get up to here at Being Smarter is about getting personal. The days of broadcast email, send and hope direct mail and one voice for all customers are effectively over. 2010 and beyond is all about defining your buyer personas and getting personal. Click each of those links for some [...]

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How to get 2.5 million customers in 5 years without advertising

It’s not a secret that I’m a fan of 37 Signals and how they’ve built their business. What I didn’t know until yesterday was the number of customers they have. How many of those are paying it’s hard to know – but a good proportion I bet. Jason Fried is the co-founder and president of [...]

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How to really demonstrate an online application

Write on Glass has been gathering buzz and momentum for some time now. Quite simply, it looks like an awesome new way to share content. Sorry, experiences… Whilst I’ve not got access, what really interested me is seeing how have they chosen to demonstrate the concept. With screen shots? screen cams? a clever technical animation? [...]

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