How are your customer’s lives or business improved by your product or service? The procedures, materials, formats and other features of your product or service are important to you.  But those who need your product or service only care about what those features will do for them.   Your job is to answer your customers question: What’s in it for me?  (WIIFM).  Clients want to know that what you provide will meet their needs; what they can count on from you; and what improvement or benefit to their life, job, or business will they get for the money they will spend. What benefit […]

If you have a product or service that solves a problem, you have customers trying to find you right this minute!  But they don’t know where you are and you probably don’t know where they are!  Somehow you must find each other.  This is where marketing comes in.  It shows those who need you where to find you. There are probably a lot of other businesses that have similar products or services as yours, so marketing also helps distinguish you from your competition.  It allows you to stand our from the crowd. The successful marketers I have talked with are […]

Very few of the successful small business owners I have worked with were expert sales people, however, most were excellent marketeers in that they used a variety of methods to attract new customers. They didn’t run a normal ad, their ads sparkled.  They didn’t have the normal brochure, their brochures had unique colors and folds.  Their mailings weren’t normal, they included gifts.  They didn’t simply attend a lot of network meetings, they spoke engagingly before those groups.  If there were no networking groups that fit their needs, they started their own. The only difference between a great marketeer and other business owners […]

The better you are known for being a leader in your field, the easier it will be to attract business.  Most of the successful small business owners ($100,000+) I have worked with were not well known when they started out.  Many became known by positioning themselves to become recognized leaders in their field. The positioned themselves by doing one of the following: Gaining greater knowledge in their field Assuming a leadership role in their field Beginning a new field For example, some of the things I have done to position me as an expert are: Volunteer my time as a counselor […]

Many of the most successful small businesses ($100,000+) that I have worked with have become successful because they had access to the people that made the buying decisions.  They gained that access because of strategic alliances. A strategic alliance is a person that knows and trusts you and works with you to build your business by feeding referrals to you. For example, in a printing company I own, I have strategic alliances with graphic artists, business consultants, bankers, copy shops, and even other printers that do not have the capabilities of high quality full color that I specialize in.  When any […]

The most successful home-based or small businesses that I have analyzed are highly specialized.  They have a product or service that serves a small niche that no one else is serving properly or not available. One of the biggest mistakes I find most small businesses make is they try to be everything to everyone.  They are afraid they will miss work if they speicalize and not tell people they do “everything”! Little do they realize that if they define thier niche properly, they would get  more business!  Instead of being a general management consultant they are consultants to the fashion industry on […]

Over the past 35 years, (especially the past 12 as a counselor for SCORE), I have worked with hundreds of small businesses and home-based businesses.  I have analyzed the marketing strategies of the most successful – those making over $100,000 a year.  I found that the successful ones do one or more of six things that others usually do not do. 1. Get people to “beat a path to your door”.  This is what all self-employed people want.  They think that if they provide a good enough or even a great product or service, customers will magically materialize.  So sure that this […]

If you are like most of the growing ranks of the self-employed, you probably do not think of yourself as having a sales personality.  Most likely you dislike having to sell and even dread it.  But you are good at what you do and that is why you went into business in the first place.  And you know that if you can’t get enough business fast enough and regularly enough, you are doomed to go back to work for someone else. So you are determined to find practical, effective ways to attract a steady flow of business, and you would […]

One of the first things a new SCORE client will ask me is: “What have you done that qualifies you to be a SCORE counselor?” Fair question.  Let me answer that question before I move on to helping small businesses get more business. At the age of 10, I became involved in the “Family Business”.  My dad ran a grocery store and we lived in the back.  This was not the first family business my father owned, but the first one I became involved in (other than the family farm). Through my growing up years, I watched my father run […]