“Sounds good, can you send me a proposal?” These words used to excite and terrify me. Then, I’d go off to write an amazing proposal to wow the prospect and win the business. So much stress, for so little success. … Read More
writing
Don’t “Market”, “Teach” — marketing for consultants
Last week, I discussed how to “help” instead of “sell”. This is a powerful paradigm shift, especially if you find “selling” uncomfortable, unnatural, and/or unethical. But what about marketing? What about lead generation and business development? Another paradigm shift can … Read More
The Sales for Nerds Signed Bookshelf Giveway
I’ve been lucky enough to have a bunch of awesome authors come on Sales for Nerds, and Aaron Ross recently recorded his 2nd interview, for the new edition of From Impossible to Inevitable. I asked if he had any signed … Read More
How to Exponentially Increase the Value of Your Content (With a Robot and an Octopus)
“Content Marketing” is all the rage these days, and with good reason. Rather than the traditional approach of filling web pages with meaningless corporate jargon about how awesome you are, why not provide some actual value to the visitor, right? … Read More
Language Traps
I’ve spent a lot of time on this blog talking about how storytelling is important for sales (and marketing), and particularly the way language helps construct our reality, which means it can also lead us into traps. For example, how … Read More
Will the end of the movie business end your business?
In my last post, I made the seemingly preposterous claim that every business is a media business. Some people agreed, some people disagreed, but the hypothesis definitely caught people’s attention. So, it might be worth asking, what’s happening with the … Read More
Every Company Is a Media Company
Congratulations! In addition to your regular job, you also run a media company because every company is a media company. “That’s ridiculous!” We’re a consulting company, or a software company, or a law firm. Or we manufacture widgets. “We’re the … Read More
Language and the Pursuit of Happiness (and Business)
Chalmers Brothers’ book, Language and the Pursuit of Happiness has a lot of interesting things to say about language and how it shapes our lives, both internally and our relationships. To start, he points out that we live in language … Read More
The Hardest Advice to Follow
Is usually your own. Last week I wrote about how to multiply the value of your content, because this is a problem I face along with many of you. I knew I needed to do a better job with this. … Read More
How to Multiply the Value of Your Content
Great content is great. It’s also really hard to produce and who has time for that, anyway? You can take a page from Oprah’s book and multiply the value of your content creation efforts by spreading their impact, or repurposing. … Read More