3 essential pieces of the supermarket business model
A short while ago, I posted "10 strategies for SME's to beat the supermarket gorillas at their own game" which generated quite a bit of comment and feedback. Amongst the feedback were a number of requests to go into more detail on each of the strategies, and so this...
4 essential questions for small business survival
I talk to small businesses all the time, have done for 20 years, and it makes me cry how many of them do a great job at their passion, the reason they stated the business, but a lousy job of making money from it. A simple analogy. When you drive around a bit,...
5 tips for business planners
Planning is a fundamental building block of success, but planning like everything can be done well, and done poorly. Poor planning is probably worse than no planning, as having done the planning, the expectation is that the "do-do" will not hit the fan, so when it...
3 “shares” vital to success.
Success these days is hard won, how do you go about winning your share? Most progress of a sales prospect through the sales funnel happens with some sort of design in mind, rather than accident, even though the actual process is usually chaotic. As the one setting...
A simple tool to increase productivity 25%
About the most common management advice I have both had, and been given over 40 years goes something like: "Have a To Do list, update daily, and stick to it" Many variations, but basically make a list, ensure the list is up to date, relevant, and helps manage your...
Fishing for leads.
Lead generation has always been a real challenge for marketers, an obsession for many. Billions have been spent on misguided, irrelevant and wasteful activity in the name of lead generation. So, the question remains, how do you find and engage leads through a process...
Marketing suicide
The stupidity of the functional silos that deliberately separates an organisations capability to deliver value and service to their customers, and the way the customer experiences those services never ceases to amaze me. A friend of mine has a mortgage on his home,...
6 things you must do to get your email opened
Much of Email marketing has become a bit like the electronic version of the letterbox stuffing junk mail. Marketers are aggressively and creatively finding ways to collect email addresses, then directing traffic to the addresses in the expectation that a few...
7 characteristics of the successful leaders I have seen.
Reflecting on the behaviours of the best people I have seen in leadership positions over my 35 years of playing in this area to a friend a while ago, it seemed to come down to a small number of discrete behavioural characteristics. I know there are libraries full of...
8 simple ideas to navigate social media.
For many small business people, Social media is a mix of mystery, distraction, and something that at some level they feel they should know about. However, they have seen too many stupid cat videos, observed the stream of consciousness that can be...