Do your customers want the latest, trendiest, most-newsworthy promotional product? Or do they want to achieve a specific business objective? Or do they want to look like the coolest, hippest, most savvy and in-touch, worldly executive to their associates? Knowing what your clients want is the key to your success. Your value proposition should be…
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Your clients only buy what you make them feel. Describe how your clients feel after they’ve just entrusted their brands, their projects and their reputations to you. You see, people don’t buy what you do or what you sell. They buy how it (the relational and transactional experience with you) makes them feel. Do they feel…
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Let’s start with a verifiable fact. Everyone hates their ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system. Yes, a few of you will say your ERP is great, wonderful, etc. However, you are wrong, or at least using “alternative facts.” I hate my ERP system, and yet I realize that my ERP is actually great. I just want…
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Question: Is there a way to view my profit by type of customer? Answer: QuickBooks has a function within it to allow segmenting your business in reports. It is called “classes.” You can create a set of classes, which you enter into QuickBooks and apply to customers, vendors or other categories. For instance, you can…
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Are you ready? Ready to make 2017 your best year ever? Here are seven steps to make it happen. 1. Identify a Big Goal for Your Business. I recommend setting a big sales goal for three to five years out. Identify a specific sales goal and a specific deadline. Then, write it down and read…
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Question: I called Intuit/QuickBooks support and was told something that I know is not the way we do business. How can that happen? Answer: We have a complex and unique business. We do not fit typical business models, and it is confusing to many bookkeepers, CPA’s and, yes, even QuickBooks support on occasion. Recently, a…
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If you haven’t started with home automation yet, now is the time. Even if you have, now is the time to add one more thing: Amazon Echo Dot, better known as Alexa. On its own, Amazon Echo Dot ($50) is a great deal. It plays music (although only loud enough for one room), creates shopping…
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In my last blog article, I discussed the fact that most distributors don’t really own a business, but rather, they own a job. The test to determine if you own your own business is if you can fly to Hawaii for three months and tell someone else where to send your check. The key words…
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I love data. I really do. The more data you have, the better decisions you can make. Unless… Unless you read the data without context and understanding. Consider this example: Your e-commerce vendor is reporting to you that your Google Adwords (the ads that show during a Google search) campaign is doing extremely well and…
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Donald Trump shocked the world last night when he won the 2016 presidential election. While political campaigns are usually won on the issue, there’s another element that I think is worth looking into: promotional products. It may be a leap, but I believe promotional products played a huge…
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