1. I’m selfish, only interested in me. Right now, I don’t care about your business, I care about me and whether you can deliver the product, service or solution I need. I’m not interested in the 400 other things you sell or do, just the one thing I need.
2. I’m impatient. Get to the point quickly, demonstrate to me that you know what I need and that you can deliver it. I don’t want to go trawling your site for more information until I know I’m in the right place.
3. I don’t trust you. I landed on your site because you matched my search on Google, and it looks like you have what I need. But I still don’t trust you – now I’m going to browse around your site and find reasons to confirm my doubts; ah, jack of all trades, huh? Not for me! Ooh, only started up three months ago? No credibility. Spelling mistakes or broken links? Do they represent the shoddy way in which you’ll deal with me, too? Maybe.
4. I’m confused: What do I do now? How do I contact you? How do I order? Why is it so difficult to find this information on your site? There are so many options, I don’t know which to click.
5. I’m suspicious. Is your payment gateway secure? Can I trust you not to spam my email address or sell it to someone else who will? Will my order ever arrive? Who have you worked with before? Did you do a good job?
6. I’m looking for a reason to leave. I’ll need lots of reasons to stay, but just one will make me leave.
7. I really need to be told what I need and how I can get it. Please make it easy for me.

In the last few days alone, business owners have told me that sole objective of their site is to get someone to pick up the phone, and have then been shocked by the revelation that their telephone number isn’t on every page – it’s buried somewhere on a contact page. It’s a simple thing, but easily (and frequently) overlooked when you’re viewing your site from your perspective, not that of your visitor.

Achieve a greater perspective. Call free on 08000 47 47 14 or email:

Work with your customers in the knowledge of the end result. If your end result is a quick sale and no repeat orders, where is the motivation to do a good job, or make sure that they are happy? If the profit in acquiring new customers is in the long term relationship, you’re much more likely to be considerate, helpful, supportive and understanding. You’ll consistently work hard to do a good job.

Seth compares the follow-through to the action required in Tennis or Golf – the ball is long gone, so why keep swinging? The same is true for football, boxing and my personal favourite, snooker – if your cue continues in a straight line after the shot, you know the stroke itself will also be true.

Seth’s Blog: Follow through
If you know that the last two inches of your follow through don’t matter, then you’ll start slowing down at three inches, or even four, and suddenly it does matter. If you draw the line on money back guarantees you’ll keep sliding backwards, bit by bit, until it does matter. If you’re quick to fire the employee who needs a lot of help, you’ll be quicker with those that need just a little, and then, pretty soon, it’s a very different place to work, isn’t it?

1. Be nice
2. Be fully attentive
3. Exceed their expectations
4. Listen to what they’re really telling you
5. Help them understand how
6. Always follow up
7. Stay in touch

It’s a great seven-point plan that will work well, but needs to be implemented in appropriate ways for different products and services.

The purchase of an asset such as a plant, a division, or even an entire company.

What do you do with an asset? Maintain it so that you can get the most benefit from it for the longest period of time? If the asset were a building, you’d ensure that it retained its value, you’d repair it, you’d carry out preventative maintenance to stop expensive things going wrong.

How would you go about acquiring an asset? You’d search and evaluate each opportunity and judge it on its merits. Does it fit well with my needs? How much will it cost me to maintain? What’s the return on my investment? How high is the cost of acquisition?

What if a customer or a new market were an asset?

Before considering any acquisition, you need to consider the cost. How much is that asset worth? If the annual spend for that customer is £1000 and there’s 20% gross profit in it, that sounds OK. But what if that customer was really demanding and you spent a whole day pitching the sale, and three days’ on customer service in the first year alone?

Consider this sum:

Return on Investment (ROI) – Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) = Asset Value

Somewhere below the asset value is what you can justify spending on the acquisition, and this figure differs from business to business and from market to market.

Before undertaking any business development or marketing activity, you need to define what you can justify as the cost of acquisition.

Now, it may be that in your market, customers are buying high value goods and spending a lot of money with you over a three-year period. You might well justify inviting that potential customer to an exclusive sporting event or two, but if your customer is just going to buy one book from you, that isn’t going to work.

Get free advice on business development.

The result of Google and the prevalence of search means that people are far more forgiving of things that need to be sought out, and less patient than ever with selfish marketers that insist on showing up in your face.

Search marketing works for precisely this reason, if it’s done well, of course. You audience only gets your message when they are searching for what you do, or they have a problem that you can fix.

In case you missed it, there’s a free paper on how to get the best from AdWords available here.

In the cold light of day, it is irrational. But there’s a reason why this happens: in an auction of this nature, whether it’s on e-bay or not, once you’ve bid and you’re winning, you start to feel like you own the item in question. The longer you stay winning the bid, the more you feel like you own it. It belongs to you.

Next, someone bids a little more and you’re not leading: someone is trying to steal from you. Something that you feel that you already own. So you bid a little more to stop the thief. Even if that means you bid more than you wanted to pay, or even if it’s more than the ‘buy it now price’.

The more you feel attached to the item, the easier the sale is and the more you’ll pay.

It’s the same when you buy a house. You go and view a stranger’s house and it’s always more appealing if it’s full of furniture rather than empty. Why? The same reason: you can imagine living here, somewhere in your mind you can imagine your furniture in here, your dog sleeping in the kitchen. Would you buy a friend’s home? Probably not, because if they’d lived there a long time, it would always feel like their home, not yours.

What works better if you’re selling a car? Seeing it sitting on your driveway, or in a showroom? Better with your family in it, or on your own? Better to have a friend with you who’s envious of the purchase, or alone?

If you’re demonstrating a software application, try and do it with some of your prospect’s data. If you can’t manage that, try something from their vertical market, at least. The prospect will start to feel like it’s their application already. Better still, install it and let them try it out, assuming you’re confident that the software is up to the job, of course. The customer will start to feel like they own the software.

I think of this process as an increase in stakeholding. The higher the stake you have in the deal, the harder it is to let it go, and the more you’ll increase the stakes to avoid losing what you already committed.

Well, it sure worked. In another bizarre (or planned?) unexpected release, Lily Allen was shown on Channel 4′s, The Friday Project revealing her third nipple. According to Lily, one in ten people have one.

Why then, did Jo Whiley report on her afternoon radio show on Radio 1, with an audience of over 4.5 million listeners, that over 400,000 people had watch the video on YouTube?

Planned or not, Lily is already popular, but this much press can’t do any harm to sales of her album and single. Talking of which, how about Boy George and the community service lark, and George Michael and the whole public toilet affair. Perhaps the spinners are doing too good a job, and these accidental, personal revelations just appear to be planned?

Is this Philanthropy, or a clever marketing ploy? Think about it. If you’re old enough to remember the early days of Microsoft, you’ll remember that it implemented a similar strategy. In fact, most software companies still do.

This strategy works in a number of ways:

1. The educational sector is pretty communal, there’s lots of sharing of ideas and word of mouth, so plenty of organic growth.
2. It’s a very large, well defined sector that will create a large user base very quickly.
3. Most importantly, what do we trust most as users? We trust what we know. As human beings, we don’t typically like change. When we’re getting educated, we use the tools we’re presented with because we don’t know anything else. When we leave education, we want to use those same tools that we’re comfortable with.

This strategy, often called ‘seeding’, produces exceptional results in the medium to long term, but you need a lot of funding to survive the investment period (like Google, for example).

I prefer to call it, a ‘candy sale’. Here, try this. Isn’t it great? Now, you want to give it back, or buy it?

With this project, they failed – why?

Because they didn’t understand the business. They didn’t have a strong grasp of our strategy or our market. Or of what makes that business unique. Who the clients are and why they chose to work with that business.

It failed because they didn’t immerse themselves in the business, just took a superficial view of the requirements and followed the specification.

The experience brought in to sharp focus my method of engagement with a client.

I’m often devising or implementing a business strategy or a marketing campaign for clients or implementing an on-line campaign to capture a willing audience. How on earth could anyone do that without taking the time and care to understand how the business worked, the people in that business, the products that it had delivered successfully, the achievements of which it was most proud.

More than that, how could you hope to gain new customers, if you didn’t first understand and appreciate the existing ones? It’s critical to successful project outcome that I completely engage in, understand and share a companies’ vision.

Without understanding, without working hard to maintain a dialogue of feedback and reinforcement, without regular project meetings, we’d deliver something that matched a specification but not the vision.

And that would be a failure.

Click here for more

Isn’t it amazing where a bit of passion and belief will get you? I guess sometimes, you just have to be in the right place in your head to seize the right opportunity, to just simply follow one’s gut.

The iPhone/AT&T deal is almost certainly the exception that proves Godin’s law of bizdev: No is the default answer. The spreadsheets and the marketing team and the CFO and the lawyers have no trouble at all defending the status quo, because, it’s their status quo. They created it and they like it that way. Bizdev deals like this almost always fail because the potential for upside seems too small compared to the mammoth disruption that organizations imagine will beset them.

There’s also a mantra that I hold close to my own heart – don’t do bad business. It appears that Verizon couldn’t agree to the terms that Apple offered. If this is the case, it’s almost certain that Verizon is better off: there’s a strong possibility that it would have ended in discontent on one side or the other. Or both. Or worse.