Business Tips Blog
Enjoy Evan’s easy-to-use advice for your business.
Five Common Newsletter Mistakes
How many email newsletters do you receive every day? Most of us get quite a few. So how do you make sure yours stands out? Many people have said to me, “Evan, yours is the only newsletter I actually read.” I take this as quite a compliment! Today I will share with you five mistakes I see all the time, which reduce a newsletter’s effectiveness. When you implement the fixes I give here, more people will be excited to open and read your email. You will build stronger relationships with your audience, and you will receive more referrals and leads! Mistake #1: Not Sending It Consistently When’s the last time you sent a newsletter? Recent answers I’ve heard include: “last Christmas,” “when we launched our new website in 2012,” and “when we were featured in that article 6 months ago…oh my, it’s been a year already.” While sporadic emails let …
Land Bigger Projects by Offering Options
Recently, a marketing firm hired me to help them sell bigger projects. I suggested that they beef up their proposals and pitch bigger projects to their prospects. “We can’t do that,” my client explained, “because we’re already too expensive for many prospects, and losing that business.” In my years working with small businesses, I’ve found that this situation is very common. To solve it, we changed their proposals. Instead of pitching “the plan,” they offered clients three choices: small, medium, and large. Now, instead of “take it or leave it,” clients had choices to fit their budget. Immediately, a higher number of their proposals turned into paying clients, and they soon landed two projects of record size! Today I’ll show you how to close more and bigger projects by offering options to your clients. Offer Three Options, and You Will Close More Sales Most businesses I work with pride themselves …
Want to Sell More? Stop Trying to Serve Everyone
They say “variety is the spice of life,” and one thing most of us business owners enjoy is that we get to do lots of different types of work, with different types of customers. There are many benefits to this variety, but today I want to show you how breadth can hold your business back from faster growth. While it may be counterintuitive, if your business focused on a narrower niche, you would likely find more new customers, faster. Business A.D.D. I recently started working with an IT support company. The owner was telling me about the different services they offer, and it was a very long list. They help people set up smartphones and tablets; they help businesses install computer networks; they design custom software; they consult on technology workflows; …and I’ll spare you the rest of the list. Their business had grown like this organically. People approach them …
What You Want To Sell Isn’t What They Want To Buy
We love helping our clients achieve the greatest possible success. But sometimes, it seems like they themselves don’t want that. Many clients only want the most basic, stripped-down version of what we offer. And other clients ignore our suggestions for proactive, preventative work, and only come to us when something blows up on them. Why is it that what we want to sell–which is typically the best thing for them–isn’t what they want to buy? This is doubly frustrating, because we’re not helping clients to our fullest ability, and we’re not making as much money as we could. In my experience, this frustration is extremely common, shared by most industries I work with. My dentist bemoans the fact that many people skip their cleanings for years, and they only call when something in their mouth has gone horribly wrong. A graphic design firm I work with noted that companies come …
How to Handle Requests for Freebies
There was a moment after I started my business when I realized that lots of people were hitting me up for advice. Not only were clients eager to learn as much from me as possible, but old friends and new contacts were asking to “pick my brain.” At first, it was very flattering. But quickly it became too much. First of all, it was taking up a lot of time. But more importantly, I thought, they should be paying me! But I didn’t want to offend anyone, and I didn’t want to lose any potential business opportunities. If you’ve been in your line of work long enough, I’m sure the same has happened to you. Your clients have asked you for extras that weren’t in the original agreement. And you have non-clients asking to “grab coffee and bounce ideas around.” Sometimes it is good to say yes, but often you’ll …