Building rapport is the single most important thing you can do to sell your products or services, and to sell them at higher prices.

What’s the secret?

It’s not rocket science.

With the U.S. tax code changing and the small business climate in flux, you are probably looking for ways to conserve your working capital and increase your revenue. You’re not alone.

Some of our clients prefer to do their own Infusionsoft implementation instead of paying a consultant to do it all for them. If that’s you, you’re in luck!

Ever wonder how to automate certain marketing to repeat over and over periodically to the same people? For example, consider a birthday card or email you want to send to clients every year, or the announcement of your semi-annual sale, or their annual anniversary as your client, or whatever you want to do on a repeatable basis to the same group of people.

2017 is but a memory. As business owners and entrepreneurs, we are all in for 2018!

Understanding business trends and, better still, knowing which ones will have the most important impact on your business is critical. Sometimes it’s luck, sometimes it’s brilliance.

You bet they are. It’s the holiday season, after all.

Local and online retailers have been very busy boosting buying morale this season and, as a small business owner or entrepreneur, you can ride their coattails.

Take a few minutes to think about what you offer that your clients/customers/patients or prospects would ‘click to buy’ or take a trip to your location to purchase.

When you get a new lead, how many times do you touch them before you give up? By touch I mean contact, not physical touching obviously… but if you can actually meet them and shake their hand all the better, although that is frequently not an option.

Or worse, do you get a new lead and immediately hard sell them… bad, very bad.

When our son calls, his daughter almost always wants to get on the phone, saying “Daddy, I want to see Grandmom and Granddad!” (make the call a FaceTime call) and once we are visible, odds are she will say “Can you read me a story?” She usually asks Kerry, I guess her storytelling is better than mine, at least in our granddaughter’s eyes.

What’s the point, other than a cute antidote about Eva? The point is that we identify with stories from the time we are very young… we’ve been reading stories to Eva since she was just a few months old. We relate to stories, we learn from stories, we start to better understand our world through stories. Stories help us see things that cold hard facts would not allow us to see.

I think that you know by now we are big, big into automating everything but the kitchen sink (hey, maybe we can automate that too… hmmm). Anyway, one thing that you can easily automate is sending out holiday cards, for any holiday or occasion you want.

Why do webinars? They are a great way to build a relationship with your target market.

Today there are so many choices to create webinars in so many different formats that it is easier than ever to get your message out.

If we are in business, we all have ‘members’. That can be defined in different ways: people who have logins to our membership site, people who belong to our loyalty program, regular customers who we know by sight, etc.

So how do you monetize them above and beyond any product you sell (or give) them normally? Either way, how do you monetize them after all they are already a member?

Are you missing out on profit in your business?

Do you have parts of your business that you want to promote or automate that are languishing?

Newbie or experienced entrepreneur, it’s easy to get stuck in 2nd gear and have no idea how to get out.

You glance down the track a final time and head back to your mark. It’s a perfect morning. You can hear the crowd eagerly waiting for the race to begin. You do a brief stretch to make sure your calves and hamstrings haven’t tightened up and then settle in behind your mark. To your left and right, your competitors are crouched beside you. Their eyes are fixed forward, their faces taut with concentration

They’re ready. Are you?

A double or single what? We’re talking about whether you have your new list members double opt-in or not bother with that ‘extra’ step.

You may be asking what the heck is an opt-in anyway, never mind the difference between a single or a double… I’ll bet more of you know the difference between a single or double glass of fine single malt scotch. So, let me define what I mean.

If you’re in business, you’re in the marketing business. And you’ve been handed a gift worth $8.4 B (that’s billion!). In fact, this is a gift that repeats annually and has increased in value by 60% in the past 10 years. Run all the way to your bank with it!

Halloween is big business and there’s no reason you can’t cash in on some of it. Think about your audience and how to creatively engage them using Halloween to promote your business, your products, your services, your brand.

Happy New Year! I know I’m 4 months early but I just had to share this killer personal practice with you so you can use Q4 to get a powerful jumpstart on 2018.

If you’re not already one of the elite business leaders in the world, you can borrow their best personal practice that got them where they are and keeps them there.