“The difference between successful people and very successful people is that very successful people say ‘no' to almost everything.”   ~ Warren Buffett

Saying no is hard. No one wants to wants to see that disappointed look on someone’s face or feel that sudden awkwardness that often overtakes the room when someone gets turned down. Who really wants to hurt someone else’s feelings like that? Not us. We’re can-do team players, right? What if we might need that person for something later? And there’s always that voice in the back of our head that tells us we’re missing out on a potential steal of a lifetime.

In one of our recent articles we asked whether your marketing plan was ready for Q3. With Q3 almost over, it’s time to get your Q4 plan up and running. The principles in our Q3 article hold true for Q4 too. There are several great reasons to keep on target with your quarterly plans.

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When we’re looking at a sales spreadsheet, it can be easy to think of our customers as just names and numbers. It’s important to remember they’re people, each as varied and complex as we are, and our interactions with them are equally complex.

How do we keep track of all that complexity? The best companies take the time to get to know their customers’ habits and preferences to better serve them. While that’s great, it also generates a lot of data. Where does all that data end up? How can we effectively use that data to improve our relationship with our customers?

Do you like perfection? Sure, who doesn’t? When it comes to writing though, there’s a tendency to want to get it perfect, and if you can’t get it perfect, then why bother at all?

The trick is that few things are perfect the first time. Ask any famous author for the first draft of their epic novel and it will almost certainly be far different than what actually gets sent to the publisher. Revision is part and parcel of the game, and often the editing is just as important as writing.

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Posts, let’s see, there are fence posts, post a letter, post-it note, and perhaps other types of posts. But none of them are what we are talking about here. Here we are going to talk about an HTTP post. What the heck is that? [Geek alert]

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They say don’t judge a book by its cover. It’s a great piece of advice, but honestly… how often do we follow it? We’re busy people, surrounded by a lot of information we have to process. If something wants to get our attention, it better darn well do it fast! In other words, we totally judge a book by its cover.

We tend to think of great promoters like the legendary promoter P.T. Barnum as special people. For all their faults, these individuals are incredible salesmen who can sell the wings off a fly. We also tend to think that because many of their businesses involved putting on a show, their marketing legerdemain isn’t necessary for our business. We’re computers programmers or accountants or cosmetologists at heart, not sales people.

Do you remember those essays you had to write in school? They might have been about George Washington crossing the Delaware, Harriet Tubman or maybe what we did for our summer vacation. We churned them out as best we could and dutifully turned them in, sometimes flexing our writing hand to keep it from cramping. Of course, we weren’t really writing them for ourselves or our classmates or our parents. No, the one thing all these essays had in common was that we were writing them for an audience of one: our teacher.

Can you think of a successful business? Most of us can rattle off at least a dozen in just a few seconds. Some of them are huge conglomerates with internationally recognized names like ‘Coke’ or ‘Xerox.’ Many of them are smaller names that still dominate their particular industry. Even in our hometown, there are bound to be multi-generational companies that are still standing strong.