No matter how good your product or service is your business will need to develop good relationships to succeed. It’s not just relationships with your customers that matter either, you should also build a good relationship with your suppliers, professional advisors, bankers, investors and competitors.

So what is the key to building good business relationships?
There are [...]

Many businesses try (and fail) to be all things to all people. Most successful businesses have a real understanding of what is special about them – what their Niche is. Niche marketing is all about narrowing your focus… specialising… establishing yourself as the expert in a tightly focussed range of products or services.
Niche
Compact Oxford English [...]

Seth Godin today wrote about the wilful waste he encountered at a hotel recently:

When I walked into my hotel room the other night, I was amazed to discover that no less than 18 lights were on (all traditional bulbs) and that the heat was set on three different thermostats to a toasty 75 degrees in [...]

Price
I often talk to businesses where they spend all their time working out how they can save a few pence so that they can reduce their prices. If you have become a habitual discounter, you might want to take another look at how you can differentiate your offer more.
Your pricing policy should be a weapon [...]

It is easy to be coerced into spending a lot of money on advertising – because we liked the sound of the deal or because the telephone sales person made it sound compelling.
Before you spend a penny on advertising or PR, write a marketing plan – and there are plenty of books out there on [...]

Many businesses make the simple mistake of promoting Features when they would profit far more from promoting the Benefits of their product or service.
One of the hardest tasks is writing words that encourage people to buy from you. It isn’t enough to say that you sell the “best product ever” or have the “largest selection [...]

Rob over at BusinessPundit recently wrote about his experiences at a Shell Station where a speaker in the petrol pump played an advert to him while he was filling his car. He has this to say about it:

I think it is a smart idea to market to me at the gas pump. Usually I just [...]

If there’s one thing that really puts me off dealing with small business “professionals” it’s being presented with what is clearly a free business card. You know the ones, they have something like “Get your 250 FREE business cards from www.aprintingcompany.com” on the back of them.
Now I appreciate that small businesses have limited budgets and [...]

In the sporting world if you’re loosing then you and your team set about practicing more, perfecting your technique and studying the other teams to look for their weaknesses. You then try to exploit those weaknesses using the skills and team work that you’ve developed during your practices.
Business is much the same. You should study [...]

How many of you entrepreneurs can’t get a break in marketing your small business? Is your competition too fierce? Are your clients too hard to reach? Is your location too far off the beaten path? Is your domain name not very memorable? Is your brand too hard to differentiate?
As a small business development specialist, I [...]