Reading Time: < 1 minWhen you have a product or service for sale, your main goal is generally for people to exchange money to acquire what you’re offering. They key to remember is that your product needs to literally be the best use of their money in that time. Whether you’re selling a $2 soda or an $80,000 car, […]
Business
More data = less value
Reading Time: < 1 minOur agency is a big believer in data. We track website metrics, social media metrics, email marketing metrics, and pull in great tools like heatmaps to take things even further. However, a problem that can quickly arise is having too much data. It’s easy to build a giant report that shows everything, but the result […]
If you can’t describe it, you don’t know it well enough
Reading Time: 2 minA key to understanding how well you know a subject is how easily you’re able to explain it to others. As I shared last year in “Explain it to me like I’m five“, being able to distill a complex subject down is a great skill to develop. In the case of that post from last […]
Absence Blindness rewards drama
Reading Time: < 1 minAbsence Blindness is a cognitive bias that prevents us from identifying what we can’t observe. It seems pretty obvious — if we can’t observe something, of course we’ll be blind to it. That shouldn’t always be the case, though, and absence Blindness can lead to two problems. First is the lack of ability to “do […]
It’s an open book test
Reading Time: < 1 minWhile I spend a decent amount of time trying to memorize various things using tools like Anki, for the most part rote memorization is unnecessary. Learning systems and frameworks for understanding are vitally important, but for most everything else you can just look it up when you need it. Similar to the “you won’t be […]
Your top boss is the customer
Reading Time: < 1 minThere are almost certainly some people in your organization that have authority over others, but at the end of the day there is only one true boss — your customer. If you can’t create a perceived value imbalance in the favor of your customer, where they feel they’re getting more value than they’re spending, you’re […]
In sales, being well-liked is a tie-breaker
Reading Time: 2 minAbout a year ago, I shared a thought from Blair Enns where he stated that when it comes to sales, price is only a tie-breaker. It seems he considers a handful of things to “only be a tie-breaker”, as a recent episode of his 2Bobs podcast talked about how being well-liked is only a tie-breaker […]
Engage in Conflict
Reading Time: < 1 minConflict can be a good thing. Donald Miller compares engaging in conflict to being like having a great workout — it can hurt a bit in the moment, but it leads to a healthier future. This doesn’t mean you should go around stirring up drama and creating conflict, but rather you shouldn’t run away from […]
Delegate and Elevate
Reading Time: 2 minWe’re big fans of the EOS (“Entrepreneurial Operating System”) model of business at GreenMellen, and it’s served us well over the years. We don’t follow it precisely, but some aspects of it (like meeting cadences and clarity breaks) have been astoundingly helpful for us. EOS founder Gino Wickman has a variety of books on leadership, […]
Have you faced marketing trauma in your past?
Reading Time: 2 minThere are times when we’re meeting with a potential client that we can tell they’ve been burned badly by a marketing agency in the past. They’re defensive, questioning, and unwilling to share much about their situation — and for good reason! If they’ve had a bad experience before, it can be tough to trust another […]