This is a crucial selling point for expensive, technical, and/or complex products & services When it comes to maintaining and building customer relations in industries that involve expensive, technical, and/or complex products and services, there’s nothing more important to customers than risk reduction. The ability to understand the risk customers face and then reduce it can make a dramatic difference in the rate of sales conversions. There is always some risk to a buyer when the decision to buy or not buy will have unpredictable consequences. Risk can include Financial Risk Performance Risk Physical Risk Convenience Risk The amount of risk to your customer is always tied to and magnified b
OK—so last week’s post included some out-of-the-box tips for prepping for a speech. This week, I’ll wrap up the topic with some tips on what to do before, during and after the speech. Here goes: Wear something that will focus attention on your face. This means no loud colors, no busy prints, no big designer logos, no (please) cleavage. Don’t wear anything with metal buttons that will clank on the lectern or podium while you’re speaking. The same goes for long metal necklaces. If this is going to be an after dinner speech, be sure that the wait staff won’t be clearing dishes while you’re speaking – it’s very distracting. The podium should be as close to the audience as possible and the micr
If you’ve ever given a speech (and I’m including junior high English class here) you already know the standard advice. What you’re going to read in the following pages are tips and tricks that you probably didn’t know. Wouldn’t it be nice if people in the audience didn’t yawn, roll their eyes, or check for messages on their PDAs while you’re speaking? Wouldn’t it be nice if nearly everyone was hanging on your every word and you actually saw dozens of people jotting down notes? Wouldn’t it be nice if you were giving a speech to hundreds of adoring fans? It happens all the time. But it happens to the same speakers all the time, while others get the PDA checkers…all the time. The difference be
If you’re like most busy executives, you’ve got a stack of reading material in your office and more online that you plan to get to someday. If you look at what’s actually in that stack, it’s a collection of material that you thought was important enough to save, but too lengthy to read on the spot. The goal for B2B writing is to make it on-the-spot reading wherever possible—you want to avoid the stack. You do that by creating a visual impression that the material is well organized and to the point and then you deliver on that by making the copy easy to understand and informative. Following are 10 ways to help you do that. 1. Be Concise: You are writing for upper level executives that don’t h
