Leads: Bad to Worse

Of course you are aiming for a YES. But when you get a NO, remember, all NOs are not the same.

Something old, something new

Fear can be crippling.

Customer Pipeline Dreams

Tossing and turning? Trying to figure out how to grow your business, and you glance at the clock and see it is 4 am?  Creating a self sustaining customer acquisition strategy is one way to feel more confident about the future and sleep easier.

Insistence on Persistence

You think success is only based on intelligence? Nope.

You think success is solely due to the number of contacts you have? Negative.

You think success is pure luck? Sorry.
You think success is based just on education? Nice try.
You think success is only about you? No way!

A Wish for You

My grandmother recently signed up for Facebook.  

So About Our Product...

“With no marketing budget I resorted to techniques I would have never considered – cold calling, cold emailing, cold presentations, and crashing networking events, amongst others.” 

To spread the word to customers in a big company, the marketing department gets the big bucks to make sure the sales team is out there busting down doors to grow the business. And since chances are the brand or product already has recognition, the marketing helps reiterate and boost the brand in the market. The huge marketing budget pales in comparison to the return on the investment.

In a startup on the other hand, every employee – from founder to developer to gopher needs to be a marketer and a salesperson. The thick skin each employee will develop after hearing constant rejections will only make the value proposition stronger.

This article by Anita Newton goes deeper into the comparison! It's a good read especially if you are making the transition from big company to small, or vice versa.

Key Startup Lesson: Use inexpensive methods of marketing and PR that all team members can use help grow the business.

Tell us about your experiences marketing in your startup in the comments below. 

This comic and post is from the book: Cheating on Your Corporate Job: A Comic Look at the Startup Dream. Read the review on Forbes.com. You can get the book on Amazon Kindle or PDF. Use the code "fifty" to get a 50% discount on the PDF.

This contains little to no spam. Promise.

As alluring as social media is, it is fleeting and many people never see the posts more than once if at all.

Email provides one of the highest conversions in online marketing because everyone checks their emails – even if only looking at the subject line, and it is always in their inbox until deletion. Catching folks on social media is hit-or- miss.

Symptoms of Customer Acquisition Procrastination Syndrome

It's an epidemic out there in the entrepreneurial world. 

Anyone out there suffering from CAPS (Customer Acquisition Procrastination Syndrome)? Symptoms include the eager urge to work on ANYTHING and EVERYTHING except finding customers to build a new business. Your doctor (or mentor) doesn't need to tell you that building a business is contingent on finding paying customers, yet new entrepreneurs often dive into the more fun, less important tasks first!

Plead for a Lead: Sales Don't Come Easy

If you have to beg…you're probably not working on the right leads. 

Planning, executing, and closing the sales for your venture are arguably the most important tasks in starting a business. Too many new entrepreneurs (myself included) decide to go for the gold, and aim directly for customers, without putting in all the work it requires at the beginning.