Visitor, your NOVEMBER FocalPoint Newsletter is here

The year end is rapidly closing in on us. Are you doing everything you can to end on a strong note and blow past those goals you set out for your company when you were ringing in 2018?

In this article, we outline five solid strategies for increasing sales now and setting you up for a great 2019.

Make sure you aren’t missing any of these tricks.

Every employer deals with difficult employees. But when they are not dealt with properly, your problems can escalate far beyond the original headaches caused by your employee.

It’s critical to take the right approach, say the right things, and follow the right procedures.

With the insights and information presented here, you’ll be much better prepared to get difficult employees back on the road to peace and productivity.

Slapping together a lead magnet and putting an opt-in form on your website is child’s play today.

Developing a strategy and the tools to build a powerful email list that will become your company’s most valuable asset is something entirely different.

Understand and act on the three list building secrets explained here and you’ll be well on your way to email marketing success.

We’ve run into many attempts to capture the essence of being an entrepreneur in America today, none does a better job of doing so than master copywriter, John Carlton.  We think you’ll agree.

“Fundamental Rule of Going Off On Your Own: Entrepreneurs run on different engines than the majority of the civilian population.

It’s good to remember that, every so often.

Most folks avoid risk and uncertainty. We eat it for breakfast.

We don’t work for The Man, either.

We make our own rules, most of the time.

We’re the bottom line for every choice, decision and action we take — the buck stops here, with a vengeance.

When we do well, the rewards are large and deserved.

When we "fail", we still have to clean up the mess…

… and start again tomorrow with fresh ideas, plans and tactics (learned from our failure) to get back on the winning track.

We’re misunderstood, and often even held in suspicion by friends and family…

… cuz we rock boats, we get too big for our britches, and we never accept "no" for an answer.”

- John Carlton, Marketing Rebel

A stale sales meeting can lead to a stale sales force. On the other hand, punching up your meetings can breathe new life into your team.

There’s always a big danger that over time regular meetings get stale or even become tedious. Here are 12 ideas to energize your meetings and your employees.

Do you dare try number 10?

TV ads edge recommendations from friends and family as the top influencer of purchases for Gen Xers (born 1965-1981), according to MarketingCharts’ US Purchase Influencers Report 2018. In so doing, Gen Xers display more similarities with Boomers than with Millennials, who are more swayed by recommendations, per the report.

Millennials’ attention, by comparison, seems more attuned than others to digital video.

More data can be found when you read the full article online. See the “Purchase Influencers report”, which covers 18 purchase influencers, 4 activities, and 6 demographic variables.  READ THE FULL ARTICLE >>>

Courtesy of Marketing Charts

Have you noticed that our attention spans are shortening? Well, perhaps not so much for us older folks (I’m smack dab in the middle of Generation X, and the oldest of our cohort turns 55 this year), but most certainly for the generations coming after me.

The one thing that seems true for old and young alike is that our attention can be grabbed and held by an interesting or exceptional experience. The term experiential marketing has even been coined to describe events that are carefully constructed to seem like an experience but are, in truth, data mining exercises for marketers.

I discovered a show called Billion Dollar Buyer on CNBC recently. It follows a self-made billionaire named Tilman J. Fertitta. This guy has parlayed a single restaurant in Texas into one of the largest restaurant chains in the US, and a $2.4 billion net worth before he was 60!

In this show, he interviews and assigns tasks to two small businesses, if he likes what he sees he hires them to do work for his companies. This isn’t a game show, it’s real business negotiation, and bagging a billion dollar client can make or break a small business.

In the first episode I watched, a marketing guy out of Florida had sent him a single branded sneaker and told him that if he wanted to see more, he’d have to visit him in Florida. He went, got the other sneaker, and gave the guy an opportunity to throw a bash on his yacht – it was a bit of a bust when he used branded plastic cups to promote Moreton’s – the high-end steakhouse chain in Fertitta’s portfolio.

Despite the setback, he gave him a second chance to provide an exceptional experience at one of his Golden Nugget Casinos.  Again, the marketer did nothing much out of the ordinary – he gave away T-Shirts, multi-tools and a few other cheap gifts when folks pulled a Velcroed nugget off a wall. He thought he did great, while the casino’s customers were telling the camera that their time had been wasted. Needless to say, he did not get hired.

The key to experiential marketing is that the experience has to be special and leave the participants feeling like they had invested their time wisely and given up their contact information for something worthwhile. Here are some books to help you develop your own experiential marketing, or to advise your clients on how to do it in their business:

While some people were writing obituaries for Apple, this company had legions of loyal customers and an estimated $262 billion in the bank, so I don’t think they’re going anywhere anytime soon!

How’d they get all that cash and all those loyal customers? Certainly not by being the cheapest! They did it by being different. Everybody thought they were nuts when they opened Apple stores, but now there are Microsoft stores and Samsung stores (it’s been said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery).

This book offers great insight into Apple’s thinking and how they’ve become so successful. Read it and find ways to apply it to your business and your clients’ businesses too.

- by Ben J. Pritchett