“A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” – Proverb What the old adage above demonstrates is that we’ve known for a long time that it is better to hold on to what you have than to test uncertainty to gain more. However, you wouldn’t know it from many businesses’ customer retention strategies. Why is it so important to keep the customers you have, you ask? It all comes down to numbers. Via Hubspot, we learn that the Harvard Business Review has found that acquiring a new customer can cost anywhere from five to 25 times what …
How to Get More Clients by Working Smarter with These 5 Tips
One thing seems to concern all small business owners, experienced and novice entrepreneurs alike: how to get more clients. Without clients or customers, your business can’t survive long, but you only have so much time to devote to chasing and nurturing leads. What to do? The trick, in my experience, is to learn how to get more clients and customers by working smarter. If you can maximize the impact that your decisions have on growing your customer base, you and your team won’t have to spend as much time trying to attract and close sales with people who need your …
Call Tracking for Small Business: Why You Need This Awesome Tool!
Have you heard of call tracking for small business? Today’s small business owner has many more options for finding and converting leads than the small business owners of the past. While the entrepreneur of yesterday had to rely on paid print advertising, cold calling, and word of mouth to find leads and convert them into paying customers, today we have social media, online review sites, company websites and so much more! But there’s a catch—how do you know which platform is the best lead source for your business? After all, you’ll want to earmark more of your marketing budget for …
Attention Miami FL CPA Firms! Why Accountants Need to Take SEO Seriously
Attention Miami FL CPA Firms! Why Accountants Need to Take SEO Seriously SEO? What’s That? First thing’s first—what is SEO? Short for search engine optimization, SEO is a process that makes your site more attractive to search engines like Google. But how does the process work? The inner technical aspects of search engines are actually pretty interesting. They’re definitely complex. And they’re also undeniably critical to understand if you want to improve your accounting practice’s online presence. To put it simply, search engine robots (often called spiders or crawlers) are constantly traversing the internet, collecting and indexing information from every …
Is Your Brand More Like Carnival or Royal Caribbean? 5 Ways To Tell.
Recently my family and I took a Caribbean cruise. We’re not new to cruising, in fact this was our seventh. But the first six were with Royal Caribbean so this was our first experience with the Carnival brand. I’ll save you the suspense and tell you that it will also be our last, but what I did find interesting was observing the vastly different strategy that each brand employs from its website, to customer service, to the ships themselves and their excursions. I wasn’t expecting the same standard on Carnival as I had previously experienced with Royal, but I wasn’t …
4 Key Business Lessons From European Entrepreneurs
I recently returned from a family vacation in Europe and having previously lived and worked extensively there I was once again struck by the distinct cultural differences in business from which American entrepreneurs could learn a thing or two when contemplating business change. And so I present 4 key business lessons from European entrepreneurs. Lesson 1 from the Italians: Be passionate about your customers. No one can deny that the Italians are a passionate people. One need only witness an animated mobile phone conversation complete with wild hand gestures, or the expressiveness of an Italian driver to know this is …
Do You Wonder Why Good Clients Suddenly Stop Coming Back?
A new client (we’ll call her Jessica) recently came to me with a concern that she was delivering a service she was so convinced was a market need, yet clients who she expected to be flocking to her in droves were somewhat lukewarm, and other good clients would suddenly stop returning yet seemed happy with her service. We spoke about the importance of identifying her market sweet spot, the full discussion of which will be a topic for another day, but when I walked her through my “Buy It” chart, her eyes lit up with understanding. The Buy It chart …