Business Relationships – 6 tips to create better business relationships

1. Face to Face meetings

Take time to meet new people face to face and extend your circle of contacts. Approach these intro meetings with an open mind and no agenda. Do not pitch during these meetings and listen more than you speak.

2. Deliver Value

Make a point to help help out your contacts whenever you can and to connect them with people that they should meet. Do so without point scoring or expecting anything in return.

3. Surprise and Delight Your Clients & Customers

Execute all contracted projects and tasks well but make one of your objectives to surprise and delight them by delivering beyond their expectations. If you are unsure how to do this your staff and customer feedback will give you some very strong indicators.

4. Be Authentic

One of the benefits of being a business owner or entrepreneur is that you can create your own company and remain true to your values and vision. Do not lose sight of this when you are starting business relationships even if there are monetary reasons to do so. If your gut tells you that a potential relationship will be problematic – go with your gut.

5. Establish Trust

For any relationship to work there needs to be trust on both sides. Major deals and agreements need to be written down and formalised but a good relationship should be the basis. Be worthy of trust, open and and trust in others.

6. Frequency and Feedback

Regularly communicate with your contacts – this applies equally to your staff as well as contacts external to your business. Encourage the giving of and be receptive to feedback and reviews.

Implement these points and you will establish better business relationships – relationships that will help you build better business. The last word goes to Dale Carnegie

“You can close more business in two months by becoming genuinely interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.” – Dale Carnegie

We hope you have found this information useful.

Need help creating better business relationships? Give us a call on +44 845 2264 247 or email us via mail@marketingfundamentals.com to start the conversation.

Best regards,

Mike Pitt
Founder & CEO – Marketing Fundamentals Ltd

The post How do you Create Better Business Relationships? – 6 tips appeared first on Marketing Fundamentals.

1. Research – What does upmarket look like in your niche? Is there an upmarket segment? Is there potential for one? Do not skip this step – it is vital. Your repositioning needs to be commercially viable.

2. Value proposition -What is to be your new value proposition? What will you offer to consumers that is different to what you are currently offering and also different to your competitors?

3. Consistency or congruence – Are your brand assets consistent with your new positioning or will they need to be updated. This could include website, stores, communications materials, staff uniforms etc

4. New positioning or sub brand? – Is it feasible to take your brand upmarket? Or should you consider a sub brand and start fresh as Toyota did with Lexus?

5. Customer experience – What changes will need to be made to the overall customer experience to substantiate the new upmarket positioning? You will need to list these out.

6. Stop anti- brand activity – If you are running any price promotion activity – stop it . As I said above brand is reputation and if yours is ‘Closing down sale’ ,’2for 1′ or ‘60% off’ then that becomes your reputation.

7. Social proof – What do customers say of your customer experience? Is there some evidence within the feedback you have received of potential for your brand to be reappraised? Do you already have an upmarket segment of your customer base?

8. Products and services – What changes do you need to make to your products or services to be congruent with an upmarket positioning? It might mean removing some and adding others. You may already have clear customer segmentation which will help the transformation process.

9. Distribution – Your distribution network needs to be consistent with your new positioning. If your product is on sale in dumpbins at a discount retailer you will not be able to take your brand upmarket.

10. Implementation – Great news ! If you are a SME owner or entrepreneur – with a relatively small number of staff (up to 50) and low number of sites – in most cases it is considerably easier to plan and execute a brand repositioning than it is for large multinationals. The advantage is with you and the potential rewards can be too.

Are you considering re-positioning your brand? We would like to help you. Feel free to give us a call on +44 (0) 845 2264 247 or drop us an email via mail@marketingfundamentals.com – We look forward to hearing from you.

I hope you have found this information useful.

Best regards,

Mike Pitt
Founder & CEO
Marketing Fundamentals Ltd

The post Entrepreneurs – How do you take your brand upmarket? 10 considerations appeared first on Marketing Fundamentals.

Celebrate your Success – 7 Reasons to Celebrate

1. Company birthday – You have reached a significant milestone – 3 years since your company was founded, for example. Remember that in the UK 80%* of startups fail within three years so your survival is a good success milestone.

2. Distribution – You produce a product that has just been approved for national/ regional retail distribution. This is a major achievement.

3. Pitch – After a tender or competitive bid process you have secured a major new piece of business.

4. Staff – You have welcomed new team members into your company.

5. Acknowledgement of your peers – Your company, an individual or a project you were instrumental in has won an industry award or recognition from a major organisation.

6. Performance targets – You have reached or surpassed performance targets.

7. Company culture – You have created a company culture that celebrates the successes of your staff whatever they are. Staff members may have completed charity runs, learned a new language, volunteered for non profit organisations or reached other personal milestones.

Celebrating success is not only beneficial in a ‘feel good’ way it will also create a much more engaged and motivated team. Engaged and motivated teams tend to me more productive and happier even during tough times.

We are a leading B2B Content Marketing Agency in London. We can help you grow your business and give you reason to celebrate. Feel free to give us a call on +44 (0) 845 2264 247 or drop us an email via mail@marketingfundamentals.com – We look forward to hearing from you.

We hope you have found this information useful.

Best regards,

Marketing Fundamentals Team

The post Entrepreneurs – Do you take time to celebrate your success? 7 reasons to celebrate appeared first on Marketing Fundamentals.

Later this person came back to us and explained that they wanted the post to be an advertisement for their client. Obviously we cannot run advertisements via the back door for this company’s clients in our blog. The options presented to this person were to run to a piece that retained editorial integrity or for them to purchase a paid for post. All of this highlights the fact that many do not understand what constitutes a guest post on a blog. Here’s what it is not.

* A guest post is not an advertisement for a company.

* A guest post is not reason to abandon normal editorial guidelines in order to mention a company.

So what is a guest post?

* A guest post provides readers of a blog with value added content in the same way that the regular posts do. The only difference being that the guest post is written by a guest author.

Rationale

A good guest post delivering great content will drive people to the guest author’s website link and establish a useful backlink or ‘traffic source’ to use Google Analytics terminology. It will also build the reputation and profile of the guest author.

We are still happy to receive guest post submissions providing they deliver value added content – this could relate to some new innovative technology or range of services. It is possible to secure a link to a company or individual providing it is relevant and of interest to our audience.

Feel free to contact us via mail@marketingfundamentals.com with your guest post or give us a call on +44 (0) 845 2264 247 to discuss this or any aspect of your marketing requirements.

We hope you have found this information useful.

Best regards,

Marketing Fundamentals Team

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Caroline Bennett gives a testimonial after attending an ‘Is Blogging the New Branding?’ workshop ran by Mike Pitt of Marketing Fundamentals Ltd. There are more testimonials after Caroline’s. The full playlist of testimonials also appears on our YouTube channel.

Contact Marketing Fundamentals Ltd on 0044 (0) 845 2264 247 to arrange a workshop for your company.

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Automatically there is a tendency for many businesses to slow down but this is a great opportunity to steal a march on your competitors and improve the performance of your business. How?Below are 12 things you should do now.

Improving Business Performance – 12 Things to do this summer

1. Reconnect with lapsed customers/ and re-validate old email addresses

2. Make design changes to your website/ update your logo an branding assets

3. Staff team building days / catch up on staff appraisals

4. Re-evaluate your pricing strategy and range of products or services offered

5. Continue to blog and be present on relevant Social Media platforms

6. Update financial forecasts

7. Progress joint venture / partnership opportunities

8. Gently chase clients or customers for testimonials – written and video versions

9. Take steps to adapt/ company rules to allow flexible working as much as possible – will produce a more committed and engaged workforce

10. Debtors – If you have them chase all debtors in a structured way

11. Assess company performance against objectives set out for the year in January

12. Look again at your Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) and Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) figures

Working through this list will be prove to be productive and will give you a great platform to have an excellent Q4.

Do you need help making the most of summer time opportunities? We would be happy to help so feel free to give us a call on +44 (0) 845 226247 or drop us an email via mail@marketingfundamentals.com – We look forward to hearing from you.

We hope you have found this information useful.

Best regards,

Marketing Fundamentals Team

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The post Client Testimonial – Your Life Records appeared first on Marketing Fundamentals.

This represents an increase of 2500% on the amount of leads that they achieved at the 2012 Expo. What was responsible for such a dramatic rise? Content Marketing, Social Media and a good team.

Cloud Knowledge Base is a client of Marketing Fundamentals Ltd. If you’d like us to create and implement a strategy to maximise your return on investment from a trade show give us a call on +44 (0) 845 2264 247 or drop us an email via mail@marketingfundamentals.com

We look forward to hearing from you.

Best regards,

Mike Pitt
Founder & CEO
Marketing Fundamentals Ltd

The post Cloud Knowledge Base at the Richmond Business Expo 2013 appeared first on Marketing Fundamentals.

Do you share our passion for writing for entrepreneurs and business owners ? Do you want the exposure that appearing on our site would give you? If you would like to be considered as a guest blogger on our site, review the content on our site and send your draft guest post subject line ‘Guest Post Submission’ to mike@marketingfundamentals.com for consideration.

You don’t need to have attended any particular school or university to get published – great writing will be recognised and will be published with your name and either a weblink or Twitter name.

So now it is over to you – feel free to tweet this to anyone you feel would be interested. Here’s a couple of quotes to inspire you.

The secret of success in life is for a man to be ready for his opportunity when it comes. ~Benjamin Disraeli

Opportunity is often difficult to recognize; we usually expect it to beckon us with beepers and billboards. ~William Arthur Ward

Okay – get writing! We look forward to receiving your submissions.

Best of luck and best regards,

Marketing Fundamentals Team

Note – Take care to avoid plagiarism and copyright infringement.

The post Bloggers – Do you think you can write for www.marketingfundamentals.com? appeared first on Marketing Fundamentals.

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