Paul Lemberg

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Keys to Business Failure, Part 1

Why talk about failure and not  success?

About a week ago marketing genius and worldly philosopher Perry Marshall and I spent almost ninety minutes talking about some of the keys to business failure.  I shot this video the next day – it’s a recap of the conversation we had.

The keys to success are elusive. They are as varied as there are businesses.

And the thing is, if you survive long enough, and keep experimenting, you can “fail” your way all the way to massive success.

On the other hand, if you fail repeatedly, eventually you are out of business.  So the keys to failure – and the knowledge of how to avoid them, improve your odds of reaching your goals.

Watch this short video to find out what works and what doesn’t…

 

 

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Strategic Planning for Purpose and Passion

Some people think of this as the holiday season…

Others also think of it as the “planning season.” The time of year when you start to figure out how you’d like the next year to go…

What you’re going to achieve…

What programs and practices you’re going to kick off…

If this sounds like fun to you, I’d like to offer a little spin in keeping with this very important idea:

Make sure that all – or at any rate, most – of your precious time should be spent in service of things which light up your life.

If you plan from that perspective, no matter what you chose to do, things could turn out…

Simply amazing.

So watch the video. It’s a short 4’53”…

And please leave your comments below for others to see.

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Time Used Well

Time well used, time well spent?

I’ve been thinking recently about the kind of choices we can make about time.

Do you go with the default…

The pre-programmed…

The accidental non-decision…

Do you yield to inertia?

Of course, you have to earn a living, you have to pay your bills.

But can you make a conscious, deliberate decision to spend your days in a way that lights up your life.

Watch the video…

And put your thoughts and comments below.  This conversation is worthwhile…

If you’re in your 20s or your 30s, you may not want to listen to this. As you get a bit older and you’re in your 40s or maybe you’re in your 50s maybe you’re even in your 60s, you may really want to pay attention to what I’m about to say.

About 4 years ago my mom had a stroke and suddenly in a blink of an eye, in about 30 seconds’ time, she stopped being able to do all the things that she loved doing. She stopped being able to do the things that gave her purpose. That lasted for four years, four really long years for her. A few weeks ago, she died, she passed on. If you lost either of your parents, you know that this really gets you thinking about your own life. It got me thinking about the notion of time and about how much time that there really is.

So here’s what I came to and this is not a new idea. But this is it, this here, right here, right now. This is it. Whatever your beliefs are about the afterlife or whether there is an afterlife or not, on earth in the 3D world, this is your time and you can use it well or you can use it now as well. Let’s talk about work. If you work only 8 hours a day and only 5 days a week, that’s about 40 hours a week and after 50 weeks it’s about 2000 hours a year. So ask yourself this, do you want to spend that time doing something that just doesn’t matter for you? Sure, you’ve got to earn a living, you’ve got bills to pay.

If you have a family and you want to feed them, and maybe you want to provide for your future, you don’t want to let anything get in the way of that. But there are hundreds of ways to do it. There are lots and lots of ways that you can do that. But passion, purpose, the point of your existence, this is what really matters. Whatever it is that you do, you’ve got to make it worthwhile to get up in the morning. It’s got to matter however it is that you define what matters. Now don’t lie to yourself on this one. If you’re not sure whether something does or doesn’t matter to you, I can tell you right now without giving another seconds thought. That means it does not qualify, that it does not matter.

I want you to start thinking about this, today, right now. Ask yourself the question and answer it. What really matters to you? What would have been worth spending your time on if suddenly you didn’t have any more time to spend? Because it’s just as easy to pay your bills, it’s just as easy to build your fortune doing something that lights up your life as something that doesn’t. So look, this is isn’t one of those do what you love and the money will follow things. I can’t promise that. But I can promise you that if you invest your passion into your purpose and then you do all the other strategies and tactics that I’ve been teaching you and telling you to use. This will be a worthwhile journey for you. I am pretty sure at this point that the journey is far more important than when you reach the destination.

This, by the way, is one of the great reasons to have someone in your corner with you. Someone will ask you the tough questions about your life, your business, your focus. So check in with yourself right now. Make sure that you’re on the right path. Make you’re on that path you want to be on. Not some default that you got on by accident or because it was easy. Make sure you are on the path that matters.

If you have any thoughts or comments, please share them on the blog. I’d love to talk to you about this.

Paul

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Strategies for Holding Sales

 

Follow these tips to make more money by holding sales promotions

It’s that time of year…

Maybe it should be called Sales Season.

Want to know how to make sales work for you – and have more cash coming in right now without hurting your year-round profits?

There are four important tips, and each one will make a difference to whether your sales bring in a much-welcomed cash boost or tank your margins until the end of time.

Watch this short video, and be sure to post your comments below when you’re done.  Tell me what you need to know and what you think…

~pl

 

 

 

 

 

 

Today I’m talking about how to have a sale. It’s on my mind because it’s sales season. Black Friday… Cyber Monday… This is the time of year when all retail businesses, marginal ones, finally make a profit.

Now everybody knows I’m the “higher prices” guy. You know… Higher prices leads to higher margins, which leads to stronger profits, and gives you more money if you use marketing and sales. It’s a virtuous circle. Stronger demonstrable value always, always is the most profitable strategy over the long haul.

But as we know people sometimes need incentives to take action. Time has to be compressed. Sometimes the pressure has to be turned up. Which brings us to The Sale.

Sales are not the only way, but they are a good way to get people to take action.

Sometimes you just have to stimulate some business, you just need to bring in cash right away. Used strategically, sales are not a bad thing. They ARE a bad thing to rely on for your whole business but strategically they’re not bad.

Here are some tips if you’re going to have a sale.

First, you can’t always be running a sale. I’m thinking of Banana Republic. I signed up for their buyer’s club account. And they’re always running a sale. Almost every other day I get some sort of a discount coupon from them. It does drive purchases, it does act as an incentive. But it absolutely hurts margins.

Next, have to offer a reason for the sale. You don’t want people to expect your sale and you don’t want them to think you’re going to do it all the time. Tell people why you’re making this particular sale. It could be a tax sale, maybe it’s a divorce sale, perhaps it’s an inventory sale. It might be your office burned down – a real fire sale or a flood sale. It could be a “you want to expand your business” sale. It could be “I’m an idiot and I just can’t stop myself and we’re going to have a sale”.

You have to offer something as a reason for the sale so that your customers don’t take it for granted that the sale prices are going to be the “new” prices.

Next, don’t have the sale at an expected time. In other words, Black Friday – while it does work to put companies in the black – doesn’t work because in fact Black Friday crushes all the sales for all of the time before, and some of the time after.

So don’t do your sale when people expect you to have a sale.

See, people will compress all their holiday shopping, they’ll compress it to one day. On Saturday right after Black Friday I was in the stores and while they weren’t empty, they really weren’t full. You know what I did on Black Friday? I bought my daughter a new computer. Why did I do it on Black Friday? I got a pretty good discount that I know I was going to get. If people expect your sale, they’re going to wait for it. If it’s the same time every year, they’re going to wait for it. No matter what, don’t always do it at the same time.

Next, have a defined, limited amount of time and stick to it.

If you say it’s going to be a 3-day sale, it’s a 3-day sale. Prices go back up afterwards. Banana Republic had a Black Friday sale, but – as you expect now that I keep mentioning them – prices stayed at the BF level.

Next, make your sales irregular in length. Don’t let  people know how long your sales always going to be so that they can wait until the end.

Last – It doesn’t always have to be the same kind of deal. You don’t have to cut price. You can cut price but you can also do things like a 2-for-1 or a 3-for-2. You can bundle services with a product or vice-versa. You can throw in the upsells, you can add premium value, you can even offer special things that people can’t get any other time. A limited time offer or a one time offer, in other words you can’t get this any other time so you better buy it now during the sale or promotional period.

All of these approaches give your customer more value and your average revenue per transaction where you’d like it to be.

I’m just going to recap to rules for having a profitable sale:

  1. Have a reason, a justification.
  2. Do it randomly in terms of time.
  3. Make it for a defined period of time
  4. Use other strategies besides cutting price.

This is Paul Lemberg and if you think it’s time to just bump up some business a little bit before the end of the year, go on have sale. To your outrageous success…

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Mea Culpa and
How to Jump Start Your List

I’m not dead…

And I haven’t stopped writing…

But it has been almost eleven months since my last blog post so I might as well have.

So this quick post is combination of a mea culpa plus an important lesson.

First the mea culpa:

I stopped speaking to my subscribers…

I stopped communicating with my community…

I let the dialogue dissolve…

While I never forgot about you, you probably couldn’t tell the difference.

Sure there are reasons why these things happen, but really. Who care about your reasons for things? (That by the way, is an important lesson in it’s own right…)

 

I don’t know if you’ve ever done this kind of things to the people upon whom you depend. Stuff happens, yes… Stuff does happen and it happened. It’s been a paradigm-shifting year for me. (More about that later.) But I teach business development strategies and profit generation and marketing  and I really ought to know better.

Now, if you’ve ever neglected your loyal customer base – and you’re in danger of losing these folks entirely, there is something you can do about it.

 

 

There are two steps:

The first is send out some really good free content. The specifics don’t really matter.  You could send videos or audios, you could post written content to a blog. You could hold a teleseminar or a webinar series. It doesn’t matter what it is as long as it’s solid content, rich with valuable information. And make it free.

Your job here is to remind your followers, subscribers, customers, whoever they are to you remind them of the value that you bring to them and then remind them who you are and why they should pay attention.

It doesn’t matter whether you send one piece or you send many because the point is this:

A key to consistent and ever growing sales is keeping the communication lines open and active, you get it?

Keep those lines open and active.

Use this core idea to get your business back on track if you’ve let it slip. If you haven’t let it slip but you want to generate more sales, open up the communication lines and make them active.  Whatever you do, do not do what I’ve done.

Step 2: make a killer offer.

What’s a killer offer? A killer offer is the kind of offer that cannot be ignored, that people have to respond to, that provides so much great value at such a reasonable thing that you’re asking for like decent price, great offer, decent price that people have to respond to. I am not going to make a killer offer today. What I am going to do instead is I’m going to send you more great free content. The kind that you’re really going to benefit from, the kind you’re going to learn from, the kind you’re going to bring to your business and have your business produce better. And then I’m going to make you a killer offer and it’s going to be coming up soon so you want to pay attention. Great business coaching coming your way and great offer, a great killer. New Programs, products, and a great year-end special for you so look out for all of it.

Do me a favor and post your comments below.

~pl