Tag Archives: marketing for entrepreneurs

Sell Your Products & Services with Advantages Not Features

To be successful selling products and services to customers, you need to understand the difference between a feature and an advantage.

A feature is a property of a property of service. A product may come in red, green, blue or orange.  The service may be delivered morning, noon or night. Those characteristics are features of the product.

As a product or service developer, you may be competing with a dozen products and they may have hundreds of features. Adding any or all...

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Entrepreneurs Guide to Brand Advertising

Long before people actually take out their wallets to buy something, they begin making their purchase decision. Through exposure to social media and mass media they become familiar with products and services that are consistent with their identity and lifestyle.

For example, someone interested in purchasing a motorcycle will become aware of brands like Kawasaki, Harley-Davidson, Suzuki and Yamaha. They will, over time, begin to choose the brand that is most consistent with their requirements. When it is time to buy...

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Practical Q & A: Pricing, Marketing & Sales

Q: Are there different business models between a service based firm and a production firm/sales firm?

A:Generally speaking, yes. A company that manufactures products almost always has fixed costs (equipment, people, etc) and enjoys returns to scale (which means the more they produce, the lower their cost of production). A service-based business may have very low, or no, fixed costs, but their costs remain relatively constant over time. A sales-based business (which sells the products and services of...

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Promoting Your Business Effectively On LinkedIn

LinkedIn is, for many people, one of the most frustrating social media sites on the web. All the things you most want to do most seem to be forbidden. Although you can read almost any business leaders profile, and can see where they have worked and what they have done, you aren’t allowed to just contact anyone anytime you want.  With a standard free account you get only a few “In Mail” credits a month and when they are used...

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My Startup is Way Too Complex to Explain . . .

If you really hate to describe your business, and your elevator speech never seems to result in people taking more of an interest in your new enterprise, you need to step back and think.

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Global Network for Entrepreneurs with Disabilities

The Global Network for Entrepreneurs with Disabilities is an association dedicated to helping People with Disabilities (PwD) start and run their own businesses.  The GNED works as an advocate for disabled business owners worldwide, and serves as an information resource for disabled business owners, disabled people starting their own businesses, local communities,  national and international governmental bodies. Most recently, for example, GNED gave presentations to the US Business Leadership Network at their annual conference in Chicago.

Simon Cox, a founder of the GNED, says ““ The GNED is...

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Want Your Business to Succeed? You Better Understand “Brand”

People’s attachment to the brand is emotional, not intellectual. The brand becomes a guarantee of value for its customers, and that emotional attachment to the product spurs a large percentage of a well-branded company’s sales.

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An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Making Products and Services That Sell Themselves

If you want to be successful in business, one objective must rise above all others. Your products and services must absolutely sell themselves. This means that for every sale you make to a customer, that customer must actively work to generate one or more additional sales.

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An Entrepreneur’s Guide to 40/40/20: The Winning Combination for Marketing Success

You really have to put your time and money into the right stuff if you want mailings of any kind to pay off, and every business needs effective marketing to thrive and grow. So, in the spirit of returning to the fundamentals lets talk about the 40-40-20 rule.

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Practical Q&A With Doug Richard — Cambridge Starting & Growing a Successful Business Class

At a recent Starting & Growing a Successful Event held in Cambridge, we received the following questions. We've taken a moment to respond to them. We thought others might find the answers interesting.

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