When we’re looking at a sales spreadsheet, it can be easy to think of our customers as just names and numbers. It’s important to remember they’re people, each as varied and complex as we are, and our interactions with them are equally complex.

How do we keep track of all that complexity? The best companies take the time to get to know their customers’ habits and preferences to better serve them. While that’s great, it also generates a lot of data. Where does all that data end up? How can we effectively use that data to improve our relationship with our customers?

Featured Resource this week - Wicked Reports

WARNING: Half Your Marketing Is Wasted.  Do You Know Which Half?  We Do.

We automatically pull data from your ad networks. We then apply over 10,000 lines of database logic to track sales revenue to specific clicks, ads, audiences, campaigns and emails (we’re the only ones who do this!).

We then translate all this data into easy to use marketing reports so you can make data-driven decisions about your business and make more money!

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Featured Resource this week - PureChat

The Best-Selling Live Chat Software for Small Business

Live chat and visitor tracking software has never been easier.

Close More Saleswith simple live chat software

• Provide instant answers on your website and see visitor history.
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• Record every conversation and share them with your team.

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Featured Resource this week - ScheduleOnce

Make more connections with an integrated scheduling platform

ScheduleOnce is a field-proven solution for powering online scheduling with your customers and prospects.

Solutions for every phase of the customer lifecycle

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Featured Resource this week - StockUnlimited

600,000+ Visuals for Businesses & Professionals

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Featured Resource this week - Centerpointe

Did you know that if your head isn't in the right place, you can sabotage your business and personal success? Centerpointe's premier introductory product, Holosync, gives you ALL the benefits of meditation – in a fraction of the time – and without spending years learning how...

What if you could meditate like a Zen monk, literally at the touch of a button?

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No great invention springs out of thin air. Despite all the talk about spontaneous genius or claims that “it just came to me,” great innovations are almost always built on the backs of smaller ideas that came before. Most of the time, progress is evolutionary more often than revolutionary.

Everyone in marketing talks about the summer slump, and like it or not, summer marketing does present its share of challenges. The weather’s warm, there are tons of other things to do and people are thinking more about red-hot vacation deals than red-hot marketing campaigns. All is not lost however. Why not get things going with a summer flash sale?

They say don’t judge a book by its cover. It’s a great piece of advice, but honestly… how often do we follow it? We’re busy people, surrounded by a lot of information we have to process. If something wants to get our attention, it better darn well do it fast! In other words, we totally judge a book by its cover.

Do you like perfection? Sure, who doesn’t? When it comes to writing though, there’s a tendency to want to get it perfect, and if you can’t get it perfect, then why bother at all?

The trick is that few things are perfect the first time. Ask any famous author for the first draft of their epic novel and it will almost certainly be far different than what actually gets sent to the publisher. Revision is part and parcel of the game, and often the editing is just as important as writing.

We tend to think of great promoters like the legendary promoter P.T. Barnum as special people. For all their faults, these individuals are incredible salesmen who can sell the wings off a fly. We also tend to think that because many of their businesses involved putting on a show, their marketing legerdemain isn’t necessary for our business. We’re computers programmers or accountants or cosmetologists at heart, not sales people.

Do you remember those essays you had to write in school? They might have been about George Washington crossing the Delaware, Harriet Tubman or maybe what we did for our summer vacation. We churned them out as best we could and dutifully turned them in, sometimes flexing our writing hand to keep it from cramping. Of course, we weren’t really writing them for ourselves or our classmates or our parents. No, the one thing all these essays had in common was that we were writing them for an audience of one: our teacher.

Can you think of a successful business? Most of us can rattle off at least a dozen in just a few seconds. Some of them are huge conglomerates with internationally recognized names like ‘Coke’ or ‘Xerox.’ Many of them are smaller names that still dominate their particular industry. Even in our hometown, there are bound to be multi-generational companies that are still standing strong.

“A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men.”

    ~ Roald Dahl

You get up. You get dressed. Whether it’s downtown or just down the hall, you go into the ‘office’ and get ready to start your day. You spend most of it solving problems, both your own and everyone else’s. At the end of the day, you go home (or back down the hallway) to get some well-earned rest.

Featured Resource this week - iMember360

WordPress Membership Plugin for Infusionsoft™

Unleash the power of WordPress and iMember360 to create your Infusionsoft™ driven membership site instantly! iMember360 - a WordPress plugin that turns a normal WordPress site into a full-featured membership site with all the protection controls you can imagine, almost limitless customization, and driven by Infusionsoft’s second-to-none CRM and e-commerce engine.

Check out others who we recommend - solid vendors and products that could benefit your business today.