While the challenges of social media content creation may feel daunting, showing up consistently has big benefits for your business. By posting valuable content consistently, you can:
<ul>
<li>Grow your audience</li>
<li>Increase brand awareness</li>
<li>Build authority in your industry</li>
<li>Improve engagement</li>
</ul>
If you are looking to achieve any of the benefits listed above, it is worth figuring out a sustainable strategy for saving time planning and creating social media content. The key to achieving this is twofold—planning in advance and batch working content creation.

Posting Valuable Content Consistently

<ul>
<li>Each month, set aside time to map out your social media content for the following month.</li>
<li>By outlining the content topics you want to cover for the entire month, you can look at your content from a higher level and be more strategic about your content plan.</li>
<li>Plan on spending 1-2 hours each month mapping out your content for the following month.</li>
</ul>

Content Planning Process

<ul>
<li>Number of posts. Keep in mind that quality and consistency are more important than the number of posts. Stick to a schedule and frequency you can sustain long-term.</li>
<li>Goals. What are your overall business goals for the month? How can your content support those goals?</li>
<li>Any important dates. Do you have a new product or service launching, or an event? </li>
<li>Social media holidays you want to “celebrate”. Are there relevant social media holidays you want to celebrate on your social platforms?</li>
</ul>

Things to Include in Your Content Plan

One of the biggest challenges when it comes to social media content is knowing what to post.
When creating content for social media, it is important to share a variety of types of content. Your content should educate, entertain, or sell.

The Types of Social Media Content You Should Create

Batch working is a highly focused, topic-specific form of working. When batch working, you divide your work into different hours/days and focus on only one thing at a time. Batch working can be applied to all areas of your life and work, but here we will focus on how to utilize it for content creation.
The idea is that by focusing on one task at a time, you can get into a flow state which is when your productivity and creativity truly flourish. The end result is better quality content in less time.

Batch Working

<ul>
<li>Plan a Month of Content: map out the entire month on content.</li>
<li>Create All Visual Content. Write a list of everything you need from stock photos, custom graphics, videos, Reels, cover images, etc. Once you have the list, it’s time to start creating.</li>
<li>Write All Captions. By batching captions and following a caption formula, you can quickly write captions that convert your audience.</li>
<li>Schedule Posts. Now that you have your visuals and captions, it’s time to schedule your posts according to your content calendar.</li>
<li>Add Hashtags (if posting to Instagram).</li>
</ul>

Streamline Content Creation With Batchworking

<ul>
<li>Hook: Grab their attention right off the bat. You have to inspire your audience to click “read more”.</li>
<li>Value: Deliver on what you promised in your hook and share content that educates, entertains, or sells.</li>
<li>Call to Action: Tell your audience what you want them to do next (i.e. share, like, comment, click, buy, sign up, tag, etc.). Keep your calls to action simple and fun.</li>
</ul>

What a Good Caption Should Include

In this post, we're sharing a sustainable strategy for saving time planning and creating social media content.

marketingandsales

Marketing & Sales

artsandculture

Society, Arts & Culture

How To Save Time Planning and Creating Social Media Content

Collaborative product development aims to involve customers—as well as employees and industry partners—in the product creation process and beyond.

Collaborative product development

Your customers are the market, so having a customer-centric strategy is an obvious choice. The best way to have your customers involved in product development is by having them come up with the products. It means a much briefer market validation period because the solutions originate from your core customer stakeholders.
You can do this by sending a one-off survey via email or running a poll on social media to find out what people would like to see developed next. But there are also ways to be a bit more intentional: user interviews or a full-on program for customer involvement.

Leverage your customers

Sales teams, customer support teams, and on-the-ground employees have a ton of insight into customer pain points, which means they're a great resource for collaborative product development. Ideally, you'll have feedback built in to your everyday processes—think comments on wireframes and collaboration in GitHub—but there are a couple of other things you can try as well.

Leverage your colleagues

A lot of businesses shy away from collaboration and knowledge sharing with industry partners for fear of spilling company secrets. But if you do it right, your team could walk away with a tremendous amount of new insights, new industry contacts, and even a new lead or two.

Leverage your partners

Discover the world of business and economics.

economics

Economics

teamwork

Teamwork

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Business

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Product & Design

Drive value with collaborative product development

In a world of too much noise, a new approach is required. Instead of relying on more exposure to get the news out, more attention is needed on getting the right words across. Instead of just informing people more often about what makes us special, more granularity of detail is required to distinguish ourselves from others.

Marketing should be practical

Identifying and satisfying a target customer’s needs and wants. The science part is analytical and objective. It studies customer behaviour with techniques like usability labs, eye-tracking studies, and A/B testing. The art part is “softer” and more subjective and is concerned with branding and positioning.

Marketing is the art and science of creating value

It needs to be at the core of the organization’s decision-making process.It’s a decision-making discipline that should move across the organization — from product development to sales and support to finance, human resources, training, and more.

Marketing is not just a set of tactics

These tactics have been so successful in the past that marketers have been losing sight of what really drives growth. And in the process, they’ve been making their messages more and more shallow.

Clickbait headlines don't convert

The value a customer receives from a business’s product or service. The value of your product or service is going to be delivered by each person in your business, whether it be the delivery person, the “I want to thank you for choosing us assistant” or the owner. I also mean that there is no such thing as a bad day because all days especially bad days are an opportunity to serve and build relationships with clients and customers.

The key to a successful marketing strategy

What do we want to achieve for the business with marketing? It is important to set out marketing objectives at the start of a product’s development because those objectives will shape the product, and be affected by it.They are the foundation upon which all your activities are built. You can’t do anything without them. They establish what you will do, how you will do it, and why.

We need to define marketing objectives.

<ul><li>How can we reach a wider audience and how much do we want to spend on paid ads so we can capture the market?</li><li>How do we tell prospects and the general public about our products and services? What innovative ways can we come up with to give us a good public image?</li><li>How do we generate leads and create a sales funnel to capture them and convert them to customers?</li></ul>

What businesses focus on when developing marketing objectives: (Wrong approach)

8 out of 10 companies will go with this approach, no wonder we don’t have many real successes. All we see is noise, noise, and more noise.This is an excerpt from the 12 pages long book on “Practical Marketing Strategy” written by Edison Ade.<a href="https://buzzedison.gumroad.com/l/jmrov">Click here</a> to get your free copy today! Free for 60 days. or go to buzzedison.gumroad.com

I find this the wrong approach to developing a marketing strategy 

I am giving out a free 12 pages long ebook on "Practical Marketing Strategy". This is just an excerpt from an article I wrote on medium to promote it. 

In a world of too much noise, a new approach is required. Instead of relying on more exposure to get the news out, more attention is needed on getting the right words across. Instead of just…

What does a practical marketing strategy look like?

Have you ever seen an ad from someone on Facebook (or while conducting a Google Search) that claimed the presenter was an “expert” or a “guru” at some business-related topic? For example, imagine an ad that says something like this: “I’ve helped businesses generate $1MM+ in new leads” or “I’m the marketing guru who can help you double your ROI.”That’s because every independent contractor, agency, and consultant in the world is competing on a global stage to win business. And if you want to win business, you have to be <a href="https://readwrite.com/2021/10/27/brand-building-101-learn-how-to-build-a-brand/">perceived as an expert </a>– or at least, that’s the way it used to be.

Experts And Gurus Everywhere

Online platforms like Google attempt to incentivize high-quality content by disproportionately promoting and rewarding content that serves as an authoritative take on a given subject. For example, a History professor’s 50-page dissertation should be ranked higher than a middle-schooler’s 50-word blog post, despite their similar subject matter. It’s why <a href="https://seo.co/pillar-content/">developing pillar content </a>is so important for SEO and other marketing strategies. Additionally, consumers tend to prefer working with experienced and knowledgeable professionals in all matters: this is common sense.

The Role Of Google And Consumers

It’s highly rewarding to be an expert.If you can establish yourself as a knowledgeable and respected professional in a given industry, you’ll enjoy more leads, a higher retention rate, and even more satisfied customers (as long as your performance isn’t terrible).

Reasons For The Overabundance Of Self-Proclaimed Experts

Anyone can call themselves an expert. What is an “expert” anyway? Is it someone who gets a certain degree or has a certain number of years in the field? Or is it someone who reaches a suitable threshold of knowledge in a given area? On some level, it doesn’t matter – because anyone can call themselves an expert in the digital age. A person may claim to be a PhD-holding serial entrepreneur, despite being a 19-year-old still in college and trying to start up a freelance business.

Visibility reinforces expertise. Thanks to the mere exposure effect and a handful of other cognitive biases, it’s natural that repeated exposure to a person (or a brand) makes us think more highly of them. If we see a collection of different ads from an individual marketing guru over the course of a few months, we’ll begin to think of them as being a more prominent and well-respected expert than they actually are – even if the effect is subconscious.

“Experts” force “experts” to emerge.If you only have a year of experience, you can’t exactly find success marketing yourself honestly. How does this ad sound: “I’m not very experienced, but I’ll try my best – and I’m probably cheaper than my competitors!” The mere existence of competitors who all bill themselves as experts means you need to bill yourself as an expert if you want to keep pace.

The nature of the internet incentivizes echo chambers and misinformation. The internet contains practically unlimited access to information and connective potential with everyone in the developed world. While this can be a tremendous strength, it also leads people to develop their own echo chambers – and makes it easy to find misinformation. Whatever your opinion is, you’re only one quick search away from finding a so-called “expert” who agrees with you, and a full community of people ( along with intelligent bots ) who will regurgitate your own opinions back to you.

Consumer trust is declining. It’s not all marketers’ faults, but generally, consumer trust is declining. After years of iffy coverage from the mainstream media, lies from politicians all over the political spectrum, and the overwhelming prevalence of misleading marketing and advertising, average consumers take everything they hear with a grain of salt. If you call yourself an expert with years of experience and tell them you can help them improve their business, your work is cut out for you – you’ll have to go to extensive lengths to prove this.

Consequences For Marketers (And Creators)

Terms like “expert” and “guru” are losing meaning. If you want to use terms like “expert” or “guru” in your marketing as a way to describe yourself, you’ll have to revisit that strategy. These terms are so popular and so widely misused that they’ve begun to lose their meaning. Once distinguishing markers of authority, these words have become cheap and easily exchanged.

Competitive differentiation is becoming harder. Most of your competitors are probably heavily invested in content marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), social media marketing , and other strategies meant to establish them as popularly perceived experts. They’re also pushing themselves as experts in your specific industry, making it harder for you to make the same claim. As a result, competitive differentiation is becoming harder and harder.

Understand and review your competition. If you want to stand out from the competition, you have to understand your competition. That means taking the time on a regular basis to read your competitors’ core pieces of content, review their lead generation strategies, and possibly even evaluate their customers. The more you understand about them, the more you’ll be able to grow your own strategies; you can find more ways to creatively distinguish your business from theirs and get ideas for how to promote yourself innovatively.

How To Thrive In A World Where Expertise Is Dead

Focus on a narrow niche. Some brands attempt to market themselves as broadly as possible, trying to reach the largest possible target audience to win more sales. But this isn’t the best idea when the market is flooded with competitors. Instead, it’s better to focus on a narrow target niche . Instead of describing yourself as a general “marketing expert,” you can become an expert in a very specific strategy, or become an expert at serving a specific industry or type of business.

Show, don’t tell.In the world of fiction writing, a common piece of advice is to “show, not tell.” In other words, you want to demonstrate something to your audience rather than explaining it to them explicitly. Instead of saying, “Bob was nervous,” you could say, “Bob padded the sweat from his brow and began to fidget.” Similarly, instead of calling yourself an expert, you can simply show your audience how much of an expert you are. The best way to do this is to develop consistently good content over time, then publish and syndicate it.

Prove your claims. Make sure you prove your claims. You’re an expert – but why? How much experience have you had? What miracles have you been able to work?

Expertise is “dead” in the sense that pretty much everyone is a self-described expert. But you still need to show your expertise is you want to continue competing in this landscape. Find a way to differentiate yourself – and still showcase your authority – if you want to thrive.

Differentiate & Showcase

Expertise is dead. And experts killed it. 

When experts get involved, expertise dies. Here we discuss why experts have killed expertise and what to do about it.

communication

Communication

entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship

Expertise Is Dead: How to Stand Out When Everyone's an Expert

<ol><li>Determining Your Business Blog’s Purpose (e.g. Attracting quality traffic; Generating leads; Driving conversions; Educating users, etc.)</li><li>Setting up Measurable Blog Goals (e.g. Attract X% of the total addressable market (TAM); Increase organic traffic by X%; or Get X% more leads in a year.)</li><li>Defining Your Target Audience</li><li>Deciding on the Content You’ll Publish (One of the approaches to this is to consider two kinds of content strategies - Publications & Libraries. Publications cover the latest industry news and trending topics.  Libraries focus on evergreen content)</li></ol>

Step 1. Outlining Your Blog Strategy

<ol><li>Topic Clusters: Create a ‘pillar’ page that roughly covers a general topic, & usually targets a high-volume keyword; & Several ‘cluster’ pieces of content that focus on specific, long-tail keywords.</li><li>Determining Your Pillar Topics: Think about topics as they relate to your product or service. Review your product’s value proposition and persona portrait. Merge your audience's challenges with your product solutions to find a topic.</li></ol>

Step 2. Identifying Your Core Blog Topics

Do topic research using multiple sources, such as:<ul><li>Brainstorming: Industry, User-problem-related, Product/service-related Topics</li><li>Competitors’ keywords</li><li>Search and social media trends</li><li>Keyword research tools</li></ul>

Step 3. Expanding Your Topic List

<ol><li>Filtering Keywords by Keyword Volume & Difficulty: focus on keywords with highest volume & lowest difficulty/competitiveness</li><li>Grouping Keywords by Topic Clusters: Tie each keyword to a general pillar topic. During filtration & grouping, you may come across a general/popular topic that fits your pillar topic list. Then you can substitute your original topic, or add a new one. Working on a table, introduce a pillar topic column with your 5-10 topics, a cluster topic column with the remaining topics distributed by core pillar topics, & product/feature column for each topic.</li></ol>

Step 4. Filtering and Grouping Your Topics

<ol><li>Matching Search Intent with the Buyer’s Journey: Informational intent (pre-awareness or awareness stage); Navigational intent (consideration stage); Commercial intent (consideration stage); Transactional intent (decision stage)</li><li>Identifying Search Intent for Your Keywords</li><li>Deciding on Post Types and Headlines</li></ol>

Step 5. Identifying Potential Headlines

Here are a few ideas on how you can prioritize your article publication in line with your business goals:<ol><li>According to Your Cluster Topics</li><li>According to the Buyer's Journey</li><li>According to Volume and Difficulty</li><li>According to Your Product or Feature Releases</li><li>According to Trends</li></ol>

Step 6. Prioritizing Topics Based on Your Goals

Learn how to research post ideas that will drive organic traffic to your business blog. This step-by-step guide will help you find suitable topics for your content plan.

How To Research Topics for Your Blog's Content Plan

A business has to be customer-focused, it has to speak the language of the customers. You can’t be pushing what you think is cool, or pushing the technology. You need to understand what’s important for your clients.

Be Customer Focused

Community is the best marketing. You need to leverage your community to do your marketing for free. How do you build communities?Look for places where people post or talk about problems your product/service can solve.Find groups or pages that people are creating on Facebook, Reddit, Quora etc.

Leverage Communities 

Your Circle Of Influence is the people and networks you already have in place. You can use other people’s knowledge or relationships to get other people’s business. If what you are selling is both valuable and scarce, then you can leverage your Circle of Influence to close more sales. This doesn’t mean treating people like commodities.

Leverage Existing Circle Of Influence

You don’t need to come up with ideas for your content. People give you their problems all the time — 1) in blog posts, tweets, and reader comments,2) in email submissions and3) in events or conferences.Think about what motivates people.Content, not sales.

Content First Marketing Strategy

Be consistent and put in the hard work. You can’t expect to be successful with 0 dollar marketing if you don’t put in the work of creating content, distributing, engaging and adding value. Be bullish. It’s not enough to show up every now and then. You have to be there regularly, contributing quality content that others know about well enough to read and share with their friends.

Be Consistent, and put in the hard work

Thoughtfully marketing a product or service can cost a good deal less than a penny. It only takes a few minutes of active time invested per customer, and costs can be as low as zero. To be clear…

career

Career

How to market with 0 dollar budget

Emotional Output or Value is the emotional feeling of a result of using a product.And it can be any emotion that obviously has to be positive.The best way to understand it is by examples.

Emotional Output/Value

You bought a lawn mower and it cuts grass extremely well and even though you are not an expert in mowing grass.but due to the product excellence, you are able to do something which you had a problem doing and as a result of using the product you are proud of the outcome and happy about it even though all you had to do is use the product.But why do you feel this way?

Example No#1

You are proud of making a great decision of buying that specific product which helped them to the work easily.

Because...

When people do something they are proud of then they try to show it off and tell others about the product they bought and how it helped thembecause it makes them feel appreciated and content with their decisions so the next time anybody complains to you about mowing grass you will probably tell them about the product you are using.

Benefits of this Emotional Output/Value

If the people buy the same product you recommended then you feel like a master/leader because you gave advice and people acted on it and you will try to tell more people and in all of this the brand is going to benefit.These are the benefits of a good quality product which solves the people's problems or makes something easy for them.This is the good way to build brand loyalty too.And if anybody says something negative about the product that you bought then you will be willing to fight them.but more on brand loyalty later.

Word of Mouth.

An emotional Advert is far more powerful than a Factual one so it is necessary for marketing individuals to study it.

Strategy of an Effective Advert

“The way we are conditioned to see the world in our own culture seems so completely obvious and commonplace that it is difficult to image that another culture might do things differently. It is only when you start to identify what is typical in your culture but different from others, that you can begin to open a dialogue of sharing, learning, and ultimately understanding.”

The majority of managers who conduct business internationally have little understanding of how culture is impacting their work. This is especially true as more and more of us communicate daily with people in other countries over virtual media.
When you live extensively in a foreign country, you pick up a lot of contextual cues that help you understand the culture of the people living there, and you decode communication and adapt accordingly. But when you exchange emails with an international counterpart in a country you haven’t spent time in, it is much easier to miss the cultural subtleties impacting the communication.

The invisible boundaries that divide our world

“Leaders have always needed to understand human nature and personality differences to be successful in business--that's nothing new. What's new is the requirement for twenty-first century leaders to be prepared to understand a wider, richer array of work styles than ever before and to be able to determine what aspects of an interaction are simply a result of personality and which are a result of differences in cultural perspective.”

Cultural patterns of behavior and belief frequently impact our perceptions (what we see), cognitions (what we think), and actions (what we do).
Many of the cultural differences—varying attitudes concerning when best to speak or stay quiet, the role of the leader in the room, and what kind of negative feedback is the most constructive—may seem small.
But if you are unaware of the differences and unarmed with strategies for managing them effectively, they can derail your team meetings, demotivate your employees, frustrate your foreign suppliers, and in dozens of other ways make it much more difficult to achieve your goals

How we understand each other

It is common, to work across cultures for decades and travel frequently for business while remaining unaware and uninformed about how culture impacts you. Millions of people work in global settings while viewing everything from their own cultural perspectives and assuming that all differences, controversy, and misunderstanding are rooted in personality.
This is not due to laziness. Many well-intentioned people don’t educate themselves about cultural differences because they believe that if they focus on individual differences, that will be enough.

When having an open mind is not enough

Each of the eight scales represents one key area that managers must be aware of, showing how cultures vary along a spectrum from one extreme to its opposite. The eight scales are:
<ul>
<li>Communicating: low-context vs. high-context</li>
<li>Evaluating: direct negative feedback vs. indirect negative feedback</li>
<li>Persuading: principles-first vs. applications-first</li>
<li>Leading: egalitarian vs. hierarchical</li>
<li>Deciding: consensual vs. top-down</li>
<li>Trusting: task-based vs. relationship-based</li>
<li>Disagreeing: confrontational vs. avoids confrontation</li>
<li>Scheduling: linear-time vs. flexible-time.</li>
</ul>

Eight scales that map the world's cultures

<ul>
<li>In cultures where low-context communication styles are prevalent, people assume a low level of shared context — few shared reference points and comparatively little implicit knowledge linking speaker and listener. In low-context countries like the United States and the Netherlands, effective communication must be simple, clear, and explicit in order to effectively pass the message.</li>
<li>In contrast, in high-context countries such as the United Kingdom and Japan, people tend to communicate in ways that are implicit and rely heavily on shared context. Someone from a high-context culture might accuse a low-context speaker of being too direct, whereas a low-context listener might often wonder if the high-context speaker will ever get to the point.</li>
</ul>

Communicating: low-context vs high-context

Erin Meyer’s Evaluating scale offers insights into how to give effective performance appraisals and negative feedback in different parts of the world. The spectrum goes from “direct negative feedback” to “indirect negative feedback”.
With direct negative feedback, the feedback is delivered to a colleague frankly, bluntly and honestly. Negative messages stand alone, not softened by positive ones. In contrast, when indirect negative feedback is provided it’s done in a soft, subtle and diplomatic manner.

Evaluating: direct negative feedback vs indirect negative feedback

<ul>
<li>When providing an evaluation, be explicit and low-context with both positive and negative feedback. Don't launch into the negative until you’ve also explicitly stated something that you appreciate about the person or the situation. The positive comments should be honest and stated in a detailed, explicit manner.</li>
<li>Try, over time, to be balanced in the amount of positive and negative feedback you give.</li>
<li>Frame your behavior in cultural terms. Don’t use your cultural background as an excuse to be disrespectful but talk openly about the cultural differences that explain your communication style.</li>
</ul>

How to provide feedback

There are two types of reasoning we can use to persuade:
<ul>
<li>Principles-first (or deductive) reasoning derives conclusions or facts from general principles or concepts. People from principles-first cultures generally want to understand the why behind their boss’s request before they move to action</li>
<li>With applications-first reasoning (or inductive) reasoning, general conclusions are based on a pattern of factual observations from the real world. Applications-first learners tend to focus less on the why and more on the how.</li>
</ul>

Persuading: principles-first vs applications-first

When interacting with someone from another culture, try to watch more, listen more, and speak less.

An international business expert helps you understand and navigate cultural differences in this insightful and practical guide, perfect for both your work and personal life. Americans precede anything negative with three nice comments; French, Dutch, Israelis, and Germans get straight to the point; Latin Americans and Asians are steeped in hierarchy; Scandinavians think the best boss is just one of the crowd. It's no surprise that when they try and talk to each other, chaos breaks out. In The Culture Map, INSEAD professor Erin Meyer is your guide through this subtle, sometimes treacherous terrain in which people from starkly different backgrounds are expected to work harmoniously together. She provides a field-tested model for decoding how cultural differences impact international business, and combines a smart analytical framework with practical, actionable advice.

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Travel

books

Books

An international business expert helps you understand and navigate cultural differences in this insightful and practical guide, perfect for both your work and personal life. Americans precede anything negative with three nice comments; French, Dutch, Israelis, and Germans get straight to the point; Latin Americans and Asians are steeped in hierarchy; Scandinavians think the best boss is just one of the crowd. It's no surprise that when they try and talk to each other, chaos breaks out. In The Culture Map, INSEAD professor Erin Meyer is your guide through this subtle, sometimes treacherous terrain in which people from starkly different backgrounds are expected to work harmoniously together. She provides a field-tested model for decoding how cultural differences impact international business, and combines a smart analytical framework with practical, actionable advice.

Erin Meyer (born August 22, 1971) is an American author and professor based in Paris.[1] She is most known for writing the 2014 book, The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business a study that analyzes how national cultural differences impact business.Meyer is a professor at INSEAD, an international business school with campuses in France, Singapore and Abu Dhabi. She regularly speaks about cross cultural management and global teamwork.

Erin Meyer

The Culture Map

Silence is often underestimated. Interestingly it serves two purposes in a business discussion. It can allow the other person to talk, or even force them to speak.Regardless of the application of silence, when used with effective listening, you can drive a business conversation into a successful outcome.

Use Silence As A Tactical Tool

Anxiety and excitement can easily drive you down the rabbit hole of offering solutions without having a clear understanding of the business situation/problem. Unfortunately, a solution is only valid if it meets a known problem or business situation.Never be in a haste to speak, listen to understand the business context so you can gather your thoughts and drive the conversation towards a meaningful outcome.

Listen First To Understand The Context

There’s nothing worse than rambling for hours only to realise your audience was completely misunderstood or uninterested. What’s more frustrating is when you’re unable to tell what point the disconnection happened.Find opportunities to pause and ask for feedback. Ask if there are any questions so far, or if clarity is required. Pauses also allow you to get a reaction from your audience and use their feedback to determine your next move, or words.

Pause For Feedback Continuously

When speaking becomes over-speaking, you risk losing the opportunity you have already secured. This is particularly important in sales especially when the prospect has shown interest in buying or made a verbal decision.Don’t talk yourself out of a deal by sharing information that is relevant after a deal is won. Focus on what matters and if there’s nothing else to say, thank them, clarify next steps and call it a day.

Know When To Stop, Especially When A Deal Is Struck

There’s a thin line between speaking and overspeaking.  Sometimes it is best to be the listener. Recognising the importance of silence and how to use it as a tactical tool in business is an art a lot of successful salesman have mastered.  So here are some of the practical tips I have taken into my business that have also worked for me.

Mark McCormack, dubbed 'the most powerful man in sport', founded IMG (International Management Group) on a handshake. It was the first and is the most successful sports management company in the world, becoming a multi-million dollar, worldwide corporation whose activities in the business and marketing spheres are so diverse as to defy classification. Here, Mark McCormack reveals the secret of his success to key business issues such as analysing yourself and others, sales, negotiation, time management, decision-making and communication. What They Don't Teach You at Harvard Business School fills the gaps between a business school education and the street knowledge that comes from the day-to-day experience of running a business and managing people. It shares the business skills, techniques and wisdom gleaned from twenty-five years of experience.

Mark McCormack, dubbed 'the most powerful man in sport', founded IMG (International Management Group) on a handshake. It was the first and is the most successful sports management company in the world, becoming a multi-million dollar, worldwide corporation whose activities in the business and marketing spheres are so diverse as to defy classification. Here, Mark McCormack reveals the secret of his success to key business issues such as analysing yourself and others, sales, negotiation, time management, decision-making and communication. What They Don't Teach You at Harvard Business School fills the gaps between a business school education and the street knowledge that comes from the day-to-day experience of running a business and managing people. It shares the business skills, techniques and wisdom gleaned from twenty-five years of experience.

Mark H. McCormack

What They Don't Teach You At Harvard Business School

Every brand that is serious in securing equity in the market place must leverage every digital opportunity that exists.But it is not just about having a website, it is about having a clear business strategy that leverages online opportunities to maximise sales. Clearly, Toys’rus could have done more with their online game.The reason is simple - more consumers now opt for online shopping, but you need to attract them to your online store.The moment you don’t take the digital space as seriously, you’re already taking major leaps backwards into extinction.

Digital/Online Is The Present And The Future

The summation of all the interactions between your customer and your brand is the overall customer experience.Leave a gap and the customer is already making their way towards your competition.It is no longer about a good product only, there is more focus on how a customer feels through the experience shopping with you.Both in-store and online shopping experiences of the old toys’rus were not as seamless as new decade consumer experiences. This is a major issue that leads to customer attrition in any brand.

Customer Experience Is A Game Changer

Shopping is clearly now an omnichannel experience with customers buying in store, online or switching across both experiences simultaneously.Within these experiences is a huge customer need that must never be underestimated - Convenience.Every winning brand know that it is not enough to have limited options. Customers want the flexibility of shipping choices, quicker delivery, various payment options and much more. At the core of this is convenience.

Convenience Is A Core Customer Need

If data is not seen as gold by any brand, then they are already coasting towards extinction.But data is not just about seeing what is truly happening. It is also about making every attempt to anticipate where the market, customers and the business industry is heading.The key here is to stay ahead of the game by anticipating market changes that can impact your business so you can make data-driven decisions to keep your brand afloat and winning.

Data Reveals More Than You Can Think

The last point is all about being customer centric. If Toys’rus had put just a bit more focus on listening to what their customers were saying, and studying what their customers were doing and not doing, it may have revealed risks and opportunities within the brand.When you ignore the importance of the customer’s voice, you may just end up building a brand without the customers you’re looking to win in the first place.No customers, no business!

Listen To Your Customers

It took me a long time to believe that Toys’rus had truly disappeared from the streets of retail.  While I am glad the brand is making its way back, here are some key business lessons for any brand that wants to stay in the marketplace.

When familiarity is a strategy, you lose market share.

Lessons from Toys R us - How to Remain in Business and not Lose Brand Equity

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