Strategy Hour | Online Marketing for Business Growth

Today we’re going to talk about the art of the follow-up! Once you’ve pitched your service, it’s possible that you’ll experience potential clients ghosting you, being passive-aggressive towards you, or fighting against the process that you’re trying to put them through. All three of those things have happened to us in the last seven days so we know all about those weird experiences. In an ideal world, people will seamlessly move through your sales process, discovery call, and pitch meeting, and then they’ll pay you. This happens almost half of the time but the other half of the time, you’ll be faced with resistance and objections that you’ll have to work through. Today, we’re going to talk you through how to deal with them!Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Being a human being these days is undeniably stressful. We are constantly expected to function at our best while being endlessly bombarded with a million different things that are competing for our attention. Add social media into the mix and now you also have to deal with an onslaught of content about anything and everything, from how you too can achieve impossible standards of beauty to live feeds of devastating world events. All of these rapid changes have had a tangible impact and are evident in the rising rates of depression, anxiety, and a host of other mental health issues. So how do you, as a leader, support your team in this climate of information overload and unprecedented global events? Tune in for a deep dive as we discuss the single most important skill for leadership, the research underpinning it, and why it will not only make you a better leader but also, a better person! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We’re in the final quarter of the year and it’s the perfect time to hunker down, focus, and refine. This is the season to investigate what’s working in your business and what’s not so you can make strategic and educated improvements going into the next year. In preparation, you’re going to need to start collecting data in order to identify your greatest areas of opportunity and gauge where to place your focus.This past week we walked through a quarterly optimization training with our clients, and today, we want to share some of the conversations we had there so you can learn from them and apply the takeaways to your own business. In this episode, you’ll find out how one of our clients increased her close rate by 40% and where she discovered she needed to place her focus once her sales process was in order.Tune in to find out which metrics are worth analyzing, how to pitch up to a planning session, and much more, including some tangible tips for improving your sales strategy!Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, we want to share with you some behind-the-scenes live action of the “tweaking and repeating” that we do whenever we implement something new in our business. If you’ve been listening to the show for a while, you’ve probably heard us talk about this concept before. As a refresher, “tweaking and repeating” means to take a particular action in your business for a set amount of time (at least 30 days) and then go back and reflect. Think about how it went, how it made you feel, and if there are any opportunities for you to pivot and improve what you’ve tried.Listen in as we discuss a rundown of our “tweak and repeat” process on something that we started exactly 30 days ago. We’re going to go through the results, the things we want to keep doing, and the things we want to change. We’re showing you an example, so that you can go through the same assessment process in your own business.Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A pitch deck and a proposal serve the same purpose, but they’re certainly not interchangeable. Simply put, a proposal takes everything mentioned in a long form pitch deck and distills it into a streamlined piece of communication to back up everything you have already mentioned and sold to your client. The response you’re seeking when you send this along is “Oh yes, this is what we discussed.” That’s why, when we hear that you’re sending off proposals without any previous communication, we get worried! People are skipping the communication altogether and putting together proposals without any setup.Could you still convert people by simply sending them an email? Yes, totally. Especially if you’ve done a lot of education on your website. But if there’s any confusion at all about what you do, without a presentation, you’re going to lose someone. This is a part of your process we really want you to start caring about. It’s an opportunity to stand out by going above and beyond what other service providers are doing. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The number one thing we are encouraging business owners to do right now is to be flexible. If you can adapt to the needs of the people you’re talking to, then you’re putting yourself in a great position to make sales and optimally serve your clients so that you can both succeed! But how do you reach those clients? And how do you demonstrate that you are the right person for the job?In today’s episode, we break down how to put together a fantastic pitch deck that will showcase your skills and leave your future clients feeling both inspired and excited. Putting together all the information you need for a pitch deck may seem overwhelming, but once you automate things it will make the process so much easier. We’re here to demonstrate how you can take a structured, predictable, templated approach, while also providing the space to customize your pitch for every client. So if you've been feeling like your process could use a little sprucing up, today’s episode is for you!Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We’ve all known that kid at school. The one who completely takes over group projects and feels the need to micromanage every, single, little detail. If this sounds just a little too familiar, then you’re in good company! Being a perfectionist is tough, and it can come with a host of insidious bedfellows, like procrastination, self-doubt, and debilitating indecisiveness. But what if you could befriend your perfectionism, and make it your superpower? While it’s undoubtedly challenging dealing with perfectionism, we want to propose imagining a new way forward that doesn’t rely on your self-doubt. What if, instead of beating ourselves up over our tendency towards perfectionism, we instead embrace the strengths we have to offer? After interfacing with countless clients who struggle with perfectionism we decided to come up with the Bust the Perfectionism Toolkit. This innovative toolkit is made up of easy-to-implement strategies that allow high-achieving business owners to tackle perfectionism once and for all. Tune in as we discuss the powers and pitfalls of perfectionism, and find out what you can expect from the Bust the Perfectionism Toolkit!Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We’ve been alluding to all of our secret projects in the works for months now but haven’t yet spilled. We are simply dying to talk about the behind-the-scenes projects we’ve been working on, and you can expect an official announcement before this month’s end! Because we’re so close to announcing it, we thought we’d go ahead and let you in on a few of our secrets. We’ve been working with clients for seven years now, and the past year has seen a bit of a shift. As you know, we’ve been banging on about refocusing on working with fewer clients and dipping our toes back into the service side of things, and now that we have an accountable team comprised of individuals with their own niche set of superpowers, we can! For the first time ever, we have a team that is not just there to support us in project management or client communication, but on deliverables, and it’s truly expanded the scope of what we can offer. In this episode, you’ll hear about our evolution over the past seven years and get some insights into what we finally have the bandwidth to offer. If you’re looking to build a stable foundation for years to come and 10x your investment, you’ve come to the right place. We’re here to help you!Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The truth of the matter is that the market is shifting. As small business owners, we absolutely have to be paying attention because how this impacts us in the next few years is going to be really important. We all knew things would change after the pandemic, but two years later, we’re seeing the results in unexpected ways.There just isn’t a recipe anymore. Instead of following predetermined steps to success, we’re all having to figure it out as we go. The strategies that we all once relied on are no longer effective, and we can’t keep doing the same things and expecting to have more reach. Specifically, in the social media space, the strategies that used to bring success are far less effective on the organic side. It’s a gamble.As a result, businesses across the board are having a much harder time predicting where their attention needs to be, where it makes sense to allocate resources and time, and planning for the future of their business. The conversations we have been having with our clients and peers have confirmed that everyone is having a hard time figuring out where to put their focus, where to commit, and where to go all in. What is it going to take to ride the wave and see growth through this unpredictable time? Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Believe it or not, change and growth are possible without you being in a perpetual state of despair. Crisis can’t be the only impetus for scaling your business; we strongly believe that you can seek expansion when things are going well!In this episode, we break down the “Cycle of Despair” and the traps many service-based business owners fall into when they’re seeking to grow their businesses. If you are caught in the cycle of not having enough cash to bring in the support you need to land more clients and not enough clients to bring in the cash you need, we’re here to offer you a new approach.Join us today as we actively aim to reduce your despair, and put the scarcity mindset to rest. There are ebbs and flows to everything that we do; we can’t bypass the dips but we can reframe the way we think about them! To all you kickass business owners out there, tune in to find out how you can set the stress aside and enjoy the fruits of your labor!Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices