Shawn drilled holes through me with his stare. Sitting in a booth at Abuelo’s, his hands clinched and his jaw tightened.  Shawn just explained how he made a recent purchase, did all of the research before the purchase, and avoided any contact with sales people. He also told me about a recent campaign he launched […]

You’ve setup your inbound sales funnel and loaded it with helpful content that endears you to your prospects. Next, you start paid advertising to send prospects into your funnel. Then someone clicks on your ad, goes to your landing page and completes the form. You call to follow up with the lead and find they […]

Do you suffer from a lack of imagination? We do! As a result, people do “wrong things” on our website and it hurts our customer engagement. But it’s not the visitor’s fault they’re doing the “wrong thing.” It’s our fault for making it an option and our lack of imagination to anticipate this. The good […]

Hubspot is a wonderful platform for inbound marketing. It’s ability to coordinate and track multiple marketing activities in one platform is empowering. It is still our recommended platform for many businesses. But one of its most ballyhooed features is problematic and needs attention. We’ve got 3 unique and different issues with Hubspot’s Smart Content. After […]

Please stop reading and use your precious brain cells for something more productive than a debate about logo design. Please! For the sake of all that is good and decent, stop reading. Go do something that will actually make money for you. Still reading? Well, you’ve been warned. What follows is an irreverent rant and […]

You may not know Richard F. Teerlink, but you know his work. Teerlink oversaw one of the most amazing comebacks in American history. Starting near bankruptcy, he soon had people signed on two-year waiting lists to buy his product. The secret to Teerlink’s turn-around? He quit selling his product. No, he didn’t fire the sales […]

I was shocked awake one morning with a warning of my impending death on my computer display. Was Fat Tony or Sammy the Bull about to visit? No, just more bad marketing from Allstate. You know an advertiser is desperate when they threaten you with death. You may have read about the saga of how […]

You should be acting like Scotty by now. Yes, three decades ago, Mr. Scott (of “Beam me up, Scotty”) famously assumed computers had voice interfaces. He was shocked when he realized he had to type to get what he wanted. “How quaint!” Scotty called a keyboard in 1986. This was one year after Dell produced […]

To find advertising success, focus on The One Thing. Yes, that is the crusty cowboy’s signature from the movie City Slickers. It is also the title of the New York Times bestselling book by Gary Keller which was published by Ray Bard at Bard Press. More than half of Bard Press publications hit top seller […]