Most companies are still using traditional sales and marketing approaches and techniques - email blasts, cold calls, direct marketing, large sales teams, inside sales reps, etc.  Very few companies are taking advantage of marketing automation solutions.  What is marketing automation?  A marketing automation solution allows you to orchestrate the delivery of personalized communications and information to your leads in order to automatically nurture, score, and qualify prospects.  The system allows you to focus on marketing and selling to the prospects...

While I won't use the word "never," you will really have to convince me that it makes sense for a small business to build its own proprietary small business software solution unless they are in the business of selling software.  It hurts me a little to make such a statement as I started my career as a software engineer building custom enterprise software solutions.  However, times have changed and custom software is the wrong solution for most businesses today. Building...

Life, for most of us, is hectic and crazy.  There's constant pressure at work and at home.  It seems impossible to catch up.  We all wear multiple hats, constantly multitask, and live with little margin.  From time to time, we try to address the problem by resetting, de-cluttering, and re-prioritizing.  While this works for a short time, we often find ourselves back where we were - dominated by busyness, stressed to the max, and suffering from lack of joy and...

Managing people is one of the biggest challenges of any business.  Your employees can make or break you.  The people problem is even more important for early stage businesses.  You can't make a hiring mistake when you are just getting started - period.  However, as you grow, you must add people.  You will greatly limit your ability to scale if you don't know how to manage people properly.  Managing people is a complex problem that's hard to replicate successfully.  Here's...

Josh Andrews, founder of Legal to English, recently interviewed John Burdett, founder of Fast Slow Motion, about the importance of building businesses based upon practical processes and procedures.   The interview covers: How you can’t build the perfect product and you can’t just sell anything, but you need to meet somewhere in the middle.Building business processes to make you successful.How dangerous it is to scale without business processes in place.Simply purchasing technology can’t solve the underlying problem of a bad processes.Building...