Reading Time: 3 min Starting back in 2006, Dos Equis ran a series of commercials featuring “The Most Interesting Man in the World”. If you’ve not seem any of them before, here is an example: When reading Robert Carnes’ book “The Story Cycle“, he made an interesting note about these videos and the bit of humility they always showed […]
Marketing
Cold outreach is the domain of spammers
Reading Time: 2 min I’ve frequently shared my distain for any company that pushes cold outreach. Blair Enns recently wrote an excellent post where he breaks down the three tiers of lead generation: Tier I: Inbound leadsPeople that find you via your content or referrals from others, with no specific action on your part. Tier II: Warm OutreachThese are […]
More content leads to shorter sales cycles
Reading Time: 2 min If the sales cycle with your company seems to be getting longer and longer, that may indicate a lack of content production on your part. Without solid, regular content, people can’t get to know and trust you until they’ve had direct conversations with you. While those conversations are essential in every case, if you can […]
You need less data, not more
Reading Time: < 1 min Many agencies will produce monthly or quarterly reports for their clients that are 20 pages long, full of charts and graphs and data. Everything in there is useful, but very few clients will take the time to read through a 20 page report. Over the years at GreenMellen, we’ve worked to reduce the quantity of […]
We all have accessibility needs
Reading Time: < 1 min Website accessibility is something I’ve shared a lot about. We’ve written about it on the GreenMellen blog, devoted a podcast episode to it, and there are a handful of posts on here as well. Polishing up the accessibility of your website is a great thing, and makes it so all users can consume the content […]
Seeking social status gives others power over you
Reading Time: < 1 min There are a lot of people with millions of followers on social media. Many call themselves “influencers” because they feel they have influence over their followers, but in most cases they really don’t. William Irvine’s excellent book “A Guide to the Good Life” says it perfectly: “If we seek social status, we give other people […]
Don’t make a bigger mistake
Reading Time: 2 min Sometimes you will execute something perfectly, yet another person might think you’ve made a mistake. Depending on who that is, it might be worth owning up to your “mistake” rather than making a bigger one by trying to correct them. In his pursuit of excellence, Danny Meyer shares these thoughts in the book “Unreasonable Hospitality“, […]
Make the complicated simple
Reading Time: < 1 min Making something simple can be a very tricky thing to do. Historically, Apple has been fantastic at this, with hugely complex products that have a very simple and intuitive UI. As I shared a few years ago, many things start out simple, gradually become more complex, and then need to put in some work to […]
Boast or fact?
Reading Time: < 1 min When marketing your company, there’s a fine line between boasting and sharing facts. Boasting can be fine is certain cases, but facts should always win. A recent post from Jonathan Stark laid this out perfectly, and he compared it to the movie “Elf” where Buddy tries the “World’s Best Cup Of Coffee”. If you’ve not […]
Give or take?
Reading Time: 2 min After my recent post “experts don’t cold call“, I had an interesting comment from a friend. He defended cold calling to a degree, and ended with “you have to start somewhere when you’re new“. I agree with that, but you have a choice when you’re new: you can choose to give of yourself, or you […]