WaltzWorks University
My series of courses to help you learn the skills necessary to take your business to the next level (with many more coming soon!)
Business Strategy Basics
Introduction: I write a lot about business strategy and that it’s important, but I just realized that I really haven’t shared my definition of it. To understand the term “strategy”, it helps to realize that the term is a shortened way to refer to your business’ “strategic plan,” so whenever I say “strategy” you can
The Customer Journey: The Difference between Successful and Failing Business
Your business has a relationship with your customer. It might currently be “two strangers” or it could be a deep and mutually helpful bond. But there is a relationship and constantly improving it is critical to your business’ success. It’s important that you understand the process a person does through as they change a total
The Business Bridge: Building a Successful Business
Sometimes it’s really hard to know where to start or what to work on when you don’t have a good idea of how a business functions and how customers interact with it. This isn’t just about SEO or whether your photo background is white or gray or picking the right logo… it’s a much bigger
Market Communications: The Voice of Your Business
Last time, I addressed the first support pier of the Business Bridge, Product-to-Market Fit. If you haven’t read it, I would highly recommend reading it before you read this one. One of the big mistakes I see in new entrepreneurs is they worry about their website, their photos, their descriptions, and their branding before they
Product-to-Market Fit: The Foundation of your Business
This is where successful businesses start. It’s the equivalent of the foundation that goes under a building or the roots under a tree. Everything else your business ever does is to support this one thing. Without it, you have nothing to communicate to customers and you have no operations that need to run smoothly. Customers won’t
The Business Bridge: Supporting the Customer Journey
The last several posts have been on the Customer Journey, which is about how the customer sees and interacts with your business on their way from total stranger to loyal customer who tells all their friends about you. Each post had several ways to help move the customer along to the next stage. The reason
The Target Market Montage
Before I dig into the next series of posts on the three pillars that “hold up” the Business Bridge, I wanted to touch on Target Market one more time. It’s a major component in Product-to-Market fit that a lot of people struggle with. In this post, I’ll describe a few different ways of looking at
Customer Journey Part 5: Turning Loyal Customers into Advocates
This is the big one. Advocacy is the last step of the Customer Journey. It’s the stage where you have customers who love your product and business so much, they tell everyone they know about their experience with your company and convince them to make purchases from you. Businesses that succeed in this stage will
Customer Journey Part 4: Building Customer Loyalty
The goal of the loyalty stage is to get customers to come back to your business and make additional purchases in the future. Success in this stage is a major differentiator between businesses that keep growing year after year and businesses that fail. It takes a lot of work to get new customers (which you’ve probably
Customer Journey Part 3: Ways to Convert Prospects into Customers
The Conversion stage is when customers actually make a purchase. To get to this stage, your customers first became aware of your products, then they compared your product to other products and to the ideal they had in their mind and decided that yours is the one they want. All you have to do is
Customer Journey Part 2: Techniques for Winning the Consideration Stage
First, you helped the customer find out that your business/product existed in the Awareness stage. Most likely the customer found several products they liked, so now they will start to decide which product they like most before they make a purchase. The Consideration stage, which is the second stage of the Customer Journey, is when the customer
Customer Journey Part 1: 18 Techniques to Build Awareness for your Business
So you’ve done lots of hard work, establishing a target customer, designing something they should love, validating it with enough people you’re sure it will work, and figuring out how you will convince these people that your product is everything they ever wanted. It’s posted and ready for sale.. now what? There are lots of
Email Marketing Basics
I know. Everyone struggles with email marketing. It’s almost a given for small business owners. I have some bad news for you. This isn’t going to tell you what to put in your newsletter. Quite the opposite, I’m going to tell you a monthly newsletter isn’t enough. I have even more bad news. Most free