Lynn Serafinn's Blog: Trentino Genealogy, page 13

How Can We Shift GRACEFULLY Into Sales During a Consultation?

Lynn Serafinn explains why many service providers find it difficult to ‘close the deal’, and shares a template for consultations that ‘sell without selling’.

Here at the 7 Graces Project, we’ve been developing several courses – to be launched to the public in late 2014 – in the foundations and applications of ethical marketing. In our current ‘beta’ groups for these courses, many participants are independent business owners from various professional service industries, such as coaches, counse...

Why Companies LOSE Customers As They Get BIGGER

Guest Blogger Cindy Barnes discusses the lifecycle of organisations and how, by neglecting this natural process, they risk damaging their customers’ trust.

Companies are born, they’re established or formed, they grow and develop, they reach maturity, they begin to decline and age and – if nothing is done to refresh them and align them to the market – they eventually die. This is the nature of people (except we can’t be revived!), of products and of organisations and yet many of the businesses...

Could Our Business and Marketing Be a Type of YOGA?

What does ‘yoga’ really mean? Lynn Serafinn explains how understanding the ‘yoga of business’ can increase connection within oneself and throughout the World.

Earlier this week, I was interviewed by a lovely lady named Andrea Allen who runs a company called ‘Yogify Your Business’. Andrea had asked me to be one of over 20 speakers on a telesummit she was organising for the purpose of exploring how business and marketing could align to the principles of yoga (I’ll tell you more about this free e...

How Do We INSPIRE Our Potential Customers?

Community blogger Simon Pimenta explores the nature of Inspiration and how to identify and deliver blog content that your customers will actually want to read.

No one likes being sold to. Yet most of us have experienced it. We buy a new TV and the salesperson tries to sell us a warranty we don’t want. We are not even safe from salespeople in our own home. They call on us uninvited, knock on our front door, trying to sell us everything from tea towels, double-glazing and even God. At the same...

Expert Salesmanship OR Just Plain Manipulation?

7 Graces co-director Nancy Goodyear challenges strategies recommended by many sales & marketing gurus, and suggests a more human, customer-focused alternative.

I recently read The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber – a renowned ‘classic’ on entrepreneurship – and I have to say that I found it fascinating and exciting. It really helped me to look at The 7 Graces Project CIC and see what my co-director, Lynn Serafinn, and I needed to do to get the organisation up and running in a sustainable man...

3 Things Customers Want to be Able to TRUST About You

Ethical marketer Lynn Serafinn discusses how our customers come to trust us, and how old-school marketing methods meant to build trust can actually destroy it.

Back when I started my current practice in 2007, I had been away from entrepreneurial endeavours and marketing for a few years having spent the past 8 years in the educational sector. When I returned to the world of business, everything had changed. In the late 90s, having an online business simply meant having a website. In the ‘old da...

From Marketing to Sales – What Happens When MONEY Steps In?

Lynn Serafinn shows how money is the 3rd party in the relationship with our customers, and how our relationship with money influences how we run our business.

In my work as a marketing consultant, I work with a lot of business owners who want to build their online platforms through blogging, social media, partnership campaigns and other strategies. In the early phases of our platform building activities, the focus is primarily upon establishing their brand identity, gaining social media follow...

5 Lessons to Remember When Starting Your Own Business

7 Graces Community blogger Sue Ellam shares valuable lessons she learned when setting up her own company, and how every business start-up has a life of its own.

When I first had the idea for my own business I was extremely naïve as to what it would entail to get it up and running. I thought it was just a case of getting the business registered, a bank account opened, a website built and off we’d go! Maybe this works for some people, but I can tell you that it didn’t work that way for me at al...

‘Being’ versus ‘Doing’ in Collaboration

7 Graces co-Director Nancy Goodyear examines the importance of ‘being’ in collaborative projects and warns of the dangers of focussing solely on the to-do list.

Collaboration is a wonderful way of working. It allows us to do things we just couldn’t do on our own. It brings out our creativity in a different way than working alone does, and it brings us out of our shells and into contact with our colleagues and peers. All of which is great, especially for those of us who work for ourselves and f...

7 Barriers that Stop You from Understanding Your Customers

Most companies talk of placing customers at the heart of their business, yet very few actually do. Corporate consultant Cindy Barnes explores why this happens.

I was with a customer last week working on their global customer account process. We were discussing the ethnographic customer experience research that my company, Futurecurve, had completed for them. My customer was delighted with what we had uncovered but was lamenting their own incompetence at conducting any type of deep customer lis...