Hi…
Welcome to my Success Letter. I’m just guessing here, but since you are reading my About page, I’m thinking you might want to know more about this site and maybe even about me. Am I close?
Here’s the official description of the site:
Marketing, sales and service tips, articles and resources for small business
Whether you run a small bricks and mortar business, a pure Internet play or something in between, You have three things to get right to create a successful business.
First is Service. For our purposes, Service is the process of delivering of your product or service and your interaction with customers after delivery. If you can’t handle this one, all the sales and marketing success in the world won’t help you and could hurt you.
Of course, in order to provide Service, you do need sales. For our purpose, Sales is the process of turning prospects into buyers.
To make Sales, you need prospects, which is where Marketing comes in. For our purpose, Marketing is the process of turning strangers into prospects.
Once you can effectively satisfy your current number of buyers, you can increase profits by increasing the number of buyers. One way to do that is to improve your sales process.
Once you’ve optimized your sales process, you can increase profits by increasing the number of prospects exposed to your sales process. The way to do that is to improve and expand your marketing.
So who am I creating this site for, anyway?
I’m aiming this public portion of the Success Letter at small business owners, freelancers and would-be entrepreneurs interested in building and growing a thriving long term business. Novice to intermediate businesspeople will get the most benefit from what’s freely available here.
In the future, you’ll see one or more members-only sections with more in-depth specialized content.
One thing I should mention is that most of what you read here is based on real-life questions and problems of real-life business operators. I’ll also spend some time explaining and defining some of the things I’ll talk about. If you know how I’m defining certain things and what I mean when a say things, it will make things a whole lot easier to understand.
I’m also doing this public site so I can learn from you. One of the things I learned a long time ago is that “none of us is as smart as all of us”, so your feedback will be welcomed and encouraged. When it’s appropriate, I’ll be passing along articles, tips and resources from hand-picked subject matter experts so you can benefit from their knowledge and experience, too.
What was that? Who the heck am I and why should you listen to me?
Bet you thought I wasn’t listening, didn’t you?
It’s a fair question.
My name is John McCabe, and in the 50+ trips I’ve made around the sun, I’ve held a lot of jobs and worked in a lot of different fields. Almost all of it working with small to medium size companies, including my own.
One thing I found out I’m good at is listening to people and helping them solve their problems. When I worked as a design engineer for an industrial manufacturing company, I probably spent more time working with the marketing department, the filed sales reps and even the end users than I did designing. I was good at explaining things in ways people understood.
You’ll notice that I used the word “process” a lot. I’m a firm believer that Marketing, Sales and Service can be boiled down to repeatable processes and systems, which can be both measured and improved.
My wife of 28+ years and I live in southwest Florida, partly for family reasons, partly for the weather and partly for the world-class fishing available here year-round.
