Barry’s 80/20 Five-Page Review of Sell or Be Sold by Grant Cardone There are a lot of business owners who are very good at what they do and absolutely terrible at selling it. They have a great product. They provide excellent service. Their customers love them. And they can't figure out why some competitor with an inferior product is making twice as much money. Sometimes the answer is pretty simple. The competitor knows how to sell. You can have the best product in the world,

Barry’s 80/20 Five-Page Review of Endless Referrals by Bob Burg There's something strange about networking. Almost everybody who attends a networking event wants more business. They want introductions, appointments, referrals, and new customers. Yet the people who seem to get the most business from networking are often the ones who spend the least time trying to sell anything. They're interested in other people. They ask questions. They make introductions. They help solve pro

Barry’s 80/20 Five-Page Review of $100M Leads by Alex Hormozi There is a problem that shows up in businesses of just about every size. They need more customers. So they start looking for more leads. They spend money on advertising, hire a salesperson, buy software, start posting on social media, or pay somebody to send thousands of cold emails. And sometimes they get exactly what they asked for. More leads. Unfortunately, the phone still isn't ringing with enough qualified pr

Barry’s 80/20 Five-Page Review of The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More with Less by Richard Koch There’s a particular kind of business day that feels productive right up until you try to explain what it accomplished. You answered messages, handled problems, attended meetings, approved things and cleared a respectable number of items off your list. Then you look at the business and realize the important stuff is sitting almost exactly where you left it. The propos

Barry’s 80/20 Five-Page Review of The Go-Giver by Bob Burg and John David Mann Some businesses only show up when they want something. Buy this. Book that. Schedule a call. They keep asking for attention, appointments and money, then wonder why people aren’t particularly excited to hear from them. Well, would you be? Imagine meeting somebody who immediately explains how important they are, tells you what they sell and asks whether you’d like to buy it. Before you’ve finished y

Barry’s 80/20 Five-Page Review of Building a StoryBrand 2.0 by Donald Miller There is a strange thing that happens in marketing. A company spends years becoming good at what it does. It develops the product, improves the service, hires people, solves problems, and learns the business from the inside out. Then it tries to explain all of that to a potential customer in one paragraph. The result is often a pile of industry language, company history, clever phrases, and twelve di

Barry’s 80/20 Five-Page Review of Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell Most business owners say they want more freedom. Then they spend their days doing work someone else could do, answering questions they have already answered, fixing the same problems again, and checking tasks they supposedly delegated three months ago. That is not freedom. That is owning a company that has learned how to use you as its most overworked employee. Dan Martell’s Buy Back Your Time attacks that pr

Barry’s 80/20 Five-Page Review of Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind by Al Ries and Jack Trout Most businesses have a positioning problem. They just don’t call it that. They call it a lead problem, a website problem, a social media problem, or a sales problem. Then they change the website, run more ads, post more content, and give the sales team another script. Sometimes those things help. Other times, the underlying problem is much simpler: the market doesn’t understand w

Barry’s 80/20 Five-Page Review of The Toyota Way by Jeffrey K. Liker When something goes wrong in a company, there is a very popular management strategy: find somebody to blame. The client wasn’t followed up with. The employee dropped the ball. The project ran late. The order went out wrong. The new person “just doesn’t get it.” Sometimes a person really did make a mistake. People do that. I have even done it myself once or twice, although I am still reviewing the evidence. B

Barry’s 80/20 Five-Page Review of The Adweek Copywriting Handbook by Joseph Sugarman There was a time when writing advertising copy was difficult for a very practical reason: somebody actually had to write it. You needed a copywriter. You needed time. You needed research. You needed drafts. You needed editing. Today I can ask AI for 50 headlines while I’m drinking my coffee. That’s amazing. It’s also dangerous. Because AI has dramatically reduced the cost of producing words w

Barry’s 80/20 Five-Page Review of The E-Myth Revisited by Michael E. Gerber There’s a nasty little trick that happens to a lot of entrepreneurs. You start a business because you want more freedom. You want control over your time. You want to make more money. You want to build something of your own instead of spending your life building somebody else’s. Then five years later you realize something. You didn’t escape your job. You created a harder one. Your new boss works you ni

Barry’s 80/20 Five-Page Review of The 1-Page Marketing Plan by Allan Dib Most businesses are doing plenty of marketing. They have a website. They’re posting on social media. They’ve tried SEO, Google Ads, email, networking, videos, maybe LinkedIn outreach. There are probably half a dozen different marketing activities happening at any given time. But here’s the question: Does it all fit together? Can you clearly explain who you’re trying to reach, what you’re saying to them,

Barry's 80/20 Five-Page Book Review Every week, I'm taking a worthwhile book and doing something slightly sacrilegious to it. I'm boiling the whole damn thing down. Welcome to my 80/20 Five-Page Book Review. The idea is simple. Find approximately the 20% of a great book that contains 80% of the immediately useful ideas. Not because the other 80% is worthless, and certainly not because you shouldn't read the original book. You should. But I read for application. I want to know

It's dead. It doesn't work. It's hard. There are many misconceptions about cold calling everywhere. But there's no crying in baseball. Or...

These three books have made a huge difference in how I do business. I highly recommend all three of them: Grant Cardone's Sell or Be Sold...

Here we are, at the end of this series on Market Research. Now comes the fun part. Here is where we take the information we gained in the...

Before you can ask your target audience a question you have to get in front of them. You can have the best questions in the world but if...

In the last article we talked about defining your target audience, but how do you find out what they really think and believe instead of...

Composing the right marketing message is the difference between success and failure. And what about USPs? What is your company's Unique...

Figuring out your perfect target audience – those buyers most likely to buy, refer and buy again - is the key to a profitable business....