 "I
left Corporate America two years ago. A year after leaving,
in some disarray in starting my specialty deserts business,
I participated in the Marketing for Smarties Challenge.
The program was immensely beneficial in helping me to understand
that marketing is the driving force to success. To attain
that, I must bring to my small business the same organization
and discipline used by large corporations. The right message
and a marketing plan were needed, also resources, especially
technology and people, even if the people are part-timers
or interns. Structure and professionalism developed through
the Challenge led me to open up greater opportunities
than I had imagined possible."
"I
took the Marketing for Smarties Challenge six
months before starting my business, and I benefited greatly
from it. The seminar helped me think through the skills
that I would need to develop in order to market my business,
and whether or not I was ready to take the next step. Now
that my business has been up and running for six months,
I find that I am able to implement my marketing plan, and
I keep returning to the basic principles that I learned."
"Takes
the mystery out of marketing for small business owners."
"The
two most important things we learned to use from the program
are the timelines and relationship building through database
marketing. The timelines enable us to set goals with simple
marketing activities; we consult the timelines every day to
see how we're doing. We've found lists of local businesses
in our market that use trucks. The names are entered into the
database, and then we use a mix of mailings and telemarketing
to find leads and develop prospects. As a result, we've been
meeting our goals regularly since we started using the program.
There's more to the process that's offered in the program that
we haven't used so far, but expect to as the process evolves."
"As
a creative professional, I had never studied marketing.
When I started my own visual communications company after
years of working for others, I realized I must become educated
on business survival strategies in the highly competitive
field of graphic design. I committed to the four Marketing
for Smarties workshops and it has proved to be the
smartest, most cost-effective move I could have made for
my 18 month old business. Not only was Don Warner’s
savvy book and personal presentation easy to understand,
but it gave me the tools and structure I needed to methodically
handle what had seemed like a dreaded task before. Marketing
for Smarties has put my “feet to the fire” in
a wholly positive way, teaching me how to integrate marketing
activities into my business routine. "
"I
wanted you to know what a completely valuable experience
it was and how glad I am I was able to be part of it. We
launched our new web site last night at midnight. I had
spent days working on the copy for the whole site and all
the exercise you had us complete really helped immensely
and continue to guide our growing business."
"I
was forced to confront issues I’ve been running away
from for years. Don Warner speaks softly, but gives strong
advice."
"It’s
got the big picture, yet it’s also got so many of the
small things, the bits and pieces you’ve got to know
about to make marketing work for a small business.”
"Feel
like I got thousands of dollars worth of consulting advice."
"Changed
my life; I know what I'm doing now when I work on marketing."
"We
had a recruiter who went through the Marketing for Smarties program
and did a fabulous job of finding new students for us, some
in new areas. Unfortunately, she just resigned. But I'm not
worried. The process she used is in place and well-documented.
The replacement should require very little help picking up
where the previous person ended."
"I
particularly enjoyed having a month of working on each
step of the process. It gave me
the opportunity to learn and change the things that had to
be corrected or implemented.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not finished with the ending
of class. It is an ongoing piece of
work to run this and any business, yet I am fortunate now
to have a working concept
of what it takes to be successful…recommendation – that
you don’t take the manual and think you are going to
go it alone, you can, however you will be doing yourself
a huge disservice. There is so much that comes up with each
class that it is the nuts and bolts of running a business.
For those of us who are the new kids on the block, it is
important to have a mentor to help us navigate the shadows….one
thing I left out is that it was good fun, not like going
back to school…we were novices; struggling business
owners and wannabes, who were all treated to healthy helpings
of just what we had to do to get things going in a prosperous
direction.
"Thank
you for the Smarties program. The information has
helped me focus on what I needed to do for our business.
The workshops’ structure was inspirational. The combination
has given me a clear marketing direction."
"Marketing
for Smarties is a step-by-step process that works
even for
marketing novices like me. Don Warner has taken his years
of experience of
working with major corporate marketing departments and condenses
their
techniques for use by entrepreneurs. It is clear to me now — if
you want to
see your business grow — Marketing for Smarties is
the way to do it. Trust
the process.
"Learning
to ask what works and what doesn't work was one of the
most valuable lessons learned from the program. This led
us to major improvements in our most important marketing
tool, telemarketing. We now measure the effectiveness of
different scripts by results-oriented criteria: appointments,
conversions, and recruiting new agents. This benefit and
others were derived from the coaching and from the frank
exchange with other owners who gave candid assessments
of many of our business practices."
"I’ve
always known marketing is important and that it must work
since big companies spend lots of money on it. Whenever
I tried to get a grasp of marketing I couldn’t because
it was seemed just like air, nothing to really get a hold
of. When “Marketing for Smarties” was
offered at the Small Business Development Center at the
Santa Fe Community College, I figured I’d give it
a try. The workbook and Tool shed (a DC with the worksheets
from the workbook) gave focus and made concrete the concepts
of marketing, which I now use. I have also discovered that
marketing is a continual process. As a small business owner
I found “Marketing for Smarties” invaluable
and to the point."
The Marketing
For Smarties course was very detailed and informative,
a learning experience and a great directive towards business
operations.
"Taking Marketing
for Smarties was great! It made me rethink
who my target market was. More importantly, it
gave me an opportunity to tell my prospects what separates
me from my competition and how my services can benefit
their organization. The thought process was crucial
to me! Once I developed my copy platform, I was
able to not only utilize this material consistently but
it gave me the clarity I needed to verbalize my differential
advantage in my elevator pitch.
"
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