Grant Stanley Consulting

Selling can be sleazy when it’s manipulative. “Let me convince you to do something so I’ll get what I want.” If you want to grow your business, and feel good about yourself at the same time, it’s necessary to change the way you think about “selling.” Everyone buys things. If you provide a product or service that has real value and helps people solve real problems, there is someone who will want to buy it. That someone is struggling with the problem you’re prepared to solve. They wouldn’t want a solution if solving the problem wasn’t important to them. So if you can help them solve their problem and do a good job of it, you have become their new best friend. They not only will want to buy what you have to sell, they will want to buy from you again and again because now they have begun to trust that you are someone who can help them solve their problems. When you are able to shift your thinking from “I’m selling something” to “I’m serving someone by helping them solve a probl...

Innovators or Sheep? Have you ever notice that so many companies want to be visionary? Able to predict future products and services you need; but yet they also say they respond to market demand by being market-driven . Seems to me that’s an oxymoron. Can you be both market-driving and market-driven? To disruptively break free from reactive business strategy and accelerate the agile and pivot-able strategy, we need to understand the difference between market-driving and market-driven companies. In his 2004 book, “Marketing as Strategy,” Nurmalya Kumar characterised these two types of strategies. Market-driving companies rule the future – they push the envelope of possibility and consistently surprise customers by introducing unique value in exceptional brand new products and services. Market driven companies are doomed to fall increasingly further behind as they react to customer needs that will surely change by the time they deliver the ultimately out of date p...

10 Reasons Why your Boss shouldn’t be Your Friend Is it ever OK for a manager to be friends with their employees? Believe me, this isn’t just a question brand new manager’s struggle with (and most of them do). It’s an issue a lot of experienced managers are questioned about as well, and many of them don’t think it’s a problem at all. The issue of “buddy to boss” might not be as black and white as you might think. Conventional management and HR 101 wisdom would tell you it’s absolutely not OK. In fact, some companies might even try to outlaw it through “cronyism” policies. However, in the real world of work, emotions and relationships can’t be governed by policy. Workplace relationships are can be extremely tricky, just as personal or family relationships can be. Managers are not robots – they have feelings and emotions. Sometimes you can’t help but like one employee more than another. Sometimes workplace romances blossom between managers and employees (that’s a whol...

Marketing Spend in 2015   There’s no better time than the New Year to bring fresh ideas to your business. Last year we saw the rise of crowdfunding, the announcement of exciting wearable technologies, and a continued effort to engage customers through social media and mobile. It was a year of thrilling trends in consumer development. How many times have you or one of your colleagues said “That’s just the way things are done around here”? Don’t get stuck in a pattern of doing things a certain way just because that’s how things have always been done. Ask WHY, and if there isn’t a good reason perhaps now is the time to think of changing. Innovation in 2015, innovative ways to spend your budget. There’s no better time than a New Year and a new budget to bring fresh ideas to your business. Here are 5 exciting and innovative places to allocate your marketing budget in 2015 with an eye toward future revenue streams: 1. Getting to know your buyers Consumers are expec...

The New Year will be here before you know it, and 2015 promises to bring exciting trends. Before you make the leap into 2015, it is important to look back and see which parts of your company flourished and which areas could use improvement. Which tactics did you use and were they successful? You need to know if you were able to exceed your company’s forecasted financial goals and how the marketing tactics you used attributed to that success. Marketing professionals are already making their own estimations about what kinds of trends to expect in the very near future. Here is a list of a few trends you may want to keep in mind as you develop your 2015 marketing strategy: Visual Storytelling. Short videos have gotten very popular, especially with the younger demographics. They are short and engaging and, when done correctly, instill a strong message. Get your staff and customers involved by shooting a quick video of how your business operates  and post it to your social media a...

1)   Learn how to Delegate and do more of it. There are so many things to do when you're running a business, it's easy to delude ourselves that we need to do all of them. Then we wonder why we're so tired and frazzled and have no time to do anything else!  Determine your own Return On Investment, and decide to let someone else do some of the tasks for a change. Delegation is the key to a healthy work-life balance. 2) Promote your business regularly and consistently. Too often the task of promoting a business slips to the bottom of the to-do list in the press of urgent tasks. If you want to attract new customers, you have to make promotion a priority. Make a New Year's resolution to hire a marketing expert, or take the time to create a Marketing Plan on your own and follow through. Try some Low-Cost ways to promote your business to get started. 3) Make business planning a weekly event. Planning is vital if you want a healthy, growing business....

A powerful way to develop creative solutions is with storytelling.  Today companies are looking for ways to solve problems using creative processes. Creative storytelling offers significant benefits to every company. This process is not only much more rewarding for everyone involved , it actually produces more innovative and longer lasting results.   Here are just a few of the reasons why storytelling can help your company to develop collaborative solutions that deliver a genuine return on investment. Creativity and Ideas Generation Creative thinking in business yields measurable results. A culture of creativity within an organisation fosters idea generation and nurtures innovation. A co-creation process involves more people, which in turn generates more ideas. These people can include employees, customers and the wider community. Ideas that are developed within this group inform the story behind your business and your brand. Make use of the experiences of these pe...

After many months of procrastination, we finally committed the time and resources into finalising our website.  Whilst it is not spectacular, it is functional and contains FREE material for anyone to download and use. CSM Consultants are committed to providing a cost effective service that focuses on Inspiring and Enabling Business owners and employees to achieve new heights. We are your company's hindsight and our opinions can become your foresight! http://www.csmconsultants.co.uk