We had a great show this week! First though, we’d like to thank our good friend Stephanie Lloyd for stepping up and guest-co-hosting while our regular Stephanie (Frost) was off.
Our first guest of the morning was Steve Tingiris of an innovative startup enthusem.com which allows users to create, personalize and send customized printed greeting cards to their contacts. The enthusem.com tools even provide the means for users to provide an online attachment for each printed greeting card and track the number of times it’s accessed. But the most remarkable thing about what Enthusem does isn’t in the tools themselves, it’s in how they can be incoporated into an effective selling strategy.
Steve talked about how the traditional model of a “sales funnel”, where businesses market to a large market segment and then filter down to the prospects most interested, is an outdated approach to small business marketing. He instead recommends turning the funnel “upside-down” by focusing energy on a very few targeted outstanding prospects. We definitely recommend checking out enthusem.com and all you Twitter geeks out there should check out the innovative social media applications of their program.
We also spoke to our lawyer friend Justin Daniels and commercial realtor Ted Schwartz about how to negotiate your office lease. Ted quickly dispelled the myth, by the way, that bad market + real estate surplus = practically free office/retail space. He also gave us some great insight on what to look for in a landlord.
What may be most memorable from our discussion though was Justin’s analogy comparing a commercial lease to an octopus with it’s tentacles perpetually reaching for your wallet. There is obviously a lot of detail there that many business owners aren’t going to be able to easily navigate without an eye for fine print. So, until octopus-proof pants are readily available on the mass market, Justin recommends consulting with a lawyer before entering into a long-term lease with a landlord.
