Tell me about your experience with secret shopping your competitors. Have you ever done it? Are you opposed to it? Do you consider it a normal part of competitive research, or does it cross a line for you? I was first introduced to the concept in 2008 while working for someone else. I hated it the first time. It made me feel a little icky, to be honest. But going through the exercise also showed me how valuable the information could be. Simply experiencing a competitor's pre-sale process highlighted areas where we were stronger, areas where they were stronger, and places where we could improve our own customer experience. About two years after we opened our first remodeling company, we discovered that one of our competitors had secret shopped us using a particularly creative approach. At first, I was a little offended. Then I thought about it differently. If a competitor was curious enough about our sales process to study it, I decided to take that as a compliment. Today, because of the work I do, I regularly talk with and interview other marketing agencies. I am always upfront about who I am and why I am talking with them. Even then, I am sometimes surprised by how much companies are willing to share about their processes, pricing, positioning, and approach. Which brings me back to the question: What do you think about secret shopping competitors? Smart competitive research? Something you would never do? Or does it depend on how it is done?

When we first build our companies, our “ideal client” is mostly an educated guess. But after 3–5 years in business? You have REAL DATA. You know which customers are profitable, which projects you want more of, and what types of clients you enjoy working with. Even more importantly, you know which clients and projects you want to AVOID. The problem is, a lot of businesses never go back and check whether their marketing matches what they’ve learned. ❓ Who is actually buying from you? ❓ Where do they live? ❓ What services are they buying? ❓ What are their ages? ❓ What are their demographics? And then . . USE THAT INFORMATION! Optimize your website, social media, email campaigns, ads and all messaging so it evolves to attract your ideal client. If you have built the business, collected the data, and its been more than 5 years since you audited your brand (on and offline). . . its time. What customer or project type did you think you wanted more of when you first built your business, but later realized you didn’t? (My answer is in the comments, below!)

Most business owners are reactive when it comes to their numbers. They hope for more customers. They hope for more revenue. And they hope there’s enough profit left at the end of the month. But there are actually five key areas you and your team can intentionally focus on to influence those results: 1. Qualified Leads – How many potential customers are you attracting? 2. Conversion Rate – How many of those leads become customers? 3. Number of Transactions – How often do your customers buy from you? 4. Average Dollar Sale – How much does the average customer spend each time? 5. Profit Margins – How much of that revenue do you actually keep? 6. Small improvements in each of these areas can create a significant impact on the overall business. So here’s the question: Which of these five areas gets most of your focus right now? And which one represents your biggest opportunity for improvement?

Time for some public humiliation, because if it happened to me it can happen to you. Earlier this year I discovered the Contact Us form on my website had been broken since January. Six months. Every submission was landing on my web vendor's server and never getting forwarded to us. 61 submissions, sitting in a folder nobody was reading. Here's the part that stings: we never noticed, because leads were still coming in through phone calls and our other form. The business felt fine. The pipeline felt fine. Meanwhile the front door was locked and we were congratulating ourselves on the side entrance. When we finally got the file and cross-referenced it against our CRM, most of it was spam and bots — but about 14 were real humans asking for our services. Fourteen people raised their hand, got silence, and called my competitor instead. At my customer lifetime values, that's not a rounding error. That's real money that walked. Think about what this means for a second. Most of us in here spend serious energy and dollars GETTING people to our websites. Ads, SEO, content, referrals. And then we assume — assume — that the plumbing between "visitor fills out form" and "notification hits my inbox" actually works. When's the last time you checked? Nobody tells you when a form breaks. There's no alarm. No error message on your end. Traffic looks normal, the form looks normal, the thank-you page still loads. The failure is completely silent, and every week it stays broken, you're paying for marketing that pours into a bucket with a hole in it. 𝗧𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗼𝘄𝗻 𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗺𝘀. 𝗧𝗼𝗱𝗮𝘆. Takes five minutes: submit every form on your site like a customer would, and confirm the notification actually arrives where a human sees it. Then put a recurring reminder on your calendar and do it monthly. That's it. That's the whole system. Bonus paranoia points: if a vendor manages your site, ask them where form submissions are stored and who's monitoring failures. "I assumed you were" is a sentence you only want to say once.

“Humans make decisions based on meaning and emotion—and justify them with logic and reasoning.” People rarely buy, change, or take action because of facts alone. We act when something means something to us and when we feel a reason to move. Then, we use logic to explain why the decision makes sense. If you’re trying to sell, don’t just explain why your product or service makes sense—help people feel why it matters to them.