If you’ve scrolled LinkedIn lately, you may think every company has cracked the code on using AI in customer engagement. Bots, automation, and personalization — the buzzwords stack up fast, but how many are seeing tangible results?

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The UPS guy brings our dogs biscuits. My German Shepherd goes racing out to him barking ferociously, draws up on a dime, sits, and gets a biscuit. It’s pure theater and they both love it.

When you meet a new buyer, don’t be stupid and start asking about “pain” or sleepless nights (unless you’re reading this from the 1950s). Bring the buyer a treat—some value. Offer some learning, insights, IP, innovations that are attractive. Stop the potential barking. Invest in the meeting.

Biscuits are cheap.

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Don’t swallow Polonium-210. You won’t last long, and it won’t be pleasant.

There are poisons all around us. The arsenic in your rice, the drain cleaner under your sink.

Alas, some poisons are impossible to avoid, and it’s not productive to live a life that’s poison-free. But it might be worth considering three questions when we think about poison:

1. How fast does it act? There’s a difference between a bowl of brown rice and taking up BASE jumping.
2. Who else does it harm? Poisons that we spread to others are less moral than the ones we expose ourselves to.
3. How much does it cost to avoid? What do we have to do to our systems, our expectations and our methods to avoid this poison?

This analysis makes it clear that banning gas-powered leaf blowers is a no-brainer. They are instantly noisy and noxious, and they make more of an impact on our climate than just about any item in our garage, and they do so quickly. They harm others at least as much as they harm the user, and avoiding their use is convenient and saves money.

In addition to actual physical poisons, most of us wrestle with the emotional and spiritual poisons that are dumped in front of us every day.

Persistent systems are good at sticking around, and that’s true even when they’re bringing actual poison with them. As we seek to build a more resilient path forward, perhaps it pays to experience the short-term discomfort associated with fixing a dangerous system now rather than living with the poison it creates over time.

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Discover how WooCommerce affects your site’s performance and rankings. Learn to optimize for better load times, SERP visibility, and trust.

The post Why WooCommerce Slows Down (& How to Fix It With the Right Server Stack) appeared first on Search Engine Journal.

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Wondering why your marketing strategy keeps hitting walls at the leadership level? It’s not enough to be clever—it must speak […]

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Training failure doesn’t always look obvious. Sometimes it’s hidden in slow onboarding, low engagement, or unmet business goals. But over time, the costs add up: wasted training budgets and ineffective use of the training budget, missed development opportunities, including career development, and stalled employee growth. Most organizations invest in learning and development programs to improve…

Source

The post The Hidden Costs of Training Failure: Building Long-Term L&D ROI Through Strategic Planning appeared first on Clarity Consultants.

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Still chasing traffic that doesn’t convert? Learn how luxury brands doubled revenue by aligning SEO with audience intent across search and social platforms.

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If you’re looking to build no-code or low-code automation, you may have stumbled upon Make and Zapier. Both are popular in our Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) category, and while they may seem similar at first glance, they serve slightly different user needs.

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If someone snuck into my closet and switched out one brand of sneakers for a similar model from another company, it wouldn’t bother me much. Popular cars like the Camry, the Civic and the Elantra don’t have raving fans the way the Mini or the Rivian do. Go to the rental car counter and take what’s on offer.

Popular products and services succeed because they’re normal, reliable, convenient, cheap or simply incumbents. If someone expected to stay at the Hyatt but finds themselves at the Marriott, it’s probably not a big deal to them, because both brands have worked hard to find themselves in the center, sanding off idiosyncrasies and inconveniences to get there.

And thus, the fork in the road: If you’re building something remarkable, memorable and important, you’re simply not going to appeal to the masses for precisely those reasons.

This isn’t about being the most expensive. It’s a different sort of elitism–the elitism consumers choose. The decision to invest time in learning about the options, caring about the small differences and feeling confident enough to develop an opinion.

Sure, some people care about Budweiser or Coke, but that’s not what those brands stand for.

If you want to build a mass brand, invest in convenience and normalcy.

And if you want to be particular, memorable and worth what it takes for fans to be loyal and committed, don’t chase the people who don’t care that much.

Either you make something that costs more and is worth more than it costs… or you chase convenience, ubiquity and low price.

“This might not be for you,” is a fine slogan.

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