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TDZ Blog

Strategy Is Changing; What Does That Mean for You?

By Tracy Diziere | October 1, 2019

A recent Forbes article covered how marketing strategy in mature organizations is “moving from communications leadership to growth accelerant.” That might sound like a bunch of mumbo-jumbo to some of you. And like some pie-in-the-sky idea to others. So let’s break it down for the entrepreneurial-minded leader, shall we? As a small service-based business leader, you’ve […]

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Guest Blog Posts

In addition to our own posts by title below, check out the following guest posts:

Focusing on Successes and Strengths vs. Failures and Weaknesses

The Best Place to Spend Your Marketing Time & Money

Customer Expectations: Mind the Gap

Key Topics

Finding Your Strengths: My Journey and Purpose

By Tracy Diziere | Comments Off on Finding Your Strengths: My Journey and Purpose

Today I am in San Francisco for the first day of the Gallup Successful Strengths Coaching Program and it is the last day of #30DaysofQ2. (Confession: I am late in posting but I drafted this on Day 30.) Looking Inward and Finding Your Strengths It’s not often we spend the time to take stock and find […]

Building an Authentic Business as a Solopreneur

By Tracy Diziere | Comments Off on Building an Authentic Business as a Solopreneur

  As a one-person business, it can be challenging to define your brand if you haven’t tapped into your strengths, your purpose, your ideal clients, and your value proposition. Even if you did this foundational work in the beginning, if any one of these is “off” or changes, it can be hard to achieve alignment […]

Gaining Client Insight

By Tracy Diziere | Comments Off on Gaining Client Insight

If you are a coach or a consultant–and especially if you have “productized” your solution by creating a program or are looking into doing so–you want to see success in your clients’ development and in your relationships. But sometimes, unless clients blatantly express dissatisfaction during our engagements or begin “bad appling,” we can’t really be sure what […]

What Do You Want? Developing Your Litmus Test for Better Decisions

By Tracy Diziere | Comments Off on What Do You Want? Developing Your Litmus Test for Better Decisions

How Do We Make Better Decisions? If we take the time to identify what we want, at the BIG PICTURE level, making decisions becomes easy. When we know OUR own pH, everything that comes our way can be tested against it. If it doesn’t match, we can politely walk away. I imagine we waste a lot […]

Uncovering Expectations, Not Just Managing Expectations

By Tracy Diziere | Comments Off on Uncovering Expectations, Not Just Managing Expectations

It seems everyone talks about managing expectations but it’s just as important to do the work of uncovering them. I say “uncovering” because sometimes they can be buried. Even from the people who have them. And ourselves. Too often, service providers will assume what the expectations are and cater to those assumptions. In fairness, sometimes […]

Learning While Teaching (or Presenting)

By Tracy Diziere | Comments Off on Learning While Teaching (or Presenting)

Somewhere along the way I got the idea that I had to know everything about a particular topic to “teach” or “present on” it. And I never considered myself an expert on anything because my definition of expert meant “someone who knows everything.” Logically, I know it is impossible to know everything. That I should not […]

Communications Planning

By Tracy Diziere | Comments Off on Communications Planning

At Arthur Andersen, communications planning was part of my day-to-day activities. And I was trained to plan communications. Our marketing department had a distinct way of doing this. (In fact, it was at Arthur Andersen that I received training on The 7 Habits.) To this day, I apply communications planning to strategic communications for service-based clients. […]

Giving Others a Vote of Confidence

By Tracy Diziere | Comments Off on Giving Others a Vote of Confidence

Taking the time to let those in your professional network know that you support them is an important but not urgent activity.  An easy way to do this is to endorse them on LinkedIn. Endorsements are those opportunities you see to “check off” that a connection knows her stuff.  As opposed to recommendations, which are another […]

Designing the Client Experience

By Tracy Diziere | 1 Comment

Yesterday at Conscious Connections, Kristin Slice of Empowered Lab Communications presented on personal leadership.  The room was filled with conscious women business owners–and many of them one-woman shops. For those of us who have a background in marketing, we relied on our knowledge of product development and brand when starting our business. We (ideally) spent a […]

Offering to Help Others

By Tracy Diziere | Comments Off on Offering to Help Others

Bringing our strengths and skills to the forefront and offering to help others is one of the greatest win-wins. Unfortunately, with all the busy-ness, we can forget to reach out. Or think we don’t have enough time to help. Or think they wouldn’t value or need our help. You never know! We don’t have crystal balls. […]