The Competitive Advantage

June 6, 2023

The 3 C’s Strategy… Point Your Marketing in the Right Direction

Tactics without a strategy is just ‘noise.’

I’ve been working with a client recently, helping them to create their first-ever marketing plan (yeah, I know, it’s odd timing, but their fiscal year starts in July). As we were getting into it, they said things like “We want to do a quarterly newsletter” and “We want to post on LinkedIn every week.”

To which I responded, “That’s great! Why?”

And I got a blank stare in return. Then I said, “What do you want to post about every week?” The stare continued.

May 2, 2023

How to Maximize Impressions of a Single LinkedIn Post

The use of social media – and particularly, LinkedIn – should be an integral part of your marketing efforts. Social media, with little cost and modest effort, helps you achieve so many objectives: it builds awareness for you and your firm, it helps to cement your reputation around the topics you post about, and it helps potential buyers to get to know you a little bit better, especially if you sometimes post personal or fun content.

But here’s the problem… A single post has a shelf life of just a few seconds. It doesn’t take long for a post – even a really interesting one – to end up so far down on someone’s feed that they never get to see it. ☹ So, the question is… how do you increase the reach of a single post?

April 26, 2023

“If I can’t measure it, I’m not doing it!”

My technology manager and I were chatting with a client last week about different ways to approach marketing, when the client suddenly said, “If I can’t measure it, I’m not doing it!” Wow! I love that!

Most businesspeople we talk with don’t think a lot about measurement when they’re talking about marketing. And if they do, it’s very rarely to that extent. I was genuinely shocked!

March 29, 2023

Want to Win Your Clients’ Trust? Change 1 Word in Your Vocabulary.

I was having a conversation with a client last week – the president and his senior staff. We were talking about their business objectives for the year and the kinds of marketing and sales efforts they would need to achieve them.

As I was laying out a number of strategies and tactics that could help them reach their goals, the president interrupted me, and said, “Steve, don’t tell us what we could be doing… tell us what we should be doing.”

March 21, 2023

The Case for Being a ‘Specialist’

Take a look around our industry… most research firms are generalists. They provide a variety of services to a variety of different kinds of clients. In fact, it’s kind of difficult to find one that is legitimately a specialist in any one area.

March 2, 2023

It Really Is All About the Customer Experience

For Christmas of 2021, my wife and I bought our daughter and her husband, a Nespresso coffeemaker to replace an old Keurig machine that went kaput. And they loved it and have been using it ever since.

But recently, they started having some problems with it… and here’s where the story gets interesting.

February 14, 2023

The Biggest Challenges to Revenue Generation

At the Insights Association’s CEO Summit last month, one of the presentations highlighted the results from a survey that the association conducted of its members. And one of the topics was on growing revenue. Ahhh… music to my ears.

In the presentation, they reported on the top three obstacles to growing revenue:

1. Getting qualified leads
2. Recruiting more effective sales professionals
3. The cyclical nature of the seller-door model

And while it’s hard to argue with the results of the survey – and I’m glad to see that these firms recognize these issues – what’s interesting is that I don’t see very much being done to address them!

February 7, 2023

Want to Achieve Your Sales Goals? Achieve Your Activity Goals First!

As I write this, it’s early February… and even though it’s only been a little more than a month since ‘New Year’s Resolutions’ went into effect, 90% of them have already been busted! Why is that?