The Competitive Advantage

March 15, 2022

Think-Plan-Do: 3 Smart Ideas for Your Marketing & Sales

This blog marks the start of a new series of articles – one every month where I’ll share three low-cost/no cost ideas to help with your sales and marketing efforts. Each article in the series will follow the same format: Think-Plan-Do.

‘Think’ will provide ideas about strategy. ‘Plan’ will cover topics around planning and management. And ‘Do’ will offer very tactical suggestions. I hope you find the series helpful.

March 1, 2022

What should you post on LinkedIn? Hint: it’s not about you!

When you look at the LinkedIn posts made by most professionals and most firms in our industry, they generally fall into three categories:

1. Promoting their content – a recent blog or an invitation to a webinar
2. Office news – a company anniversary or the hiring of a new employee
3. Or a sales pitch!

And because most firms aren’t producing content very often or haven’t hired someone in a while, they’re left with selling. Far too much. Of all the things you can do on LinkedIn, selling should be the lowest priority. One rule of thumb I’ve heard says that, ‘Only one in five social posts should be a sales pitch.’ Frankly, even that is too often. Social media is – first and foremost – a ‘social’ platform. It’s about connecting with people and building relationships. Sharing will help you do that… selling will not.

February 22, 2022

Take Charge of Your Firm’s Growth

When I chat with the owners of market research firms across the U.S. about the growth of their businesses, three primary strategies rise to the top:

1. Referrals
2. Key contact relocation (they leave and take you with them to their new employer)
3. Repeat clients

And if these are among the top drivers of the growth of your business, too, you need to be concerned. Why? Because in every one of these very common scenarios, you are relying on someone else to make your firm successful. Is that really what you want?

February 9, 2022

A Great Experience with a Used Car Salesman… A Lesson for ALL Salespeople

‘Great experience’ and ‘used car salesman’ are generally not two phrases you see together, but in this case, it’s true… and the story provides some valuable lessons for all salespeople and seller-doers.

January 25, 2022

Commission Plans Are Not a Reward for Sales

To be fair, that statement is not 100% accurate. Of course, commission plans are a reward for your salespeople/seller-doers. But that is not WHY you should build them into compensation packages.

Spoiler alert: You implement commission plans to drive the desired behavior you want your seller-doers to exhibit. So yes, it’s a reward for them, but more importantly, it’s a strategic tool for management.

January 11, 2022

8 Last-Minute Ideas For Your 2022 Sales & Marketing Plan

Is your 2022 sales & marketing plan done? If your firm is like a lot of others, you might still be wrapping it up. And even if it is done, it’s supposed to be a living document… to be updated/changed as the year progresses. In either case, I wanted to share a few last-minute tactical ideas for you to consider adding to your plan.

January 4, 2022

Top 10 Sales & Marketing Blog Posts of 2021

Since founding Harpeth Marketing in 2012, we’ve published over 450 blog posts on all kinds of sales & marketing topics in our blog, The Competitive Advantage. In fact, this is officially post #491!

And at this time every year, we look at back at the most-read posts from the previous year. But we’re doing it with a little ‘twist’ this year. Instead of the usual ‘top 10’ list… we’ve got two ‘top 5’ lists:

• The first list contains the most-read articles that were published in 2021.
• The second list contains the most-read articles in 2021, regardless of when we first published them (the year they were published is shown).

December 22, 2021

3 Examples of Really Bad Selling to Stop in 2022

I guess I’m just a magnet for lousy salespeople… I get exposed to horrible selling almost every day. So, I started keeping a file of examples of this behavior and here are three real instances that happened to me just this month.