The Competitive Advantage

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.

December 14, 2021

I Stopped Blogging for a Month… And Here’s What Happened

At our firm, we are all big believers in content marketing – for our clients and for ourselves – because of all the great things it can do for a business:

November 9, 2021

Repetition Builds Reputation

Why do the big advertisers run their ads on TV over and over? And over? Simple… repetition works. Sharing your marketing message frequently – over a period of time – builds top-of-mind awareness.

Further, building awareness is an ‘additive’ process… each exposure of your message building on the one before as you slowly climb to that top-of-mind position.