The Competitive Advantage

May 19, 2020

Personal Development: 5 Ways to Make Yourself Better During the Pandemic

Right now, while you’re working from home, you’re not fighting traffic during your daily commute, you’re sitting in on fewer meetings and, unfortunately, things might be quieter with some of your clients. Do you know what that means? It means you’ve got a little extra time on your hands.

And you have three choices as to what you can do with that time. You can do more work. You can do something mindless (like watch reruns on TV and snack on Cheetos) or you can work on something you probably don’t spend enough time working on… yourself! Right now, with those available extra hours, is an ideal time for personal development. And here are 5 ways to make that happen…

May 12, 2020

Do you have a defined sales process? No?! Ignoring it is a HUGE mistake!

Imagine you have responsibility for revenue growth at your firm and you finally decide to pull the trigger and convert a couple of your senior Project Managers to the Seller-Doer role. Congrats!

Now what? Well, one of the items you’ll need to cover in their training is to help them understand your firm’s ‘sales process.’

Sales process?! It’s not a term or a concept used very often in our industry… but it’s critical to your selling success. And here’s why…

May 4, 2020

Selling Success Requires 2 Things… a Good Sales Rep and a Better Sales Manager

8 Keys for Effective Sales Management

I was chatting with an industry colleague this past week and he mentioned he had just repositioned two of his Project Managers into Business Development roles… one as an account manager and one to go after new business.

And then he said something that really surprised me and even made me smile. He said, “This process has made me realize that I’m no sales manager!”

Wow! He is literally the first person in Market Research I have met who has said that. Out loud. Don’t get me wrong… there are a ton of really bad sales managers in our industry – he’s just the first one to admit it.

April 21, 2020

Stop hard selling during the pandemic… use these 9 ‘soft touches’ instead.

I’ve been involved in a number of industry conversations lately around the topic of ‘selling during the pandemic.’ As the uncertainty grows, firms want/need to continue to sell, if only to maintain their business.

For many, however, the inclination is to be too proactive… that is ‘sell harder, sell faster.’ The reality is, though, that the opposite approach will have a much more positive impact.

April 14, 2020

With the ‘new normal,’ is a marketing & sales plan still useful?

Uhhh… no and yes!

As we all know, we’re experiencing an unusual time right now… everything in life – and in business – is changing very rapidly. And the speed of all of those changes is fundamentally impacting the way we conduct business.

One of the many questions these changes are forcing us to answer is, “Do we still need a marketing & sales plan?” Many of us spent so much time at the end of last year planning for how to tackle growth this year… is what we did then still relevant?

April 6, 2020

Stuck-at-home marketing & sales, part 4

Low-cost/no-cost marketing & sales ideas #19-23…

If you’ve been following along the past few weeks (3/18, 3/24, 3/31), we’ve explored 18 different marketing & sales activities you could employ while you’ve got a little extra time on your hands during the pandemic. Here’s a quick rundown:

March 31, 2020

Stuck-at-home marketing & sales, part 3

6 MORE things to start doing while you’re hunkered down during the pandemic.

In the past two articles (3/18 and 3/24), I listed out a number of low-cost/no-cost marketing & sales ideas you might want to consider implementing while you’ve likely got a little extra time on your hands during the pandemic.

I wanted to continue that theme this week with 6 more ideas…

March 24, 2020

Stuck-at-home marketing & sales, part 2

5 MORE things you can do while you’re hunkered down during the pandemic.

In last week’s post, I outlined 7 low-cost/no-cost marketing & sales ideas you could implement while you had a little extra time on your hands during this COVID-19 outbreak. Since it looks like this ‘new normal’ will be with us for a while, here are 5 more marketing & sales activities to work on while your new office is the kitchen table: