The Competitive Advantage

March 19, 2019

5 Questions Your Website Has to Answer for Prospective Clients

Visitors to your website – especially those who might become clients – are there with a purpose. An agenda. They have a number of questions that they need answers to… and if you don’t answer them properly (or answer them at all), the visitors will simply move on to the next potential vendor.

To make sure that doesn’t happen at your firm, here are the 5 questions your website must answer:

March 12, 2019

When Building Awareness, Drive Your Prospects Where You Want Them to Go

I was doing some reading this past weekend on building awareness for brands and was overcome with the realization that nearly every one of the marketing experts who wrote one of the articles I read was WRONG!

March 4, 2019

8 Ways to Leverage Existing Relationships to Grow Revenue

How many clients and potential clients do you know? Before you answer… think about it. Consider all of your current clients and prospects, all of your past clients and prospects (those old names in your CRM), everyone you’ve ever chatted with at an industry conference or networking event, people you’ve connected with on LinkedIn and so on and so on. I’ll bet if you add all of those up, it’s a pretty impressive number. Hundreds? Maybe a couple thousand? And that’s great!

So, what are you doing with all of those ‘relationships?’

February 26, 2019

Don’t go it alone! An Advisory Board can help with growth (and loneliness).

Many small business owners are often gripped with the fear of “being alone.” Of not having anyone to bounce ideas off of or share concerns with.

In larger firms, there may be key employees or colleagues to share with… but not so much in smaller firms. Masterimnd groups seem to be very popular, but are often full of competitors. And most businesses are too small for a formal Board of Directors. So, what’s the solution?

According to Rachel Crenshaw, founder of Strategy Sourcing Solutions, “Every small business owner could benefit from having an Advisory Board.”

February 19, 2019

11 Smart Marketing & Sales Tactics to Try in 2019

Is it going to be a good year for you and your firm? Kind of hard to say, as this point, isn’t it? But one thing is sure… you can’t just sit back and hope that something good will happen. You need to grab the bull by the horns and make it a great year!

To help get you started down the path of being proactive, here are 11 proven ideas to consider…

February 12, 2019

Want to hook a new sales prospect? Create a “wow experience” for them!

I was sitting in my office earlier this week when the UPS deliveryman walked in with a box. A big box! And I wasn’t expecting anything.

When I looked at the label to see who sent it, I saw that it was from Fracture, the ‘photo on glass’ people. Ooh… my daughter is sending a new photo of our granddaughter, I thought.

I was wrong.

February 6, 2019

Self-Funded Research… an Amazing Marketing Tool!

The following post is from an interview with Anne Beall, PhD, Founder of Beall Research in Chicago.

Henke: Anne, let me get this straight… you designed, implemented, managed, measured, reported on and paid for a full-blown research study as a marketing strategy?

Beall: Not quite. It was actually two studies! Seriously… yes, we did create and execute a full study for our own purposes – partially to support our marketing efforts and also to help us study and bring to market a new model around brands and emotions.

Henke: Where does an idea like this come from? Many firms that I’m familiar with would wait to find a paying client to help underwrite something like that.

January 29, 2019

Human-to-Human… The New Old Way to Be Successful!

Texting, social media and email are not enough to build real working relationships.

Last week, I participated in the Insights Association’s CEO Summit in Miami… a sold-out industry event attended by nearly 100 C-level executives from throughout our industry. And during the three days, one over-arching theme became crystal clear… while we all work in a B2B environment, we all still live in a Human-to-Human (H2H) world. That’s not just me saying that… everyone I talked with about that idea at the Summit whole-heartedly agreed.