The Competitive Advantage

March 21, 2017

Why is ‘thank you’ so often ignored?

I was in Memphis this past weekend. My son-in-law, Wade (that’s him with the cheeky sign), is wrapping up medical school… and it was “Match Day.” During Match Day, graduating med students from all across the country “open their envelope” at exactly the same time to find out where they will be doing their residency.

Wade ‘matched’ in orthopedics at the Medical College of Georgia… he and my daughter are very excited. And it’s at this point that the story gets interesting.

March 14, 2017

“Why should I care?”… the question your website visitors are asking!

Your clients don’t care about what you can do… they care about what you can do for them.

We’re working with a new client who has developed a unique market research methodology. It’s really very interesting and kind of heady stuff – with a lot of science behind it. And that’s exactly how it’s described on their website. Which is fine.

In fact, that’s how most firms describe their products and services on their websites in our industry: “here’s what we do”… “and it’s really neat”… “and we’re really great at it!”

Meanwhile, your website visitors – a.k.a. potential clients – are reading that copy and asking themselves, “So what?! Why should I care?”

And they’re absolutely right… why should they care? You haven’t given them a reason to.

February 28, 2017

Hey Sales Rep… Your Manager Should be Fired!

I receive “cold call emails” all the time…. I guess as President of the company, I’m a magnet for salespeople. Fine… it comes with the territory.

But this past week, I received a sales email so bad that I had to share it (names are being withheld so they don’t die of shame!).

February 21, 2017

3 Reasons Why You Need Email Automation

Email automation, the programmed sending of prepared emails based on some trigger event, has been around for several years now.

It originally fell within the purview of marketing automation platforms (e.g. Hubspot or Marketo), but more recently, has become integrated into even the low-cost email platforms (e.g. EMMA or MailChimp).

Here’s an example of how it might work… let’s say you send out a monthly enewsletter to your sales database. Inside the email is a link back to a blog post about Product Testing on your website. Pretty standard, right?

Now imagine that everyone who clicks on that link is automatically sent a second email 3 days later, linking them to another blog post on a related topic. Pretty neat, right? [Note: it’s the clicking on the link that’s the ‘trigger event.’]

February 14, 2017

No 2017 Marketing & Sales Plan? There’s still time!

Here we are… a month and a half into the new year and you never got around to putting together a marketing & sales plan for 2017. First of all, know that you’re not alone. A busy Q4 plus the holidays put a lot of businesses behind the eight-ball when it comes to planning.

But, don’t use that as an excuse! Just because the new year had already begun doesn’t mean there’s not time to still put down on paper what you’re going to do this year to achieve your revenue growth goals. So, here are my suggestions for getting it done…

February 3, 2017

Can you really be “all things to all people?”

Transforming your firm from ‘generalist’ to ‘specialist.’

Here’s a really interesting exercise… spend some time over the next day or so scrolling through the websites of a number of market research firms – even small and mid-sized ones – and one of the really unusual things you’ll find is this: the majority of firms claim to be experts in a whole bunch of different research methodologies… serving all kinds of industry verticals or markets… with the ability to seemingly solve every kind of marketing, branding or product problem. Kinda strains credibility, huh?

In addition, these “generalists,” have a really BIG problem they have to deal with every day… not only are they competing with every other generalist out there (which is the majority of firms), they’re also competing with a different batch of specialists on every project. Yikes!

January 25, 2017

Question: What percentage of your clients don’t return?

Answer: It’s a lot higher than you think!

Creating a “client for life.”

True story. I’ve been working with a large firm in our industry for the past several weeks… and one of the data-gathering projects we did early on was to look at Revenue by Client, for each of the past several years.

Of all of the insights that this exercise can provide, the most interesting – in this case – was that 40% of their clients only did one project with them… and then never returned!

We’ve done this “one-timer” analysis for many firms and the resulting information is ALWAYS a surprise… because the percentage of one-and-dones is ALWAYS higher than the client expected!

January 17, 2017

Strategy & Planning are Easy… Marketing Execution is Hard!

OK, strategy and planning are not easy… not even a little. They require focused time and critical thinking – two assets often in short supply around the office. But once they’re done… they’re done. Then the real work begins.

I was out of town last Thursday and Friday working with a new client. It was for two days of coaching on marketing strategy and planning… helping them to focus their business development efforts then putting in place some targeted tactics to execute over the coming months. And it went really well.

Now the question is… will any of those agreed-to tactics actually get executed?