The Competitive Advantage

September 23, 2015

Don’t Be an Idiot When Making Marketing & Sales Decisions

How do you make your marketing & sales decisions?

For example…

• What topics do you choose to blog about?
• How do you decide what your ads will say?
• Why don’t you Tweet?

For most people and most firms… these kinds of decisions are often made by the senior executive at the firm… who relies (far too much, IMHO) on his or her own feelings… on what they think ought to happen… and on what their gut tells them to do. And even if it’s a reasonably well-informed gut – it’s still boils down to just a guess.

September 8, 2015

Why Spelling and Grammar Matter in Marketing

A guest post by Debra Semans. Based in Atlanta, Debra, is the lead writer for Harpeth Marketing, as well as an independent market researcher and focus group moderator. She can be reached at Debra@HarpethMarketing.com.

I am a Grammar Nerd. I know the difference between “there”, “their”, and “they’re.” I know about the Oxford comma. The difference between active and passive voice is clear to me.

I read your Facebook posts, your Tweets, your emails, and I judge you for your typos and grammatical errors. My esteem for a company drops if they have typos and grammatical errors in their materials.

I know it is not my most endearing quality, but there it is. I admit it.

However, does any of that matter? Or, am I simply hyper-critical and old-fashioned?

Apparently it does matter – quite a bit.

September 1, 2015

Is the “Customer Experience” improving in our society?

In the course of just a few days last week, I had four separate [unexpected] experiences that made me wonder if businesses are finally starting to “get it”… and understand that the Customer Experience may be the most important aspect of marketing, let alone its obvious impact on satisfaction and loyalty.

August 26, 2015

Seek first to help… then to sell

Last week was the inaugural Instant Impact™, a 1/2-day virtual workshop on marketing and sales in the market research industry. (By the way, it was awesome!) If there was an underlying theme to the event – although, interestingly, an unintentional one – it was this, “Seek first to help… then to sell.” And it applied equally to both the marketing and sales portions of the program.

This philosophy works for a lot of reasons…

August 18, 2015

Why you get hired… the reason behind the reason

Last week, I was chatting with a friend about our firm – what we do and who we serve – when he asked me what I thought was a fairly straight-forward question, “Why do you get hired?”

I responded with a few of those things I thought he would expect to hear: “We have a proven track record”… “We offer services in the market research industry that virtually no one else does.”… “We work only in the MR industry which allows us to hit the ground running.” And so on.

Then he said, “No! Why do you really get hired? What’s the reason behind the reason?” Ahh… now I understood what he was getting at.

August 11, 2015

LITTLE things make a BIG difference with CX

I’ll admit it… I am a Southwest Airlines loyalist – it’s the only airline I fly unless there is simply no other option. Been that way for years. I was on my way home from Baltimore last week and as we’re boarding, I kept hearing one of the flight attendants repeat an announcement about the best way to place the larger carry-on bags in the overhead bin.

Carry-ons are continually an issue. There are always a few folks whose luggage won’t fit or the overheads are just full… so they have to get back out of the plane and check their bag at the jetway… slowing things down.

August 4, 2015

Partnering with others can accelerate your growth.

I’ve been doing a little thinking and planning lately around the future of Harpeth Marketing – noodling on a variety of strategies and tactics – and one of the things I’ve realized is that a key driver of our past success has been ‘relationships’… no, not just the buyer-seller kind, but the ‘partnering’ kind.

July 31, 2015

Take Charge of Your Own Success… Stop Relying on Others!

One of the things that I always do when having that ‘first conversation’ with a prospective client is to ask about their current marketing and sales efforts… that is, what they’re doing to grow their business. And for the 3½ years that the doors of Harpeth Marketing have been open, the most popular answer has not changed… it includes all or part of the following:

• “We have a number of repeat clients.”
• “We have a great relationship with a couple of really large clients.”
• “We get a lot of referrals and word-of-mouth recommendations.”

Let’s be clear… those are all really good things. The problem with them is that they rely on someone else to help make your firm successful… and that’s when serious problems can occur: