The Competitive Advantage

October 13, 2015

You can’t be “half-ass” about marketing and sales.

I had a conversation last week with a sales prospect… he was the co-founder of a firm with about 20 employees. Actually, it was the last of several phone calls and email exchanges and I was calling to find out if he was going to accept the proposal I had sent to him. He didn’t.

He said that, rather than outsource to us, he was going to have one of his employees “take care of” sales and marketing… in addition to continuing to work with and service clients, which he does now.

I’m gonna let that sink in for a minute.

October 6, 2015

Integrated Marketing: Getting Maximum Impact from your Marketing Tactics

Imagine you work for a small-to-mid-size firm with a small – but active – marketing program. You have a solid website, you blog weekly, send out a monthly email blast, post to social media daily (LinkedIn and Twitter) and even produce a webinar once each quarter. Pretty good stuff!

But here’s the thing… if all of those tactics are not working together, you might not be achieving the kind of results you could be. For example…

September 27, 2015

Is it OK to fire a client?

During a kick-off meeting recently for an engagement with a new client, I was talking with the owner of this market research firm and he mentioned that he had recently fired one of his largest clients – a Fortune 500 company that generated several hundred thousand dollars worth of business for him every year! Evidently, though, this client was overly demanding and downright abusive to his employees. So, his choice was… fire the client or risk losing some staff members. Wow! Tough situation.

And one I hear about far too often.

What do you think? Is it OK to fire a client… or do you believe that every bit of revenue is precious and worth holding onto, regardless of the ‘cost?’

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.