The Competitive Advantage

March 29, 2023

Want to Win Your Clients’ Trust? Change 1 Word in Your Vocabulary.

I was having a conversation with a client last week – the president and his senior staff. We were talking about their business objectives for the year and the kinds of marketing and sales efforts they would need to achieve them.

As I was laying out a number of strategies and tactics that could help them reach their goals, the president interrupted me, and said, “Steve, don’t tell us what we could be doing… tell us what we should be doing.”

March 21, 2023

The Case for Being a ‘Specialist’

Take a look around our industry… most research firms are generalists. They provide a variety of services to a variety of different kinds of clients. In fact, it’s kind of difficult to find one that is legitimately a specialist in any one area.

March 2, 2023

It Really Is All About the Customer Experience

For Christmas of 2021, my wife and I bought our daughter and her husband, a Nespresso coffeemaker to replace an old Keurig machine that went kaput. And they loved it and have been using it ever since.

But recently, they started having some problems with it… and here’s where the story gets interesting.

February 14, 2023

The Biggest Challenges to Revenue Generation

At the Insights Association’s CEO Summit last month, one of the presentations highlighted the results from a survey that the association conducted of its members. And one of the topics was on growing revenue. Ahhh… music to my ears.

In the presentation, they reported on the top three obstacles to growing revenue:

1. Getting qualified leads
2. Recruiting more effective sales professionals
3. The cyclical nature of the seller-door model

And while it’s hard to argue with the results of the survey – and I’m glad to see that these firms recognize these issues – what’s interesting is that I don’t see very much being done to address them!

February 7, 2023

Want to Achieve Your Sales Goals? Achieve Your Activity Goals First!

As I write this, it’s early February… and even though it’s only been a little more than a month since ‘New Year’s Resolutions’ went into effect, 90% of them have already been busted! Why is that?

January 31, 2023

Get on a Plane… Go to a Conference

As I write this, I’m 30,000 feet in the air heading home to Nashville from Miami, where I participated in my first conference of the year – the Insights Association’s CEO Summit. It’s just my third conference in the past 12 months, along with Greenbook’s IIeX event last Spring in Austin and the Quirks Event in New York this past Summer.

And the result of attending all of these conferences? Exactly the same… and I mean that in a good way:

January 17, 2023

Establishing Your Marketing and Sales Priority for the New Year

I came across an article this morning in my daily online reading entitled, ‘5 strategies B2B marketing and sales teams can bank on as markets tighten.’ Looks interesting, I thought… so I clicked on the link to read it.

And while the overall article was just OK, the first item on its list is what really caught my eye: ‘Stop chasing leads, double down on customers…’ The author is right, I thought… but only partially.

Doubling down on customers shouldn’t just be your top priority during difficult times, it should be your top priority ALL the time!

December 28, 2022

The Top 10 Blog Posts of 2022

Over the past year, our blog posts were read thousands of times. To all of you who stopped by to take a peek… thank you. We hope you found the articles to be interesting, helpful and maybe even a little inspirational.

Secondly, our blog now houses more than 500 articles on sales and marketing (this is actually #521), all related to growing your business in our industry. And the fact is, if you keep reading them… we’ll keep writing them.