The Competitive Advantage

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!