The Competitive Advantage

January 15, 2014

The Customer Experience: Make it Easy to do Business with your Firm

My wife and I had to run to the mall this past weekend… one of the stops was Banana Republic to pay a credit card bill that was almost due.  On the way over, my wife mentioned to me that she really liked Banana Republic – that it was one of her favorite stores.

Spoiler alert… those feelings were about to come to an end!

December 23, 2013

6 Marketing & Sales Lessons I Learned from our Workshop Participants

We just wrapped up our second M|R Marketing Workshop™.  For the past 6 weeks, I have worked with several firms from around the world (gotta love technology!) helping them to learn the process of creating a marketing & sales plan for their firms.

While I’d like to think they learned from me, I also learned some things from them… or at least made some interesting observations:

December 18, 2013

Are your PMs up-selling and cross-selling? They should be!

Every time I go to my local coffeeshop – which is several times each week – I get the same thing… a medium coffee.  In fact, when they see me walk in, a cup is waiting for me at the counter.  (I don’t know if I love the customer service or hate that I’m so predictable!)

But what’s really interesting – even though I am a very good customer – is that the person behind the counter never says… “Would you like a scone with that?” or “We just took some muffins out of the oven – would you like one today?”

And my question is… why not?  Why not take 5 seconds to try to up-sell me?  To add to my order?  To incrementally increase sales?

December 11, 2013

Didn’t achieve your revenue goals this year? Do something about it!

As you’ve probably heard before… the definition of ‘insanity’ is to keep doing the same thing over and over and expecting the results to change.

With that in mind, answer these questions…  How was business this year?  Did you exceed your revenue goals?  How many new clients did you pick up?  How many did you lose?  How about leads generated or conversion rates?

Here’s my point… if you’re not happy with your business development results – then do something about it!  More importantly – do something different!