The Competitive Advantage

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.

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!

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.

October 12, 2022

A Marketing Research Firm Doing Research on Their Marketing? WHAAAT?!

I received an email a couple of weeks ago from Merrill Dubrow, CEO at MARC Research in Dallas. Merrill is a good friend and a client… and he was looking for feedback on something he was working on.

We scheduled a Zoom call so I could see what it was. As it turned out, he and his colleague, Jim O’Hara, had created a series of ads for LinkedIn and were soliciting feedback on which of the ads I thought was most effective and why. And not just me… they also reached out to other marketing-types and some client-types.

June 28, 2022

Marketing During a Recession

The economy – and the potential for a recession – has been the focal point of the news lately… and as business owners and leaders, we have to make business decisions while considering that economic input. Historically, when times get tough, ‘marketing’ is often the first thing that gets cut back (or cut altogether)! In this article, we’ll explore why cutting marketing during a recession is not a smart business decision… and ways to keep actively marketing for little or no cost.

June 14, 2022

6 Common Blogging Mistakes and How to Fix Them

Blogging is one of the most common marketing activities – and for a whole host of good reasons. It helps to support your reputation in the marketplace, it builds awareness, it showcases your subject matter expertise and it’s a great way to nurture sales leads and your relationships with existing clients. Further, it costs virtually nothing to do (other than some of your time) and you can write about nearly any topic on your mind. Which is why so many firms include blogging in their marketing arsenal.

However, it is still a marketing tactic that needs to be done well… and too many firms are making too many mistakes with it. In this blog post, we’ll explore the six most common mistakes and make recommendations for how to fix them.

April 12, 2022

Think-Plan-Do #2: 3 More Smart Ideas For Your Marketing & Sales

This is the second in our new once-a-month Think-Plan-Do blog series where I’ll share three low-cost/no cost ideas to help with your sales and marketing efforts. [You can read the first one here.] This month, our three topics are:

Think: You have two kinds of clients

Plan: The sales pipeline report

Do: Tips for your capabilities presentation

March 15, 2022

Think-Plan-Do: 3 Smart Ideas for Your Marketing & Sales

This blog marks the start of a new series of articles – one every month where I’ll share three low-cost/no cost ideas to help with your sales and marketing efforts. Each article in the series will follow the same format: Think-Plan-Do.

‘Think’ will provide ideas about strategy. ‘Plan’ will cover topics around planning and management. And ‘Do’ will offer very tactical suggestions. I hope you find the series helpful.