The Competitive Advantage

August 22, 2023

I’ve Been Blogging About Sales & Marketing Since 2012… What’s Changed?

I was scrolling through my blog posts last week… and just for fun, I decided to go back to read some of my very first articles (written in 2012) to see how much sales and marketing have changed in the past 11 years. Guess what? Not much!

Sure, technology tools are more pervasive and capable today than in 2012, but the core fundamentals of sales and marketing are pretty much the same… and I can prove it!

June 28, 2023

Lessons Learned After Writing 500+ Blog Posts

This is post number 533 on our blog, and with the exception of two guest posts, they’re all mine. And all of them written since I founded Harpeth Marketing in 2012. In those 11+ years, I’ve learned a few things about blogging and content marketing that I thought might be of value…

June 6, 2023

The 3 C’s Strategy… Point Your Marketing in the Right Direction

Tactics without a strategy is just ‘noise.’

I’ve been working with a client recently, helping them to create their first-ever marketing plan (yeah, I know, it’s odd timing, but their fiscal year starts in July). As we were getting into it, they said things like “We want to do a quarterly newsletter” and “We want to post on LinkedIn every week.”

To which I responded, “That’s great! Why?”

And I got a blank stare in return. Then I said, “What do you want to post about every week?” The stare continued.

May 2, 2023

How to Maximize Impressions of a Single LinkedIn Post

The use of social media – and particularly, LinkedIn – should be an integral part of your marketing efforts. Social media, with little cost and modest effort, helps you achieve so many objectives: it builds awareness for you and your firm, it helps to cement your reputation around the topics you post about, and it helps potential buyers to get to know you a little bit better, especially if you sometimes post personal or fun content.

But here’s the problem… A single post has a shelf life of just a few seconds. It doesn’t take long for a post – even a really interesting one – to end up so far down on someone’s feed that they never get to see it. ☹ So, the question is… how do you increase the reach of a single post?

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!

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.

October 18, 2022

Is Your Work Good Enough to Ensure Repeat Clients?

Spoiler alert: It’s not!

If you were to ask 10 market research business owners what keeps their repeat clients coming back, nine of those 10 will say, “It’s because of the good work we do.”

To be fair, if you do lousy work, your clients won’t become repeat clients. But the reality is that most all firms do good work. It’s table stakes these days. There’s nothing unusual about it. Just to ‘be in the game,’ you’d better be good at what you do.