The Competitive Advantage

July 14, 2015

Marketing & Sales Advice from Leaders in our Industry, Part 4

This is the fourth of five posts in which we are interviewing noted business owners and leaders from across the Market Research industry to explore how top firms look at and utilize marketing & sales for their businesses.

This week, we talked with Anne Bailey Berman, President and CEO of Chadwick Martin Bailey, based in Boston, Mass.

July 7, 2015

Marketing & Sales Advice from Leaders in our Industry, Part 3

This is the third in a series of posts where we’ve interviewed business owners and leaders from across our industry to help get an understanding of how top firms look at and utilize marketing & sales for their firms.

This week, we talked with Merrill Dubrow, President & CEO of M/A/R/C Research, based in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area.

June 30, 2015

Marketing & Sales Advice from Leaders in our Industry, Part 2

Last week, we began a 5-part series on how business owners and leaders in the market research industry really feel about marketing & sales. For this week’s post, we interviewed Brett Watkins, CEO at L&E Research, based in Raleigh, NC.

June 24, 2015

Marketing & Sales Advice from Leaders in our Industry, Part 1

Marketing & sales – and the results they produce – are important to everyone in a firm… but perhaps to no one more so than the owners and senior leaders of those firms… those who have P&L responsibility and who are charged with the growth and sustainability of those businesses.

To get an inside look at how marketing & sales are viewed inside the “C Suite,” we interviewed the leaders of five very well-known, highly-regarded firms in our industry. We think their perspective will be helpful to those struggling with marketing & sales in their firms.

Up first in this 5-part series… Paul Metz, Executive Vice President/Managing Partner at C+R Research in Chicago.

May 27, 2015

How to Manage Long Sales Cycles

I was talking with a client last week about the long sales cycles in our industry. I was “bragging” that I have one client that took nearly two years to convert from prospect to client. Unimpressed, the client then mentioned that he had one that took eight years!

OK, eight years is a little ridiculous, but a 6-12-18 month sales cycle is an all-too-common scenario in B2B professional services industries… one that we all have to learn to mange. From my perspective, there are two key strategies for “sticking with it” through the long sales cycle.

April 28, 2015

‘Thanks, but no thanks’ is an OK answer.

This past week… after a number of emails, a proposal and a couple of phone conversations, a sales prospect (a.k.a. a potential new client) got back with me and said, “Thanks, but no thanks.” And guess what? While it wasn’t the answer I wanted, I was actually OK with it.

April 22, 2015

The top 15 webinar tips for your next presentation

I’m a lucky and grateful guy… I’ve been asked by two industry organizations (CASRO and Greenbook) to deliver four webinars over the next several months. I’m a huge proponent of webinars for several reasons…

• They deliver valuable information to attendees, in a non-threatening, non-salesy way
• They are a reasonable way to gather contact data from potential clients (when they register)
• They build awareness for the presenter and help position them as subject matter experts

If webinars are part of your marketing efforts – or if you’d like them to be – here are the top 15 webinar tips to consider as you get started…

April 7, 2015

Is bad marketing better than no marketing?

I received an unsolicited email the other day from a company using the holidays (Easter and Passover) as a reason to communicate… not unlike so many companies do at Christmas/Hanukkah time. Now, I appreciate when somebody tries something different as a way to “break through the clutter”… and I admit, I’m not sure I have ever received an Easter/Passover promotional message before.

But the real problem was the message itself… It was simply one short sentence. That’s it!

Now, I’m as big a fan of brevity as the next guy… but there was no real thought behind it. No real value. Not even a nice story in the message. It’s as if the sender tried to do the absolute least amount of work possible, just to get out an email for Easter so they could say they were doing something.

All-in-all… an OK strategy – but lousy execution.

Here’s my point… I see a lot of bad marketing in our industry. Poorly thought-out, haphazard, hastily-executed tactics – just to do something. Anything. And the worst offenders are these…