The Competitive Advantage

January 1, 2013

2013 Marketing & Sales Resolutions

At this time of year, we start thinking about how we can improve our lives for the coming year.  We start making our annual resolutions like “I need to lose weight,” “…stop smoking,” or “…pay more attention to my spouse.”

But most of those “goals” never happen.  Why?  Simple… because they are not action-oriented.  You can’t just “lose weight,” but you can go to the gym 3 times a week.  You can’t just “stop smoking,” but you can start chewing nicotine gum whenever you have a craving.  And you can’t just “pay more attention to your spouse,” but you can make sure every Friday night is “date night.”

See the difference?

Now let’s look at your 2013 Business Resolutions, from a marketing & sales perspective and see what you can come up with…

December 5, 2012

Get prepared… part 5 of a 5-part series on how to create your marketing & sales plan for 2013

One of the key parts of crafting your plan (Phase 3) is building in the mechanisms for measuring each of your marketing & sales tactics (which you execute in Phase 4).  If you’ve been disciplined about measuring and testing your tactics, in Phase 5, you will go through the results and decide what worked / what didn’t / and what needs to be tweaked.

October 31, 2012

Your best prospects are right in front of you… just open your eyes!

Let me ask you a question… “How long have you been in business?”  Two years?  Five years?  Ten or more?

Now, my follow-up question… “In all those years in business, how many clients and prospective clients have you come in contact with… responded to their inquiries, met at conferences, submitted bids or done projects for?”  Hundreds?  Maybe thousands?

What that says to me is that somewhere in your organization – captured in a CRM, listed on a spreadsheet or collected on business cards wrapped in a rubber band – you’ve got the names, phone numbers and email address of hundreds (or thousands?) of potential clients.

So, what are you doing with those names?  How are you engaging them?  What’s your plan for staying on their radar so that when they need to send out an RFP – they think of you?

October 23, 2012

Get out from behind your computer!

Are you familiar with match.com, the dating website?  I’ve never really spent any time on the site, but it is evidently one of the most popular sites of its kind in the world.

You know how it works… men and women log in and pore over profiles to try and find someone whose background looks appealing… then they email or IM back-n-forth to learn about each other and maybe schedule a date.  And from all accounts, it’s been a pretty successful site.

But have you seen the latest offering from them (on TV ads)?  They now sponsor events around the country called, “The Stir.”  They’re live, in-person social gatherings – wine tastings, group bowling, and so on.  Not online… not virtual… but real people meeting and talking in an effort to get to know one another.  What a concept!

September 26, 2012

If Content Marketing is not part of your Marketing Strategy… it should be!

(Part 1 of a 2-part series.)

Read through any marketing resource, website or blog post these days and you’ll see that ‘content marketing’ is THE hot marketing topic… and with good reason (we’ll get to that in a minute).

First, what is ‘content marketing?’

As simply as I can state it, content marketing is the development and sharing (a.k.a. giving away) of useful information that will help the reader to better understand a particular subject and/or help them to do his or her job better.  As an example, for a research firm, that could include providing content with titles like:

• 10 things to look for when sitting “behind the glass”
• Conducting ethnographic research in the digital age
• How to save time and money with online bulletin boards
• The top 5 coming trends in CPG research

Notice anything unusual?  None of the topics are salesy.  None of them are internally focused.  Content marketing is about providing genuinely helpful information.

Are you giving away some of your ‘secret sauce’ when you do this?  Maybe.  But, it’s the price of admission.  If you don’t – your competitors will.  And those that provide the best content often win.

September 18, 2012

Download our latest eBook on Marketing & Sales for the MR Industry

This week, we released Marketing & Sales for the Market Research Firm: Part 2 – How to Build an Effective Business Development Structure, a 14-page eBook that can be downloaded for FREE from our website.

Some of the eBook’s topics include:

• Understanding the goals and responsibilities of the marketing and sales functions
• Exploring the different marketing and sales positions common in the MR industry
• Reviewing options for sales commissions plans
• Managing marketing & sales inside the small firm.

To download your copy, CLICK HERE.

September 4, 2012

After attending a conference this fall… don’t let the flame go out. Nurture those leads!

Our industry offers up some great conferences, particularly in the fall of the year – CASRO, QRCA, ESOMAR, MRA, TMRE and so on.  They are all great places to learn and (wait for it…) network.

That’s right… these conferences provide you with the chance to meet with prospective clients in a non-threatening environment.  Whether it’s during a conference session, at a cocktail reception or on the exhibit floor, conferences give you the opportunity to shake hands, swap business cards, do a little personal “selling” and lay the groundwork for future business conversations.

But then you head home from the conference… return to your back-to-normal business routine… and before you know it, that pocketful of business cards representing a number of warm leads now has a thin layer of frost on it.

August 14, 2012

A Checklist for Conducting your own Sales Audit

Last week, we discussed ways to step back and take a look at your marketing with a fresh set of eyes.  This week, let’s apply that same philosophy to your sales effort…