The Competitive Advantage

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.

September 6, 2022

Wanna Grow? You Need Sales AND Marketing.

When it comes to sales and marketing in our industry, I bump up against two extremes more often than not. Some companies invest in sales teams, but don’t do much in the way of marketing to pave the way for them or support them along the journey. On the flip side are other firms that employ only marketing to create a presence in the marketplace and perhaps generate some sales leads… only to have a reticent and untrained seller-doer not take the necessary actions to build relationships with buyers and acquire clients. The reality is this… for you to successfully grow your business, you need both sales and marketing.

July 5, 2022

2022 is Half Over…

… Are you halfway toward achieving your goals?

It’s hard to believe that this year is already half over… it has absolutely flown by! And I hope it’s been a good year, so far, for you and your firm. This midpoint in the year gives you an opportunity for a little reflection. To see if you’re on pace to achieve this year what you wanted to achieve.

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.

May 24, 2022

The Dramatic Impact of Simple Marketing

Recently, one of our outsourced marketing clients asked me to deliver a short presentation to their entire company about the work we are doing for them and the impact it’s having.

As I was putting together the PowerPoint deck, it reinforced for me how dramatically impactful even simple marketing can be – if done properly – and the disservice most firms are doing to themselves by not doing any real marketing. Here’s what I talked about with this client…