The Competitive Advantage

April 19, 2022

500 Blog Posts and Counting…

I know it’s hard to imagine – and it’s even difficult for me to say – but this is the 500th blog post we’ve published since opening our doors 10 years ago (10 years ago this week, coincidentally). That’s about one blog post per week – every week – for 10 years. And boy am I tired!

When I mentioned this little factoid to someone recently, they asked, “What does it take to do that… to crank out a fresh piece of content every week?” I couldn’t give a good answer then, but after thinking about it for a few days, here’s how I think it happened:

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

April 5, 2022

Consistency and Frequency. Without Them, Your Marketing Will Fail!

I was having a conversation yesterday with the cofounder of a firm in our industry. It was the first time we’d met. We were talking about marketing execution, and he said something really interesting… “We haven’t done any marketing because I was afraid that once we started, we wouldn’t be able to stop!”

To which I responded, “You are 100% correct!”

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.

January 4, 2022

Top 10 Sales & Marketing Blog Posts of 2021

Since founding Harpeth Marketing in 2012, we’ve published over 450 blog posts on all kinds of sales & marketing topics in our blog, The Competitive Advantage. In fact, this is officially post #491!

And at this time every year, we look at back at the most-read posts from the previous year. But we’re doing it with a little ‘twist’ this year. Instead of the usual ‘top 10’ list… we’ve got two ‘top 5’ lists:

• The first list contains the most-read articles that were published in 2021.
• The second list contains the most-read articles in 2021, regardless of when we first published them (the year they were published is shown).

October 19, 2021

The Marketing Trifecta: The 3 Tactics You Need to Achieve Your Marketing Goals

In my last post, I wrote about a few different things I would recommend to help you in preparing for putting together your 2022 Sales & Marketing plan. I’ll assume you’ve done all those things (wink-wink), so now, I want to explore the implementation of your plan, particularly on the Marketing side; we’ll talk about Sales implementation in the next post.

Look around… there are a thousand different ways – especially in light of all the technology available to everyone these days – to implement your marketing. But I want to simplify it for you. In fact, not just simplify it, but let you know that this can be done for no (or almost no) cost!

June 1, 2021

Creating a Sales Culture is Critical to Success

Firms in the Market Research industry are, by nature, operationally-focused. You manage your businesses around delivering services to clients, almost always one project at a time. Virtually everyone on staff is there to contribute to the projects. It’s what you do and who you are. New clients come to you as a result of the good work you do and word of mouth.

Then you make the decision to become more ‘proactive’ with your sales effort. Maybe you bring in a full-time sales rep… or designate a couple of your senior staff as “seller-doers.” Either way, the chances of success with your new sales efforts are dramatically enhanced if you can help to create a ‘sales culture’ within your organization. Without it, you’re likely to stir up rumor, speculation and a lot of resentment.

May 18, 2021

Thinking About Putting on a Webinar? Do it!

For years, webinars have been a very popular channel for communicating and connecting with the marketplace. And as webinar software platforms have become easier to use, filled with amazing new features and stay very affordable, there’s never been a better time to include webinars in your marketing program.