The Competitive Advantage

May 30, 2017

Lazy sales & marketing people… UGH!

It happened again. [Actually, it happens pretty regularly.] I received an email – in this case, a LinkedIn message – from a company representative promoting a discount on their services for the summer.

In general, I’m opposed to salesy emails to begin with… but this one, like so many others, completely missed the mark with me. The note was promoting services targeted to market research firms and independent moderators. Our firm is neither of those.

Why do people responsible for sales & marketing think it’s OK to just blast out email sales pitches to anyone and everyone on their list?! It’s just lazy!

May 23, 2017

How to Max Out Lead Generation for MR Firms

Fact: Not every ‘sales lead’ becomes a client.

But every client was – at one time – a sales lead. Can’t happen any other way! Sales leads are the lifeblood of growth for every MR organization. Generating (and qualifying) them should be a top-priority strategy for everyone involved in sales and marketing at your firm.

There are numerous ways to generate sales leads, but the two most effective ones in our industry are:

• Gated content
• Conference participation

April 4, 2017

The 3 Cardinal Rules of Building Awareness

A simple fact: Potential buyers can’t buy from you if they don’t know you exist… or if you never come to mind for them.

So, whatever your marketing & sales plans, strategies or tactics… it all starts with being known. That is, it all starts with building awareness. Period.

March 14, 2017

“Why should I care?”… the question your website visitors are asking!

Your clients don’t care about what you can do… they care about what you can do for them.

We’re working with a new client who has developed a unique market research methodology. It’s really very interesting and kind of heady stuff – with a lot of science behind it. And that’s exactly how it’s described on their website. Which is fine.

In fact, that’s how most firms describe their products and services on their websites in our industry: “here’s what we do”… “and it’s really neat”… “and we’re really great at it!”

Meanwhile, your website visitors – a.k.a. potential clients – are reading that copy and asking themselves, “So what?! Why should I care?”

And they’re absolutely right… why should they care? You haven’t given them a reason to.

February 28, 2017

Hey Sales Rep… Your Manager Should be Fired!

I receive “cold call emails” all the time…. I guess as President of the company, I’m a magnet for salespeople. Fine… it comes with the territory.

But this past week, I received a sales email so bad that I had to share it (names are being withheld so they don’t die of shame!).

February 21, 2017

3 Reasons Why You Need Email Automation

Email automation, the programmed sending of prepared emails based on some trigger event, has been around for several years now.

It originally fell within the purview of marketing automation platforms (e.g. Hubspot or Marketo), but more recently, has become integrated into even the low-cost email platforms (e.g. EMMA or MailChimp).

Here’s an example of how it might work… let’s say you send out a monthly enewsletter to your sales database. Inside the email is a link back to a blog post about Product Testing on your website. Pretty standard, right?

Now imagine that everyone who clicks on that link is automatically sent a second email 3 days later, linking them to another blog post on a related topic. Pretty neat, right? [Note: it’s the clicking on the link that’s the ‘trigger event.’]

February 14, 2017

No 2017 Marketing & Sales Plan? There’s still time!

Here we are… a month and a half into the new year and you never got around to putting together a marketing & sales plan for 2017. First of all, know that you’re not alone. A busy Q4 plus the holidays put a lot of businesses behind the eight-ball when it comes to planning.

But, don’t use that as an excuse! Just because the new year had already begun doesn’t mean there’s not time to still put down on paper what you’re going to do this year to achieve your revenue growth goals. So, here are my suggestions for getting it done…

January 17, 2017

Strategy & Planning are Easy… Marketing Execution is Hard!

OK, strategy and planning are not easy… not even a little. They require focused time and critical thinking – two assets often in short supply around the office. But once they’re done… they’re done. Then the real work begins.

I was out of town last Thursday and Friday working with a new client. It was for two days of coaching on marketing strategy and planning… helping them to focus their business development efforts then putting in place some targeted tactics to execute over the coming months. And it went really well.

Now the question is… will any of those agreed-to tactics actually get executed?