The Competitive Advantage

October 12, 2022

A Marketing Research Firm Doing Research on Their Marketing? WHAAAT?!

I received an email a couple of weeks ago from Merrill Dubrow, CEO at MARC Research in Dallas. Merrill is a good friend and a client… and he was looking for feedback on something he was working on.

We scheduled a Zoom call so I could see what it was. As it turned out, he and his colleague, Jim O’Hara, had created a series of ads for LinkedIn and were soliciting feedback on which of the ads I thought was most effective and why. And not just me… they also reached out to other marketing-types and some client-types.

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!”

December 8, 2020

Lead Nurturing for Seven Years? It’s True!

I first met with the founder of this particular MR services firm in early 2013. After his initial interest and a few phone calls, he said he was not ready to move forward.

A year later we reconnected… similar interest, a few more phone calls… same outcome.

And again, two years after that.

But now, it looks like it’s finally coming around and will actually happen. The interest, the need and the urgency are all higher than ever before. So, what happened? How did a sales prospect from 2013 finally come to pull the trigger (we think) more than seven years later?

July 28, 2020

12 Things to Do When Launching a New Service or Product

Congratulations! With the extra time you’ve had on your hands recently, you and your colleagues decided the time was right to launch a new service. Not just a small upgrade to what you’re already doing… but something entirely new. That’s terrific news.

Probably.

July 14, 2020

12 Touchpoints While Waiting to Hear Back from a Sales Prospect

I signed-up a new client last week. Pretty excited about it, too. And it only took 2 years to make it happen! :-0

Do you have clients and prospects that are slow to respond? OK, maybe not 2-years-slow – and that was certainly an anomaly for us – but waiting to hear over a period of weeks, or even months, can be very challenging and incredibly frustrating.

May 12, 2020

Do you have a defined sales process? No?! Ignoring it is a HUGE mistake!

Imagine you have responsibility for revenue growth at your firm and you finally decide to pull the trigger and convert a couple of your senior Project Managers to the Seller-Doer role. Congrats!

Now what? Well, one of the items you’ll need to cover in their training is to help them understand your firm’s ‘sales process.’

Sales process?! It’s not a term or a concept used very often in our industry… but it’s critical to your selling success. And here’s why…

June 25, 2019

Don’t sell to companies that can’t buy from you. Qualify your sales leads first.

Have you ever gotten deep into a sales conversation with a potential buyer – maybe even over the course of weeks or months – only to find out that they will never become a buyer? That your firm is just not the right fit with what they really need… or that they can’t afford your services?

Scenarios like that – which happen all too often – are incredibly frustrating. And a colossal waste of time!

So, what can you do? You need to qualify your sales prospects before moving forward. Here’s how…

January 23, 2019

Don’t Treat Your 2019 Revenue Goal Like Your New Year’s Resolution!

Raise your hand if your New Year’s resolution is to “lose weight!” It is, by far, the most common option for that annual tradition of ‘personal goal setting.’

While I don’t know the actual statistics, I’ll bet well over 90% of those with that goal don’t achieve it. Maybe 95%!  And there’s a pretty simple reason why that happens…

You can’t just ‘lose weight.’ You can’t will it to happen. You can’t stand in front of the mirror and hope that the fat will go away.