The Competitive Advantage

September 16, 2025

It’s Only September… But 2025 is Already Over!

At least from a sales & marketing perspective.

It’s September and you’re a little behind on your revenue goals for the year. So, you decide to double down on your sales and marketing efforts for the next several weeks.

Logical, right? But the fact is, for most MR agencies, it’s too late to impact 2025. With the typical sales cycle being 6 to 12 months long, your efforts in September and October aren’t paying any dividends until Q2 or Q3 of next year.

Sure, you might get lucky heading into Q4 of this year, but for the most part… you’re done!

August 19, 2025

Inside the Mind of a Research Buyer, Part 5

This is the 3^rd installment (post 1, post 2) in our current blog series (and 5^th overall in this series) based on interviews with research buyers I’ve had the opportunity to meet recently. They have all been kind enough to share with me how they like to connect with (and ultimately, be sold to by) research vendors/agencies. If you work in any capacity for an agency, this series will help you better understand your clients.

Name: Nicole Whitlow
Title: Head of Global Consumer Insights, KitchenAid
Company: Whirlpool
Years at company: 6

August 12, 2025

Inside the Mind of a Research Buyer, Part 4

In our last post, we continued this blog series based on interviews with research buyers I had the pleasure of meeting over the last couple of months. Their insight into how buyer’s buy should be required reading for all MR agency employees. Here’s #4 in that series…

Name:  Brett Garrison
Title:  Manager, Market Insights
Company:  Aflac
Years at company:  8

August 5, 2025

Inside the Mind of a Research Buyer, Part 3

Earlier this year, I interviewed a couple of research buyers around the topic of how they connect with and buy from their agency partners. They were (and still are) among the most read blogs I’ve ever posted. Well, as a result of hosting & moderating the Insights Association’s Summer Sales Webinar Series last month – and attending the Quirks NY Event – I’ve added a few more interviews to the list. I hope you find value in their perspective…

Name: Jen Lovinus
Title: Senior Manager, MRO Insights
Company: Grainger
Years at company: 3

July 21, 2025

What Buyers Want

And I know this because they told me!

Over the past couple of weeks, I had the pleasure and privilege of hosting and moderating the Insights Association’s Sales Accelerator Series. All the presenters were terrific, including the very insightful research buyers who participated in a panel discussion on the last day.

June 2, 2025

Churn Baby Churn, Part 2

The REAL reasons clients leave you.

In last week’s blog post, we explored why it’s so important to focus on keeping and growing your existing clients… that is, to minimize ‘churn.’ And, in fact, it ought to be your #1 priority when planning for revenue growth!

The question is, why do you have churn in the first place? That is, what are you doing – or not doing – that causes seemingly good clients to leave your firm and take their business elsewhere?

May 29, 2025

Churn Baby Churn!

One of the tools we use when onboarding a new client is something we call the ‘5-Year Revenue Review.’ It’s a report that your accounting team can easily provide: Revenue by Client by Year for the past 5 years. And what you can learn from it is interesting and eye-opening.

Many business leaders regularly look at revenue year-to-date and compare it to last-year-to-date. And that’s fine. That trouble is that even if there’s overall growth, it may be hiding problems lurking beneath the surface. But when look at a 5-year report, you’ll see gaps and trends in the data that a 2-year analysis can’t reveal.

April 30, 2025

The Job of a Sales Manager? To Manage AND Coach!

Part 4 of a 4-part series on managing seller-doers.

When we hear the term, “sales manager,” most people think about that person managing their sales team. Not only is that job description incomplete… it’s also wrong.

In a nutshell, the role of the sales manager is two-fold… to manage the sales process and systems and to coach the members of their sales team. Let me explain…