The Competitive Advantage

May 5, 2026

2026 Is 33% Over! Are You on Track to Hit Your Sales Goals?

As of last Thursday (April 30^th), the year is already 33% gone! Hard to believe. But it’s also a chance to reflect on and assess what’s happened so far… and maybe to make some tweaks to your plans for the rest of the year.

October 21, 2025

Stop Chasing New Clients: Focus on Keeping the Ones You Have

When most people think about ‘sales,’ they think about going out and acquiring new clients. And while that clearly is part of the sales function, I would argue that the higher sales priority is to ensure that you keep – and grow – your existing clients.

October 14, 2025

Introverts Can Sell Too: Busting the Big Sales Myths

Over the past several years, I’ve trained hundreds of MR professionals, 95% of whom were seller-doers. And there are two major reasons (ahem… excuses) that I’ve heard from these workshop participants as to why they can’t sell (ahem… don’t want to sell):

• “I’m an introvert!”
• “I’m not a natural born salesperson.”

Sound familiar? Let’s dissect these and bust apart these misconceptions.

October 7, 2025

Hey Seller-Doer… How’s Your Reputation?

It’s a big factor in sales success.

As we’ve discussed often in this blog, there’s a lot of sameness in our industry (Article 1, Article 2). All too often, it’s the same kind of firms providing the same kinds of services to the same kinds of clients and talking about it in the same way.

So, with all of that sameness, how does a buyer make a decision? In the past, we’ve talked a lot about PODs (points of differentiation)… that is, differentiating your firm based on strategic decisions. For example, specializing in certain methodologies or focusing on specific industries.

But today, I want to talk about “reputation.” Not your firms, but yours… as a seller-doer.

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

July 29, 2025

The Future is Face-to-Face

I was reading a post on LinkedIn yesterday, talking about AI, and suggesting that one of the fallouts from it is that in the very near future, we won’t know if what we see and hear online or in apps is ‘real’ or was created by AI. Because of that, Marc Cuban – billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks – is predicting “an explosion of face-to-face engagements, events, and jobs.”

Well, that sure seemed to be the case last week at The Quirk’s Event in New York.

June 24, 2025

Want More Sales Success? Slow Down!

I was having a conversation earlier this week with one of my clients about his sales process. He had what was ostensibly a two-step process: Connect with someone on LinkedIn, then get them to see his software demonstration. And while he had decent success getting connections, and even some success getting prospects to sit through a demo, not much was happening after that. My advice to him? Slow down.