The Competitive Advantage

February 22, 2022

Take Charge of Your Firm’s Growth

When I chat with the owners of market research firms across the U.S. about the growth of their businesses, three primary strategies rise to the top:

1. Referrals
2. Key contact relocation (they leave and take you with them to their new employer)
3. Repeat clients

And if these are among the top drivers of the growth of your business, too, you need to be concerned. Why? Because in every one of these very common scenarios, you are relying on someone else to make your firm successful. Is that really what you want?

October 26, 2021

The Sales Trifecta… The Core of Your Selling Efforts

Last week, I wrote a blog post about the Marketing Trifecta… the three fundamental marketing things you need to do to help grow your firm. In this post, I want to talk about the Sales Trifecta… yep, you guessed it – the 3 selling things you must do if you have sales responsibilities for your firm.

July 6, 2021

Improve Your Sales Presentation… Get Rid of ‘About Us’

Take a look at your current sales presentation deck. If you’re like the [vast] majority of firms, it starts with slides labeled ‘About Us’ or something similar. And generally, not just one or two slides, but a bunch of them.

Here’s my advice… delete them all!

When you stand in front of the room – or the zoom – to deliver a sales presentation, never start with ‘About Us.’ Why not? Because no one in the room cares! They already know what you do. If they didn’t, you wouldn’t have been invited to present.

June 23, 2021

Stop These 3 Bad Social Selling Habits Today!

Social selling using LinkedIn has been part of the sales landscape for several years, but it has exploded over the past year because of the pandemic. For many businesses, the cancellation of conferences and trade shows has meant the loss of one of their primary lead generation opportunities. So, they turned to social selling on LinkedIn. The problem is that it’s being done badly… too many people in sales have taken their old, bad sales habits and just moved them over to this new channel.

June 15, 2021

If You’re in Sales, Your Job Is Not to Sell!

Yeah, I know… sounds kind of wrong, doesn’t it? But let me finish that statement. Your job is not to sell… it’s to help buyers buy.

This philosophy is based on the premise that ‘people don’t like to be sold, but they love to buy.’ Think about your last car buying experience. There’s nothing that feels quite as good as driving off the dealer’s lot in a beautiful, brand new car. But leading up to it, you dreaded going to the dealership because of the pushy salespeople. You didn’t want to experience that sort of pressure or be forced into buying something that wasn’t quite right.

Now think about your role as a sales rep or a seller-doer. If you make a sale, that’s good for you… you win. But maybe it’s not what’s best for the client. However, if you help the client make a good buying decision, that’s a win-win.

April 20, 2021

Why Former Clients Are So Important

One of the on-boarding activities that we do with all new clients is to take a look back at their business for the past five years. And one of the things we inevitably see – and our clients seem to have forgotten – is the large number of former or lapsed clients. [Or maybe they remember, but just don’t like to be reminded of it.]

What’s really interesting about these former clients is that they stay former. That is, it’s extremely rare to see any of them come back into the ‘current client’ category.

I think this happens for three reasons…

March 16, 2021

Your Clients Don’t Know What They Need!

Alternate title: ‘Don’t Be an Order-Taker’

I received a call from a client last week. He said he wanted to talk with me about our sales training workshops. Great! Love to do those!

In my younger days… I would have hopped on the phone call and told him everything about our workshops, all the topics we covered, key takeaways for his employees and what makes it different than any other sales training workshop in our industry. It would have been awesome… at least that’s what I would have thought back then!

But I’m not that guy anymore… I’ve learned a few things.

December 29, 2020

The Top 10 Most-Read Blog Posts of 2020

According to Google Analytics, there were more than 10,000 Page Views of our blog this past year. And as I do every year at this time… I wanted to do a count-down of the most-reads topics. But I did the measurement a little differently this year.

Instead of looking at the most popular posts that were written in 2020, I looked at which posts were the most viewed in 2020, regardless of when they were written. Interestingly, these “hot topics” spanned the entire life of our company… from as early as 2012 (the year we were founded) up to several from this year.

We hope you enjoy them…