The Competitive Advantage

August 9, 2022

Sales Success is About Your Activity – the Quantity and Quality

I started my career at the DuPont company a long, long, long time ago as a Technical Sales Representative. [My parents were so proud!] On the very first day of training, the national sales Director – Jim Thorn – welcomed our three-man training class to the company. To this day, I still remember his words, “I don’t care if you make only one sales call a week, just hit your sales goal!” True story.

And while it’s a bit of an extreme example, that philosophy still reigns supreme in the world of sales today. As a sales rep or seller-doer, exceeding your sales goal IS the goal! And that’s great… but it’s your selling activity that makes it happen. Send no emails, make no phone calls, send no proposals and – I guarantee – you won’t sell anything.

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.