The Competitive Advantage

June 28, 2023

Lessons Learned After Writing 500+ Blog Posts

This is post number 533 on our blog, and with the exception of two guest posts, they’re all mine. And all of them written since I founded Harpeth Marketing in 2012. In those 11+ years, I’ve learned a few things about blogging and content marketing that I thought might be of value…

June 6, 2023

The 3 C’s Strategy… Point Your Marketing in the Right Direction

Tactics without a strategy is just ‘noise.’

I’ve been working with a client recently, helping them to create their first-ever marketing plan (yeah, I know, it’s odd timing, but their fiscal year starts in July). As we were getting into it, they said things like “We want to do a quarterly newsletter” and “We want to post on LinkedIn every week.”

To which I responded, “That’s great! Why?”

And I got a blank stare in return. Then I said, “What do you want to post about every week?” The stare continued.

March 29, 2023

Want to Win Your Clients’ Trust? Change 1 Word in Your Vocabulary.

I was having a conversation with a client last week – the president and his senior staff. We were talking about their business objectives for the year and the kinds of marketing and sales efforts they would need to achieve them.

As I was laying out a number of strategies and tactics that could help them reach their goals, the president interrupted me, and said, “Steve, don’t tell us what we could be doing… tell us what we should be doing.”

March 21, 2023

The Case for Being a ‘Specialist’

Take a look around our industry… most research firms are generalists. They provide a variety of services to a variety of different kinds of clients. In fact, it’s kind of difficult to find one that is legitimately a specialist in any one area.

February 14, 2023

The Biggest Challenges to Revenue Generation

At the Insights Association’s CEO Summit last month, one of the presentations highlighted the results from a survey that the association conducted of its members. And one of the topics was on growing revenue. Ahhh… music to my ears.

In the presentation, they reported on the top three obstacles to growing revenue:

1. Getting qualified leads
2. Recruiting more effective sales professionals
3. The cyclical nature of the seller-door model

And while it’s hard to argue with the results of the survey – and I’m glad to see that these firms recognize these issues – what’s interesting is that I don’t see very much being done to address them!

December 28, 2022

The Top 10 Blog Posts of 2022

Over the past year, our blog posts were read thousands of times. To all of you who stopped by to take a peek… thank you. We hope you found the articles to be interesting, helpful and maybe even a little inspirational.

Secondly, our blog now houses more than 500 articles on sales and marketing (this is actually #521), all related to growing your business in our industry. And the fact is, if you keep reading them… we’ll keep writing them.

December 21, 2022

Are You Prepared for Sales and Marketing in 2023?

As 2022 winds down, and you start looking at your sales and marketing efforts for 2023, there’s one question you’re probably asking yourself – like we all are – and that is, “How do we grow [more] next year?”

Before I try to answer that question, let me share one of my favorite business philosophies… “If you keep doin’ what you’re doin’, you’ll keep gettin’ what you’re gettin’.” The fact is, if you want to grow in 2023 – or grow more than you did in 2022 – you’ll have to try something new. Or maybe several somethings. Maybe this is the year you test LinkedIn advertising, create some videos or employ SEO in your marketing. Or finally pull the trigger on hiring your first full-time sales rep.

Whatever it is… you need to embrace it. If not, then the best that you can hope for in 2023 is exactly what happened to you this year.

October 18, 2022

Is Your Work Good Enough to Ensure Repeat Clients?

Spoiler alert: It’s not!

If you were to ask 10 market research business owners what keeps their repeat clients coming back, nine of those 10 will say, “It’s because of the good work we do.”

To be fair, if you do lousy work, your clients won’t become repeat clients. But the reality is that most all firms do good work. It’s table stakes these days. There’s nothing unusual about it. Just to ‘be in the game,’ you’d better be good at what you do.