The Competitive Advantage

November 2, 2021

Take Good Care of Your Small Clients, Too!

I have been saying for years that, “All clients matter… but big clients matter more.” And I still believe that. Strongly, in fact. But that doesn’t mean you should ignore your small clients or small sales prospects.

For one thing, small clients can grow into big ones. And if you take good care of them when they’re small… they’ll remember you when they’re big.

October 19, 2021

The Marketing Trifecta: The 3 Tactics You Need to Achieve Your Marketing Goals

In my last post, I wrote about a few different things I would recommend to help you in preparing for putting together your 2022 Sales & Marketing plan. I’ll assume you’ve done all those things (wink-wink), so now, I want to explore the implementation of your plan, particularly on the Marketing side; we’ll talk about Sales implementation in the next post.

Look around… there are a thousand different ways – especially in light of all the technology available to everyone these days – to implement your marketing. But I want to simplify it for you. In fact, not just simplify it, but let you know that this can be done for no (or almost no) cost!

September 21, 2021

Your Customers’ Experience (CX) with Your Firm Can Make or Break You!

I’m a bourbon drinker. But sadly, this blog post isn’t about bourbon… it’s about CX – the customer experience.

As a bourbon drinker, I have gotten into the habit of sending bottles of bourbon as gifts to clients. And I’ve been using a website called ReserveBar.com to do it.

It’s a really easy site to use… to find the particular product I’m looking for and to have it sent. But recently, I had a problem with a purchase there.

August 31, 2021

How Differentiation Can Help You Win the Competitive Battle

Do a quick favor for me and read through the following statements (taken from actual websites in our industry)…

• “Every project that comes through our doors gets senior-level attention every step of the way.”
• “[We are] committed to working with clients to identify the right solutions to their specific challenges.”
• “[We are] a full-service custom research firm that develops long-term partnerships with its clients.”
• “We know how to truly listen and collaborate – so you gain a partner, not just a vendor.”
• “We consult with Clients to translate what consumers say and do into insights and actionable recommendations.”

I’ll bet I’m not going too far out on a limb to say that your firm’s website likely contains several of the same sentiments, maybe using almost exactly the same words.

August 17, 2021

Knowing Your Competitors Can Help You Grow Your Business

There are three primary categories of information that impact your marketing & sales strategy… your Company, your Clients and your Competitors. The ‘3 Cs!’

If I were to ask you what’s going on with your Company… you’d probably tell me about your experienced team, your products and services, revenue numbers, industry trends, and so on. If I asked about your Clients, you’d probably tell me about the markets or industries you serve, how they’re using your services, who your Top 10 clients are and the buyer persona you target.

But when I ask about your Competitors… I’m likely to get a shoulder shrug. Or a comment like, “all firms in the industry are my competition,” which somehow – in your mind – absolves you of having the need for any real knowledge of what and who you’re competing against. That needs to stop.

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 30, 2021

Why don’t research firms conduct research on themselves?

We’ve all heard the saying that “The cobbler’s children have no shoes”… which means, in business terms, that some companies are really good at doing things for their clients, but not so good at doing those same things for themselves.

And there’s no escaping that predicament in the Market Research industry.

For the nine years we’ve been in business, we’ve worked with scores of market research firms across the U.S. and around the world… and with relatively few exceptions, none of these firms conduct any research on themselves. Specifically, they’re not doing any post-project customer satisfaction surveys.

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.