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?

January 25, 2022

Commission Plans Are Not a Reward for Sales

To be fair, that statement is not 100% accurate. Of course, commission plans are a reward for your salespeople/seller-doers. But that is not WHY you should build them into compensation packages.

Spoiler alert: You implement commission plans to drive the desired behavior you want your seller-doers to exhibit. So yes, it’s a reward for them, but more importantly, it’s a strategic tool for management.

December 14, 2021

I Stopped Blogging for a Month… And Here’s What Happened

At our firm, we are all big believers in content marketing – for our clients and for ourselves – because of all the great things it can do for a business:

November 9, 2021

Repetition Builds Reputation

Why do the big advertisers run their ads on TV over and over? And over? Simple… repetition works. Sharing your marketing message frequently – over a period of time – builds top-of-mind awareness.

Further, building awareness is an ‘additive’ process… each exposure of your message building on the one before as you slowly climb to that top-of-mind position.

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.