The Competitive Advantage

March 9, 2021

The 3 Keys to Your Personal Brand

Last week, I wrote a blog post about how your company’s brand is impacted by nearly everything it does. Well guess what? The same thing applies to your personal brand, as well! And yes, just like a company, whether you want to or not, you do have a brand out in the markets you serve. And just like a company’s brand, the market will determine what yours is… that is, what they think of you when they see you or hear your name.

March 2, 2021

What can impact your brand? Absolutely everything!

When you hear the word “brand,” what do you think of? Most people think of logos, colors, fonts… the graphical representation of a brand. But that’s not it at all.

Your brand is determined by your buyers and prospective buyers. Your brand if what they think of when they see or hear your company’s name. You don’t get to determine what your brand is. Your brand is what the marketplace says it is. Period.

January 19, 2021

It’s a New Year… What Are You Going to Blog About?

Here are two methods to make sure your blog posts hit the mark!

About this time each year, many firms are looking at their newly minted marketing plan and getting excited about the upcoming possibilities. Then, they look at the plan’s timeline and it reads, “Write the January blog post.” Instantly, that excitement turns to fear.

“Oh crap… what do I write about?” Don’t laugh, we’ve all been there!

November 24, 2020

Generating Sales Leads is a Waste of Money… If You Don’t Follow-up

Sales leads are the lifeblood of any growing business. In the good ‘ol days… they came from networking at a conference, meeting visitors at your trade show booth and cold calling. Today, they come from hosting webinars, leveraging LinkedIn connections and creating downloadable gated content.

But here’s the problem (today and back then)… the vast majority of those sales leads are never followed-up on. It doesn’t matter if the guilty party is a full-time sales rep or a part-time seller-doer… this is where the sales process breaks down. Happens all the time! I don’t know if it’s because the sale rep gets lazy, gets distracted or gets busy.

November 17, 2020

Your Sales & Marketing Focus Is All Wrong!

When you think about sales & marketing, what comes to mind? For most business people… it’s about acquiring new clients – about building awareness in the markets or industries they serve, then generating sales leads that lead to new business.

And that’s wrong!

The fact is, when you think about sales & marketing, your first priority – the primary focus of your strategies and planning – should be to maintain and grow your current client base.

November 10, 2020

The Hardest Thing To Do When Selling

Whether you’re a professional, full-time salesperson or a newly-minted seller-doer, it doesn’t take long for you to figure out that the hardest thing to do when selling is convincing a company to do business with you the very first time. That is, to acquire a brand-new client.

Think about it… first, you’re ‘stealing’ them from a competitor, one where they presumably have had a pretty good relationship for a period of time. And two, your sales pitch – by definition – is basically, “I know you’ve been working with my competitor for a long time and have a good relationship with them, but I want you to forget about that and take a chance with us… a company you have absolutely no history with!” OK, I’m exaggerating… but not by much.

October 20, 2020

Should You ‘Pivot’ During the Pandemic?

If your firm is like 99% of all other firms, your business in 2020 is not what you thought it would be when you were planning for it a year ago.

Clients are placing a ‘hold’ on projects or canceling them altogether. Some of your clients might have gone through layoffs and are not spending a dime. Perhaps you work in a certain industry vertical that has taken a real hit this year (travel, restaurants, etc.).

And when that happens, as business leaders and managers, we are obliged to take a step back and ask, “Should we pivot and be looking outside of our core business for other opportunities?”

September 30, 2020

Stop Selling… Start Helping!

I generally empty my spam folder every day, but for some reason, I had skipped a few days… and had a mountain of emails to be deleted.

As I was looking through them and getting ready to hit the ‘delete’ button, I noticed a consistent theme across all of them. Other than a couple of “I’m a barrister in Dubai I need your help to claim $20 million,” every single one of them was a hard sales pitch: SEO services, website design, app creation and so on and so on. And most from companies I had never heard of.

Even though this was my spam folder, I think there’s still a lesson here… if you want someone to take notice of you – in an email, over the phone or in person – stop selling and start helping. Or as one of my clients likes to say, “bring value to the relationship.”