Much of the following is from an excellent article by Patrick Delehanty, Marketing Manager, Marcel Digital—with some of my own input For starters, I would say that close communication and collaboration is key for healthy client relationships. One of the best ways to do this is to set up a regular meeting. At Smart PR Communications, we have a standing meeting with every client every week. We are insistent about this and our clients appreciate it. This serves a number of purposes such as: 1. It allows all of us to review what took place the prior week. 2. It sets the agenda for the coming week. 3. It allows all of us to discuss issues before they escalate. 4. It eliminates surprises on
Marketing Tip #1 for Small Technology Companies: Level the Playing Field with these 5 Tips for Negot
It makes sense, right? The person that makes the first offer loses? Not always. In fact, the opposite can be true. Negotiation truisms, like most truisms, started out as rules of thumb and then somehow became accepted fact. Following are 5 things you need to know about negotiations that may give you an edge. 1. It can be advantageous to make the opening offer. Here’s what the experts say. First of all, most negotiations don’t start with an offer, they start with something far more important, which is each party’s position. There is some advantage to getting the other party to reveal his position first and that’s where you should be focusing your efforts. As far as the offer goes, if you
I've been giving some thought lately to what separates true marketing masters (and there are very few) from everyone else. I've come to the conclusion that they always know what to do in every situation--how to meet every challenge with the solution that is most likely to work (although it doesn't always). In short, they never run out of productive ideas. This is especially important for success in marketing tech companies. In mulling this over, I went back to an article I wrote on Mastery a few years ago for Business Excellence--a publication started by Tom Peters. Following is an excerpt from that article. Six ingredients form the foundation of mastery: Focus Organization Planning Self dis
Following are a few tips for making cold-calling less stressful (in order of effectiveness). 1. Commit to an amount of time, not a certain number of contacts. So instead of starting with a list of say 25 prospects to call, commit to an hour of cold-calling. This has the psychological effect of putting a cap on the anticipated stress. It also makes a negative response or two less likely to affect you and it will make you more likely to engage with a promising prospect (you aren’t thinking “I can’t talk long because I still have 18 more prospects to call”). 2. Coffee. If you are a coffee drinker (and I hope you are) have a full cup about 20 minutes before you start calling. The hour that
