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 pur

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 somethin

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 wr

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