More wisdom from my HBR marketing mentor-5 signs that your organization’s marketing needs some work: Declining sales. No need to elaborate here. Sales are flat and your company needs a growth strategy. Sometimes that means you need to add to your marketing team. Sometimes it means your marketing team needs to work more closely with sales. No organization can really grow without support from marketing. Why? Because effective marketing projects your company as a winner, no

This is a crucial selling point for expensive, technical, and/or complex products & services When it comes to maintaining and building customer relations in industries that involve expensive, technical, and/or complex products and services, there’s nothing more important to customers than risk reduction. The ability to understand the risk customers face and then reduce it can make a dramatic difference in the rate of sales conversions. There is always some risk to a buyer w

Every business wants to connect with and appeal to an audience of potential customers. One way to do that is with a memorable business/brand name. Here are six name trends currently popular among startups and new businesses. 1. 'This and That' Names This and That names are just what it sounds like: brand names composed of two words, usually nouns, to form a striking mental image. You may have heard of Rag and Bone or Cloth and Stone. To get in on this trend, pick two shor

Everything that leaves your business should be beautiful in some way. The definition of beautiful is roughly this: possessing qualities that give great sensory pleasure. Going a step further, beauty is resonant—meaning it speaks to something beyond the senses. People seek beauty because it has a connecting quality. For example, a beautiful work of art transcends the canvas and paint, connecting the creative consciousness of the artist with the creative consciousness of the

Much of the following is from an excellent Trust Radius article. TrustRadius, a research and review platform dedicated to technology buyers, recently released their 2022 B2B Buying Disconnect report—a survey of 2,185 respondents that shows year-over-year trends in business technology buying and selling. Here are a few highlights of the 2022 report: · Virtually 100% of buyers want to self-serve part or all of the buying journey—up 13% from 2021. · Since 2021, v

OK—so last week’s post included some out-of-the-box tips for prepping for a speech. This week, I’ll wrap up the topic with some tips on what to do before, during and after the speech. Here goes: Wear something that will focus attention on your face. This means no loud colors, no busy prints, no big designer logos, no (please) cleavage. Don’t wear anything with metal buttons that will clank on the lectern or podium while you’re speaking. The same goes for long metal necklac

Multiple studies have shown that the subject line is the most important factor in driving digital marketing results. You can spend hours composing a truly informative email for clients and prospects, but it’s a waste of time if no one reads it. The good news is that you have many more characters in the subject line than you’re using—about 85. The average email subject is only 45 characters. What a waste! The thinking used to be that you want the subject line to be as short

gIf you’ve ever given a speech (and I’m including junior high English class here) you already know the standard advice. What you’re going to read in the following pages are tips and tricks that you probably didn’t know. Wouldn’t it be nice if people in the audience didn’t yawn, roll their eyes, or check for messages on their PDAs while you’re speaking? Wouldn’t it be nice if nearly everyone was hanging on your every word and you actually saw dozens of people jotting down no

While this is true for low-ticket items, it’s surprisingly true for high ticket items as well---especially if those items are complex. Badgered on all sides to make a purchase decision on complicated technology and having few resources to verify claims, risk-averse decisions makers will go with the well branded products and services every time. The lesson for businesses with unbranded or poorly branded products and services is that when you make claims, provide hard proof of

To develop a successful organization---there’s nothing more important than creating a foundation of excellence. This means knowing what you do better than anyone else and then bringing relevant products and services to a market that appreciates those unique capabilities. Paul Leinwand and Cesare Mainardi wrote the seminal work on this topic; a book called, The Essential Advantage. Although I don’t follow and/or agree with everything, it is an excellent book. And actually the