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 somethi

From the buyer’s perspective, the brand is both a shortcut and an insurance policy. It assures them that they can expect certain qualities from a product or service and it frees them from doing much (or any) investigation themselves. This is why people in a hurry are more likely to choose brands they know. 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 purc

Everyone knows what professional quality (and low quality) content looks like when they see it, but it’s a lot harder to create it. Good marketing writers have their own lists of quality priorities that go something like this: 1. Accuracy 2, Spelling, grammar and syntax 3. Brand messaging/alignment 4. Engagement My own #4 is readability. Readability refers to how easy it is for the average person to read the content. This is not the same as reader engagement—which is more li

From the buyer’s perspective, the brand is both a shortcut and an insurance policy. It assures that they can expect certain qualities from a product or service and it frees them from doing much (or any) investigation themselves. This is why people in a hurry are more likely to choose brands they know. 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

Mention "metrics" to some (even experienced) marketers and the response will be cool at best. There are a lot of reasons that marketers shy away from metrics, here are three: They only run metrics when asked (quarterly or even yearly). In fact, management generally only asks for metrics when they sense that things are not going well. If that's the case, then the marketer should be scared. By the time the metrics are run it will almost certainly be too late to do anything

There’s the adage that good marketing can sell a bad product one time, but not twice. In fact, if there is an issue with the product, most companies are better off pulling it out of the market until the issue is resolved. At any rate, don’t make the mistake of assuming that the issue is marketing until you take another look at the product itself. Following are some product-related issues that might be affecting sales. Target Audience Misalignment: Your product might not be

Not all channel partners are created equal. It’s best to focus on those partners where your sales are historically strong. Then work on fostering market development fund (MDF) relationships with 2-3. The goal is to submit MDF requests to the same partners every quarter. This simplifies things for a process that can be mind-numbingly complex. Create a separate spreadsheet for each partner that includes fields such as project #, approve date, start date, end date,

From the buyer’s perspective, the brand is both a shortcut and an insurance policy. It assures that they can expect certain qualities from a product or service and it frees them from doing much (or any) investigation themselves. This is why people in a hurry are more likely to choose brands they know. 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

If your technology company is like most, you are getting a decent amount of website traffic and engagement stats are above average. You are also getting a lot of traffic to your Contact Us page, but almost no one fills out the form, sends an email or calls. This is frustrating, especially if your marketing team is doing everything right and your site traffic is continually climbing. Following are some common roadblocks and ways to remove them. · Website Usability: E

First of all, are you really sure you are a B2B? While all businesses that sell to other business rather than consumers are called B2Bs, I’ve learned that B2B2C is not a B2B—it’s a B2C as far as marketing goes. This means if the business sells to other businesses that sell almost exclusively to consumers, it needs to be treated as a B2C for marketing (and other) purposes. An example would be a business that is selling point-of-sale systems to retailers (who are then selling