Category: Clients


My 100th Blog Post! Should You Blog?

Filed Under: B2B Lead Generation, Clients, Marketing, Personal Marketing Skills by Prairie Sky Group — 1 Comment
January 6, 2012

Marketing and Lead Generation Minneapolis MinnesotaA lot of marketers and companies ask themselves if they should start blogging in order to generate leads.  It’s the new conventional wisdom.  So there are millions of business blogs.  And there are thousands of marketing blogs, some great, but most very dusty.

I started the Prairie Sky blog as an experiment.  I had some grandiose ideas, a few ulterior and selfish motives.  I wanted to see if I could create 25 posts with a small investment of time.  I wanted to test the conventional wisdom that you need a blog to generate traffic and leads.  As goals, these turned out to be important, yet not as important as I thought they would, so I keep asking myself, why I blog?

I thought my blog would be about the technical aspects of how to create leads.  I have a few posts on these subjects such as how to create a name based gender-assigning algorithm, or 30 tips for running a webinar, or how to create an automated marketing campaign or great landing page criteria.  I will expand some of these because I’m involved in the technical details of tools and trade every day.

But rather, it is the soft subjects of sales and marketing management, messaging, motivation, understanding clients and culture that I have gravitated toward.

One reason is that I see such a poor understanding of the fundamentals amongst my clients, especially at the management level, that the tools and technical discussion seems wasted.  For example, it doesn’t matter if you have a competitive keyword analyzer or generator if you haven’t thought your story through and written for humans.  It doesn’t matter if you can run an automated campaign or create a landing page if you don’t understand your prospects.  So I have leaned toward the basics.

This doesn’t answer the question of whether you should blog.  But if you are thinking of starting a blog for your company because it will make you famous, create a jillion leads, sell more product, it is just one step.

In some ways, I am surprised at reaching the 100 mark.  This is small in comparison to many, though more than most.  I’m not sure what I expected… perhaps a band and fireworks.

I’ve learned a lot.  In the end, the reason I blog is because it’s simply the right thing to do.  It allows me to connect and help other people, dialogue (internally and externally), test ideas, and serve our marketing community.  I am compelled to do it.  I recommend it.

I’m excited to see where it will lead next.  Thanks for your support.

Do Great Things!

Lee Stocking
Prairie Sky Group
Making Sales Cry With Qualified Leads
Lee.stocking@gmail.com
651-357-0110 (Cell 24×7)

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Think Like a Client

Filed Under: Clients, Marketing, Sales by Prairie Sky Group — Leave a comment
December 7, 2011

In Norman Maclean’s, A River Runs Through It, he tells a story of two brothers growing up in rural Montana and fishing the Big Blackfoot River in Montana.  The book is a lyrical and beautiful story, and I highly recommend the book over the movie.  In one passage, the older brother, Norman, after watching his younger brother Paul catch an enormous fish while being swept into the rapids, remembers:

“However one closeup picture of him at the end of this day remains in my mind, as if fixed by some chemical bath.  Usually, just after he finished fishing he had little to say unless he saw he could have fished better.  Otherwise, he merely smiled.  Now flies danced around his hatband.  Large drops of water ran from under his has on to his face and then into his lips when he smiled.

At the end of this day, then, I remember him both as a distant abstraction in artistry and as a closeup in water and laughter.

My father always felt shy when compelled to praise one of his family, and his family always felt shy when he praised them.  My father said, “You are a fine fisherman.”

My brother said, “I’m a pretty good with a rod, but I need three more years before I can think like a fish.”

How does this relate to sales and marketing?  Simply, that if we want to be better marketers and sales people, we need to “think like a client.”  Too often, for example, marketers think; how can I send more emails, rather than how can I provide content that is valuable to my clients?  Or sales people think; how can I close this deal, rather than, is this the right product of service for my client?

How is your company** geared to think like a client?  From your call answering message, to your website navigation, to your ease of doing business, if you want to catch (develop) clients, you need to think like a client.  The first step is to look at your business and interactions as they would.

Do Great Things!

Lee Stocking
Prairie Sky Group
Making Sales Cry With Qualified Leads
lee.stocking@gmail.com
651-357-0110 (Cell 24×7)

* Like fish portraints?  Shop this guy: http://www.fishartist.net/fish-artist-gallery.htm

** Footnote:  An old colleague, Dave Peterson, once told me he could tell the profitability of a set of manufacturing companies to +/- 1%  within ten seconds of walking onto the manufacturing floor.  He based his estimates on the neatness of the floor which gave him an estimate of the facilities process efficiency.  I can now apply Stocking’s corollary to the Peterson Rule:  The profitability of a company is directly proportional to the client experience.

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Do You Have Customers or Clients?

Filed Under: Clients, Customers, Marketing by Prairie Sky Group — Leave a comment
December 5, 2011

Marketing, REII bought a pair of hiking poles from REI for a trek across the Grand Canyon.  I used them on a couple of warm up runs in the high desert on dusty hikes when I discovered that the locking mechanisms began failing.  I assumed that dust was preventing the poles from locking.  Because I change pole lengths depending on whether I am ascending or descending, I didn’t want to risk having them fail on a 25 mile/10,000 foot elevation through-hike.  I tossed them in the trunk of my car and used another pair with a different locking mechanism.  Was I a disappointed customer or a disappointed client?

Marketers need to think about this question, “Do we have clients or customers?”

In the classic definition, customers are people who buy a products from you, and clients buy services.  The problem with that definition is that the lines are blurring with the advent of the Internet where I can get the same things you sell from three other vendors at a lower price.  (This may even be true for products which are not commodities.)  Marketers need to consider the lifetime value of their buyers, word of mouth, and the speed of negative comments that can happen through social media.  It may be cheaper to think of buyers as customers.  It’s easy to do in this tough economy with a micro-focus on the bottom line.  If they never come back to you because they are only going to ever buy one widget from you in their lives, maybe you can think of your buyers as customers.

But I believe we might be better off thinking of our buyers as clients, regardless of whether we sell a product or a service.  It changes our way of thinking: the way we structure our businesses, train our employees, develop products, and deal with our buyers.

A couple of months after my hike, I found the poles in the trunk of my car and brought them back to REI.  They were almost brand new.  I expected some hassle.  Instead, they happily accepted them back, indicated they would submit a case to the manufacture so they could make the product better, apologized, gave me my money back, and pointed me in the direction of another set with a different locking mechanism.  I was their client.  I recommend everyone buy their outdoor gear from REI!

Do your clients recommend you?

Do Great Things!

Lee Stocking
Prairie Sky Group
Making Sales Cry With Qualified Leads
lee.stocking@gmail.com
651-357-0110 (Cell 24×7)

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