In my experience, too many sales people simply take the value proposition given by marketing and restate it to the prospect. This is the worst use of a value proposition. If you are in Marketing and you enable your sales team this way, then you are not helping.
Read MoreShare Let’s say that you are a drug store owner in a small town. Business has been good, but the freeway has just bypassed Old Route 7, which runs through town and past your store. In addition, the town mine has played out, and people are moving away. What do you do? This is essentially […]
Read MoreHow long do you think you have to make a good first impression? Yes, the number may depress a few of the less confident out there. Various studies say the number ranges from three seconds to thirty seconds. Further, these impressions then often guide other’s opinions of us regardless of how hard we work to change them. Even in the digital world, many inbound and outbound marketers forget the axiom about first impressions.
Read MoreMarketing Lead Generation Minneapolis St Paul Minnesota AtlantaWould you show up on a first date by bringing an engagement ring and your parents along? While this may be a custom in some countries, it could be interpreted as intrusive or presumptuous in our culture. Courtship takes some finesse, and often requires a number of steps. Often the best approach is the product of each of these steps. So why should it be any different with inbound and outbound marketing, or sales?
Read MoreA 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. None of these turned out to be so important as I anticpated, and I keep asking myself, why I blog?
Read MoreSo, if you don’t make New Year’s resolutions, here is a list of items from my posts during the year that might make good subjects for reflection.
Read MoreI’m not a big fan of New Year’s resolutions. The way I figure it, if you don’t have the discipline to decide to do something or not during the year, then a resolution is not going to help. Resolutions are mostly about things that weren’t important enough to begin with or we would have done them. Indeed, most of us abandon by February, what we resolved to do on January 1.
On the other hand, I do believe in spending time reflecting on your marketing, sales or personal plans…
Read MoreThe Trust Edge by David Horsager is a compelling look at how trust and lack of trust can impact an organization. Horsager turns what might be a soft skill into a hard skill by giving the reader conrete steps to build an organization basewd on trust.
Read MoreIn 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 and being swept into the rapids, remembers….
Read MoreI 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. Was I a disappointed customer or a disappointed client? Marketers need to think about this question, “Do we have clients or customers?”
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