Messaging | PrairieSkyGroup

Lost

Empathy is the identification and the power of understanding and imaginatively entering into another person’s feelings, thoughts or experience. It seems to me that one of the things we are lacking in our society, as well as in business today, especially in the relationship between sales and marketing, is empathy. What if we remembered the other person is thinking, “Do you understand me, can you help me, and do I trust you?” Maybe we wouldn’t get lost on our sales and marketing journey.

Remember These 29 Things…?

On the eve of the mid-term elections, I am struck by the tactics for messaging used by the major parties and the parallels for Sales and Marketing. The first is that those that keep their message simple and consistent are much more likely to get their point of view accepted. The second thing is that we are all risk averse. Our little medulla oblongata (lizard brains) in the back of our skulls that generate our flight or fight response take precedence over our frontal lobes where reason happens. So messages based on loss or fear tend to trump those based on reason.

Driving Into the Chasm

While crossing the chasm applies to technologies and products across an industry lifecycle, Stocking’s corollary is that it can also apply to a single customer or client. It’s not only the industry or technology that goes through a cycle, individual clients and customers do as well.

If you are concerned about the lifetime value of a client, you have to bring new ideas, services and products to your existing base, otherwise they are going to forget about you and go somewhere else. It’s surprising how often this happens. When it does, you’ll often find yourself driving into your own chasm.

Giving Thanks

Thanking customers and clients for their business is Marketing and Sales 101. But it’s rare when we do it with sincerity. One of the most successful marketing campaigns I’ve been involved with was sending personal thank-you notes to over 1400 customers. The benefits were twofold…

Can Your Pacemaker Take a Licking and Keep on Ticking?

It would be odd to hear a medical pacemaker company say their device can “Take a licking and keep on ticking,” (an old Timex tagline) Or maybe not. It’s something I would want if I had a pacemaker. Alternatively we could say that the device has a mean time between failure of .63 trillion seconds. Which will you remember?

The Top “3” Reasons Not To Read This Post

If you’ve looked at many marketing blogs recently, you will notice post titles that have numbers in them. While they entice us, I wonder at the subliminal message they send. The “numbers” title is focused on generating “numbers” of hits or eyeballs. Isn’t the issue really getting sustained and satisfied readers or prospects? Numbers are fine, but would you rather have 100 prospects and 1 sale, or 10 really good prospects and 5 sales?

Does This Resume Make My Ass Look Fat?

A friend sent me his resume and asked me to take a look at it. This is a slightly sensitive situation since it is the equivalent of asking the question above. He’d also had a “Resume Doctor” jazz it up a little. The resume summary was terrible. I fell asleep during the first paragraph. Here’s an excerpt.

Carly Simon and the Wooly Mammoth

Suddenly, the wooly mammoth turned with a snort… its tusks swinging violently back and forth, its trunk searching for our scent. My mouth was dry. My palms sweaty. My heart thumped like the great beast itself. I watched with terror as Grog attacked from the flank and was swept away by the beast’s long tusks. Gnerk then bravely charged, but the beast reared on two legs and came down on top of him, stomping his small body into the ground. I cringed as I head Gnerk’s bones crunching, but seized the moment, the beast distracted, and ran my spear between the mammoth’s ribs and into its heart. What do Carly Simon, blogging and wooly mammoths have to do with Sales and Marketing?

There Are Alligators in the Board Room

Share Alligators are reptilian feeding machines. Controlled by little more than their prehistoric lizard brain, they respond to food and territory. I can remember vividly a Florida vacation with my parents at the age of seven, the heat and the smell of decaying swamp grass at some nowhere highway tourist trap that bred baby alligators […]

There Are Alligators in the Sewers of New York City

ShareEvery winter, vacationers from New York City go to Florida. Some of those vacationers visit Florida’s well-known alligator farms. When they return home to New York, a small number of them bring back cute little alligators they’ve purchased at the farms as pets. Baby alligators are small and can be kept in aquariums, feeding on […]