Regardless of your gender, if you’re a B2B marketer and not considering it, you are missing a key element in messaging. While 90% of marketers may acknowledge that gender is important, I find only 10 percent of 1:1 marketing campaigns or databases have any data on gender. Here’s a simple deep dive technique to add gender to your database.
Read MoreWe are our stories. It is who we are and how we think. Our brains are wired for stories and narratives. We identify with familiar stories. They evoke emotions and expectations and hope. If you want to sell something, convince someone of your position, or market your products or services, you first need to tell a story. Here’s why.
Read MoreThe reason that the VP of Sales is the most fired position in corporate America is not because, as you might think, the sales forecast is the single most visible number. It’s because too many organizations and too many VPs succumb to the temptation of having multiple forecasts. The challenging one they think you can make, and the inflated one that no one believes you can make but the one they tell you because they don’t trust you to make the one that is challenging. When forecasting is a negotiation game, everyone loses.
Read MoreI once had a boss that sent me an email asking me to set up a meeting with him. His office was twenty feet away. Lots of passive aggressive thoughts went through my brain before I realized that in a single stroke, he had embodied the two biggest black holes of personal productivity in contemporary business; emails and meetings.
Read MoreTargeting the right prospects is Sales and Marketing 101. In my experience it’s done poorly by both marketing and sales more than 75% of the time. There are two reasons for this.
How can you make sure you don’t fall into the trap of selling to the wrong segment? Read more.
Read MoreOn 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.
Read MoreHe is a world-renowned theoretical physicist who has developed theories of black holes and space-time. On the other hand, unless you are in the black hole business, he hasn’t really produced much of a practical nature. We can’t use his inventions in our cell phones, and we can’t teleport ourselves to Barbados. So what good is he?
Moore’s concept of Crossing the Chasm is overlaid with Maister’s concepts of service organizations to provide a solution to the common problem of applying the wrong company structure or resources to the business situation facing your company. You can then decide if Hawking is a good hire for you.
Read MoreWhile 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.
Read MoreI have the great opportunity to interview many sales and marketing professionals. One characteristic for evaluation that isn’t on most corporate interview regimens is… how curious is the candidate? Why is this important? If you are not curious and not asking questions then you are not learning, and your chances of succeeding are limited.
Read MoreThanking 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…
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