Marketing
SharePoint for Project Management
I met Dux Raymond Sy a year or two ago while doing some work for Bamboo Solutions. Dux is an expert in leveraging technology to enhance project management. He is the author of SharePoint for Project Management. What is SharePoint? For those of you living in a cave, SharePoint allows individuals within an organization [...]
A “no stupid deals” policy will strengthen your brand
One of my clients taught me a great lesson about selling, branding and marketing. Sometimes, in our quest to find revenue, we forget something more important and more lasting – trust. Your goal as an organization is to deliver on your commitments reliably and predictably. By doing so, you build the trust needed to sustain a healthy [...]
Building trust in professional services selling and marketing
Over the past few months, we’ve spoken to dozens of managing partners in professional services firms about ways they find new business. Every person interviewed said that a vast majority of new business was generated via their “networks and trusted relationships.” Trust is a shared belief that you can depend on one another to achieve [...]
Automating Transactional Email
Email newsletters are common method of selling and communicating with customers. But often overlooked is the idea of using rules-based automation inside the traditional and transactional email exchanges common to the sales process. Sales people and the marketers that support them can creatively use rules-based email automation to put simple events such as customer birthdays [...]
Stealing liberally from 6 sigma, scrum and xtreme
Way back when we started working with a Six Sigma ninja to understand our own processes. How can we apply lessons from Six Sigma as a formalized process for engaging with customers on multiple levels. Can we look at the client engagement process under the lense of Six Sigma? The first question…when and why do [...]
CIO as marketer
I just read a fantastic article from a newly discovered blog. Mike Schaffner writes that… It is generally accepted that CIOs need to “market” information technology inside a corporation to get other executives and employees to think of it as a strategic area of operations and not just a cost center. What concerns me is [...]
Using Social Media to Enhance Your Sales Effort
The great minds at the CMO Council published a nice piece on the role of social media in the sales effort. It is a worthwhile read. This article quotes the Aberdeen Group – one of their latest research reports, called Sales 2.0 — Social Media for Knowledge Management and Sales Collaboration, discusses how social media [...]
Does anyone know this joke?
A pig and a chicken are walking down a road. The Chicken looks at the pig and says “Hey, why don’t we open a restaurant?” The pig looks back at the chicken and says “Good idea, what do you want to call it?” The chicken thinks about it and says “Why don’t we call it [...]
Book review – Making the Number
After reviewing Making the Number, there are a number of points about sales benchmarking that apply to our own theories about marketing. The scoreboard for sales professional is and always has been the pay stub – this is the crudest form of sales benchmarking. For marketing, it has always been a bit stickier and [...]
Thinking about the agency model
What companies want most from their marketing agencies is more sales. Yet agencies are not set up to do this. In fact, clients aren’t set up for this either. Agencies earn their fees by trading time for dollars and some earn commissions on media spend or printing. Marketing departments manage their vendors as cost [...]
