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The Competitive Advantage

tag: process

March 19, 2024

What are your buyers buying? Hint: NOT what you’re selling!

I think most people with sales responsibility – full-time salespeople and seller-doers – understand that being successful at selling is essentially about being successful at solving your clients’ problems. And they’d be right.

But here’s the rub… too many salespeople think that what they sell IS the solution to their clients’ problems. And when that’s their mindset – especially for seller-doers at research agencies – they spend all of their time talking to potential buyers about their methodologies, or their cool technology, or the new industry pro they just hired. And that’s understandable… It’s where they’re most comfortable and what they know.

But it’s wrong!

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November 14, 2023

When a Potential Buyer Reaches Out to You, Whaddaya Do?

A 6-six step process for handling inquiries…

It doesn’t happen a lot… but it does happen. A prospective buyer completes the ‘get in touch’ form on your website requesting more information about your firm. And if they’re going to the trouble of doing this, it’s likely for one of two reasons. Maybe they’re just curious. They stumbled across your website or heard about you from a colleague and want to learn more. Or perhaps, they have a project in mind and think you have the ability to get the job done. Either way, when that inquiry comes in, whaddaya do?

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October 12, 2022

A Marketing Research Firm Doing Research on Their Marketing? WHAAAT?!

I received an email a couple of weeks ago from Merrill Dubrow, CEO at MARC Research in Dallas. Merrill is a good friend and a client… and he was looking for feedback on something he was working on.

We scheduled a Zoom call so I could see what it was. As it turned out, he and his colleague, Jim O’Hara, had created a series of ads for LinkedIn and were soliciting feedback on which of the ads I thought was most effective and why. And not just me… they also reached out to other marketing-types and some client-types.

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April 5, 2022

Consistency and Frequency. Without Them, Your Marketing Will Fail!

I was having a conversation yesterday with the cofounder of a firm in our industry. It was the first time we’d met. We were talking about marketing execution, and he said something really interesting… “We haven’t done any marketing because I was afraid that once we started, we wouldn’t be able to stop!”

To which I responded, “You are 100% correct!”

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December 8, 2020

Lead Nurturing for Seven Years? It’s True!

lead nurturingI first met with the founder of this particular MR services firm in early 2013. After his initial interest and a few phone calls, he said he was not ready to move forward.

A year later we reconnected… similar interest, a few more phone calls… same outcome.

And again, two years after that.

But now, it looks like it’s finally coming around and will actually happen. The interest, the need and the urgency are all higher than ever before. So, what happened? How did a sales prospect from 2013 finally come to pull the trigger (we think) more than seven years later?

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July 28, 2020

12 Things to Do When Launching a New Service or Product

Congratulations! With the extra time you’ve had on your hands recently, you and your colleagues decided the time was right to launch a new service. Not just a small upgrade to what you’re already doing… but something entirely new. That’s terrific news.

Probably.

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July 14, 2020

12 Touchpoints While Waiting to Hear Back from a Sales Prospect

I signed-up a new client last week. Pretty excited about it, too. And it only took 2 years to make it happen! :-0

Do you have clients and prospects that are slow to respond? OK, maybe not 2-years-slow – and that was certainly an anomaly for us – but waiting to hear over a period of weeks, or even months, can be very challenging and incredibly frustrating.

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May 12, 2020

Do you have a defined sales process? No?! Ignoring it is a HUGE mistake!

Imagine you have responsibility for revenue growth at your firm and you finally decide to pull the trigger and convert a couple of your senior Project Managers to the Seller-Doer role. Congrats!

Now what? Well, one of the items you’ll need to cover in their training is to help them understand your firm’s ‘sales process.’

Sales process?! It’s not a term or a concept used very often in our industry… but it’s critical to your selling success. And here’s why…

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