Productive Insights

You have a great product. You have loyal customers. But do your customers know all of the problems you solve with your products or services? Do your employees know which products or services best solve your customers’ problems? Think of product training as an extension of your marketing program. Your audience is already persuaded to use what you have to

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What’s the one thing Barack Obama and John McCain agree on? That’s the question we’re asking the press and the public as we launch a public relations campaign on behalf of one of our clients. The timely campaign is designed to help our client gain visibility by leveraging the candidates’ recent “debate” on how best to save energy. Our client,

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It’s true. Slow times call for greater investment in sales and marketing, not less. But few businesses bite that bullet. They blindly cut back instead of giving their sales forces more times at bat by stepping up to the lead generation plate. No wonder their sales people don’t get the appointments they need. Keep in mind, too, that as sales

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Every company is looking for ways to enhance it. Our firm’s definition of marketing includes all activities that influence revenue growth. The two subjects we review below may appear to be outside of conventional marketing thought, but not if you accept our definition that marketing is every skill, policy, program or activity that affects revenue. What is one of the

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If you’re thinking about creating a new marketing plan or revising a current one, you might want to step back and do a marketing audit first. Marketing plans are generally good things. You know the old saying, plan your work and work your plan? Unfortunately, too many business owners and senior executives just can’t seem to get a good plan

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It seemed that way during the pioneer days of the Internet. Many small companies used their sales literature budget to fund their first website. The big complaint about brochures back then was that they were out of date months after being published. But just as the home video failed to put movie theatres out of business, the internet did not

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Is it hard for your customers to be heard inside your organization? Are you able to get and use key customer insights you need to improve your product or service, your operations, your business model, and your corporate strategy? Some companies tackle this tough challenge with market research, others with feedback from sales representatives. But now a new, highly productive

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Yes, there is pressure throughout firms today to reduce costs-and the sales department is not exempt. The paradox is that during slow times there is an even greater need for the work done by both sales and marketing. In an ideal world firms would increase their investments in lead generation so that new business development could offset business cycle weakness.

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Today, popular psychology holds that the personality of an individual human being is shaped not by genetics or by environment alone but by an uneasy collaboration of both. (It hasn’t always been this way, as straightforward as it might sound. Darwin’s cousin, inspired by the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859, coined the phrase “nature vs. nurture” as a scientific, not philosophical,

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We’re half way through the year. Has your team put a winning sales puzzle together or are there still holes in the picture of success you want to create? In this mid-year special report, Senior Consultant Don Minner poses 10 questions to think about in order to make the most of the second half of the sales year. If you’re

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