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Complete Archive of Columns

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• Are Sales Gimmicks Worth It?
  Should you use sales gimmicks to get a prospects attention in lead generation, appointment setting, or marketing campaigns?
• Use Common Curtesous in Social Networking Communities
  How to enter any community, be welcome, and attract new customers to your business.
• Best Insight for Recessionary Marketing
  How to recession proof your business-to-business service firm with certain marketing strategy you can easily implement without any special skills.
• Biggest Social Media Marketing Mistakes
  How to get more from social media in the business you have using three simple steps.
• Testing Strategies that Get Your Copy Approved
  A surefire way to test marketing copy that demonstrates its power to create a profitable response and clearly communicate your message.
• Are You Waiting for the Economy to Improve?
  Too many well meaning sales and marketing professionals are waiting for the economy to improve, now you can get results even in a recession.
• Improper Use of Sales Gimmicks Insults Prospects
  Three horribly misused sales gimmicks that will hurt business relationships and limit business-to-business sales interest.
• Connecting With Readers on Social Bookmark Sites
  How to get more from social bookmarking for your business-to-business website. Social bookmark sites can provide more visitors to your website if you know how to use them.
• How to Focus on Selling without Projects Suffering
  Your selling results is based on team productivity, here are simple strategies to get everyone on your team working towards measurable results without hurting resources for projects.
• Reducing Time to Close, Even if You Use Proposals
  Stop struggling with proposal generation and use these strategies to turn around estimates faster, even for complex projects.
• Increasing Contract Margins Quickly without Losing Sales
  If you know this one thing, you can turn every contract into a profitable contract without losing sales in the process.
• How You Describe Yourself Matters in Selling
  The words you use governs your ability to connect with qualified buyers and if properly selected can increase sales.
• Avoiding the "Jack of All Trades" Syndrome
  How to market your industrial or technical services firm to be something to executive level decision makers and buyers of your products.
• Getting Paid On Your Sales Faster
  How to get paid on your receivables faster after every sale guaranteed.
• Cut Selling Overhead in Two Easy Steps
  How you can cut selling overhead in two easy steps, then grow profits quickly from every customer relationship.
• Mistakes I've Made in Sales and Marketing
  What a mentor taught me about business-to-business sales and marketing, plus the mistakes I made.
• A Secret of Lead Generation that Drives Sales
  How to get prospects to call you? The first secret of prospecting they you are not using, that is killing your business profits.
• How to Make Customers Want to do Business with You
  Your buyers want what their competition can't have, that isn't easy to get, and that produces the specific results they desire.
• Customer Acquisition Objectives For Attracting Profitable Business-To-Business Customers
  How you can attract profitable customers easily with these key customer acquisition objectives?
• Learn More In Less Time While Improving Productivity
  The fastest, most sure fire way to increase sales and marketing productivity without spending more on employee training and development.
• How To Avoid Becoming A Marketing Victim?
  Never have second thoughts about an advertising purchase no matter how much it cost.
• A Simple Strategy To Know What Is Important About Customer Desires So That You Sell More
  How to prioritize customer desires to capture a buyers interests quickly with less effort.
• How To Increase Sales By Becoming An Insider To The Customer
  A research approach that turns selling encounters into profitable opportunities for you and prospects alike.
• How Strategic Long-Term Buying Relationships Are Creating Valued Customers
  Ways to increase customer life time value and increase what customers get from your complex services.
• Tragic Mistakes Your Marketing Department Is Doing To Hurt Sales
  Are you letting marketing hurt your ability to generate new sales and create customer relationships?
• Who Else Wants To Create Profitable Customers Quickly
  Find out why the speed in which you attract new buyers isn't determined by what you do now; it's what you did yesterday that matters.
• Who's Opinions Really Counts?
  When it seems everyone has opinions, which do you listen to and how to be sure what you are getting is useful to you.
• How Leaders Create The Self-Fulfilling Promise Of Mutual Gain
  Ways to get what you want from employees by helping them get what they want.
• Ways To Avoid Miscommunications Mistakes That Cause Customers To Leave
  What you say that sends your customer right to your nearest competitors and how not to say it.
• 5 Secrets For Designing Communications That Maximize Customer Retention
  Read this if you want to design strategic communications for the retention of customers.
• Simple Ways To Grow Your Business So That You Improve Long-Term Stability
  How many ways are you growing your business to increase revenue and improve financial stability?
• How To Improve Business Relationships In The New Year
  Take these small steps to grow the value customers see in your solution so that relationships grow everyday.
• Avoiding Product Misrepresentation When Influenced By Sales Incentives
  Why it's critically important to do exactly what you disclose especially when incentives are concerned.
• Are Educational Marketing Interactions Ruining Clients
  How you might be stopping prospects from buying the solutions they need to have today.
• How To Use CRM To Understand Customer Expectations
  Do these 7 things to know more about what prospects want so that they become happy customers.
• How Much Is Bad Data Costing You
  Bad contact data costs your firm thousands of dollars each year in shipping fees, delays fulfillment to customers, and labor related to correcting returns.
• Customer Interaction Points Help You Understand Customer Expectations
  See how customer interaction points help collect information about what customers want so you can better anticipate their needs.
• Customer Retention Strategies You Should Know
  How not to waste resources trying to get people to do business with you if you aren't bother to keep them around.
• Are You Promoting Your Best Customers?
  Why customer successes is the biggest retention technique you've never learned.
• Get More From Your Marketing Message And Strategic Communications
  The one thing that destroys more opportunities than anything else you might be doing with your marketing message.
• Effective B2B Lead Generation Process To Attract Qualified Prospects
  Thirteen ways to generate leads for your business much faster than the how you do it now.
• Do You Use Relationship Tools To Their Fullest Potential?
  Scott Allen has a promising tele-seminar on leveraging your network. What Scott plans to shares is relevant to any reader interested building profitable business relationships....
• Ways To Define Relationships With Evidence Of Action
  What evidence do employees and customers have that define their relationships with your company? Business relationships are built on individual actions that create mutual benefit. ...
• Sharpen Customer Relationship Weapons With Action
  Are you facing your competition unprepared? The business wars of tomorrow will be NOT be fought with the weapons of today. ...
• The Net Of Influence (Summary)
  John Battelle's March 2004 Business 2.0 column, The Net of Influence, shares the importance of connecting with the top influencer's in your industry. Battelle presents...
• Create Honest And Effective Shareholder Communications
  With recent events at Royal Dutch/Shell and Walt Disney Company, shareholder relationships is something you want to consider more carefully. Financial Times describes Sir Philip...
• How To Be More Available Without Over Burdening Yourself
  Instead of stowing yourself away behind protective barriers like some executives do, if you want to influence the people around you, consider getting out among the regular people. Leaders who isolate themselves become sheltered and become myopic in thinking. Before you say you don't have the time-- Here are a six ways to get out among clients, employees, and partners without over burdening your schedule.
• Be Known By The Company That Keeps You
  You are known by the company you keep, and now you can brag about it on the social networking platform of your choice. However, if...
• Inner Circle Relationships, Case Study #4
  How to quickly attract more clients from the clients you already have.
• How To Reduce Marketing-Sales-Service Overhead
  A large percentage of your overhead is comprised of friction between marketing, sales, and service departments. These internal communications weight heavy on client acquisition costs...
• Marketing-Sales-Service Convergence Around Customer Relationship Management
  Why the collective efforts of the marketing, sales, and service departments is necessary to maximize your ability to attract profitable customers.
• Management Style Influences Relationships Created
  Your management style has a huge influence on the relationships you create. While no one style is better than another, it's a matter of matching your personality with a style then with the type of relationships you look to create.
• Six Challenges Faced By Technology And Service Marketers
  According to the Information Technology Services Marketing Association (ITSMA) technology and services marketing leaders face enormous challenges. Their research exposes six challenges, listed here with...
• Existing Relationships Carry Hidden Gems For Your Business
  How to cultivate existing business relationships to reveal new profits for your organization, no matter the economy or how long you have been in business.
• Courting Your Leads Before Selling Increases Conversion Rates
  How to convert more leads faster with this simple method.
• Increase Short-Term Revenue Without Hurting Profits
  Most executives want short-term increases in revenues but really need increases in profits that can help their company grow over the long-term. It's a constant...
• Retain Self-Respect By Doing What's Right For The Customer
  Why you can't please everyone but what you can do to please the customers you have.
• Ways To Produce Short-Term Revenue With Long-Term Gains
  How can a company produce short-term revenue while investing in a long-term customer partnership? Ciaran Nagle, a reader of Inside Strategic Relations, and I have...
• Privacy Is Important To Any Type Of Relationships
  What you can do to protect your clients interests and personal information.
• Connect With Others The Way They Want To Receive You
  What channels can you communicate with customers for the best most responsive results?
• Make Building Profitable Relationships Part Of Business Purpose
  It's really funny to see intelligent people argue over the purpose of business. Especially since every business has different objectives. ...
• Social Networks The Next Big Internet Crash?
  Learn something from this renewed capital interest in business relationships -- plus tips for getting more from social networking.
• Customer Loyalty Requires A High-Touch Approach
  Why technology won't, even can't, solve issues with customer loyalty without knowing this one thing.
• How To Measure Customer Satisfaction And Relationship Value
  Nine measures that uncover customers easy to satisfy and willing to help you increase business profits.
• How I Use Social Software For Stronger Business Relationships
  In a recent piece I talked a little about how social software can help track business relationships, today I'd like to share how I'm using...
• Cultivate Customer Expectations While Growing Relationships
  Customer expectations are a strange beast. Often your company will be judge against the best companies in the nation, perhaps even the world. Customers don't...
• Trust Is An Essential Part Of Strong Business Relationships
  Hal Macomber offers two great articles on building trust. The first shares some insights on building trust within a team, and the second talks about...
• Create Loyal Employees With Sincere Appreciation
  How to get employees to embrace your organizations larger mission while keeping employees happy.
• Good Management Attracts Great Employees
  Do you want to attract highly talented employees? John J. Mack, the head of Credit Suisse First Boston, says "a firm's best hope for distinguishing itself in the crowded financial field now has to come from its superior management of people." ...
• Why Copy Testing Is Critical To Understanding Your Customer
  Are you sure that your marketing efforts are relevant to your prospects? Your prospective customers are bombarded with literally thousands of advertising messages each day. ...
• An Executives Responsibility To Society
  Executives create power for themselves through the opportunities they create for others. These relationships bring together the best talent available to serve certain wants of a customer. ...
• Discover Performance Enhancing Magic Bullets
  Are you an information technology or professional services firm who wants to enhance performance with zero investment? John Brandt shares three magic bullets that properly applied to your firm can increase your performance immediately. Unbelievable? ...
• Make The Most Of Consulting Relationships
  Read this before you hire any consultant to help you increase sales and build stronger business relationships.
• Credibility With Prospects Helps Them Decide To Buy
  Building business relationships is about bringing and keeping buyers in the most cost effective manner possible. Without buyers you don't have customers, without customers you don't have a business. ...
• Sales Professionals Can Cultivate Honest Relationships
  Questions to ask sales people that help them close more business and create happy satisfied customers.
• Even Business To Business Relationships Are Between People
  How B2B is different but similar to business-to-consumer, and what this means to your business relationships.
• The Only Way To Create Loyal Customers
  It seems everyone has their own idea of what creates loyal customers. No matter what you've read in the past, loyalty is created by the unique value you bring customers and by the delivery of customer desired results. ...
• Customer Service, The Actions You Take For Greater Loyalty
  Doesn't it seem like more talk about customer service than do anything about improving it? Customer service is an action, not a concept. Here are a few things you can do to take actions that improve loyalty and keep buying customers.
• Relationship Improvements Come Through You
  Expecting your company to change behavior to rapidly adopt relationship-based methods is ludicrous. Behaviors that influence the way individuals interact with others is one of the few change efforts that start at the top. You must change your own relationships if you want employees to follow suite.
• Satisfied CEOs Use These Strategies
  Being a CEO is more difficult than it seems, no longer the cushy life of leisure it was once thought to be (was it ever?) According to They've got the CEO blues (Dallas Morning News, Cheryl Hall) 73% of CEO's surveyed are thinking about quitting and another 80% lose sleep over worries of work. ...
• Five Pillars For Leading The Client-Focused Organization (Summary)
  To have a strong client relationships you need even stronger employee relationships. In Joseph Neubauer's 20 years of executive experience he's found five precepts that contribute to building enduring client relationships. Neubauer shares them with Leader to Leader, which I've summarized here.
• How Well Do You Do The Basics
  So many executives ask for new strategies they haven't seen anywhere else. I ask, "What strategies have you already tried?" It's rare they note more than 3 things they have tried. Are you endlessly seeking new solutions to tired old problems?
• Leverage Relationships To Achieve Your Business Goals (Summary)
  Leveraging relationships to achieve your business goals isn't about getting something from the other person, it's about a mutual benefit that advances the goals of all parties involved. Often when starting new ventures people forget that everyone must win. This entry summarizes key points from David Bayless article Leverage Relationships to Achieve Your Business Goals originally published for SCORE.
• Professional Banking Relationships Are Encouraged
  Capital relationships are built on the character of all the parties involved. A certain level of trust is required to assure the terms of any agreement will be kept. ...
• Blogging As A Communications Tool For Internal Executive Relationships
  Using blogging to improve communications between executives and to establish executive relationships with customers.
• How To Create Great Profiles For Social Networks That Attract Quality
  Now that you know how social networks can help track business relationships, this article will share tips on how to establish a presents that attracts...
• Social Software Networks Help Track Relationships
  How to know more about the people you already connect with and a little about who they know.
• Things Executives Should Ask Themselves Before Blogging
  What you must consider before investing your time and resources blogging.
• Building Customer Relationships Is Like Farming
  Lee LeFever provides a great analogy between building a business and farming. There are more similarities than he presents in his short excerpt. LeFever highlights a point of cultivation. For your companies success, you must understand that businesses, like the relationships around them must be cultivated.
• Discover The Importance Of Process In Reaching Business Objectives
  It's always good to see a 20-something in business, especially one with such a good foundation to be successful in it. Over a cup of...
• Benefits Of Good Internal Partnerships
  Recorded in 2002, Earning Partnership Opportunities provided strategies to strengthen internal relationships that contribute to having the resources necessary to provide a service to the customer. ...
• Brand Contributes To Your Ability To Create New Relationships
  What people believe when they see the symbols of your company contributes to their willingness to enter a business relationship. These perceptions contribute to creating...
• Wealthy Executives Can Improve Society
  While corporate executives take a lot of criticism for their personal uses of money, many are making a real difference in society. As an executive, you have a responsibility to your employees and the communities around your businesses. ...
• Learn How To Keep Customers Profitably Satisfied
  How to keep your most profitable customers satisfied while creating sustainable profit growth.
• Limit Confusion By Providing One Choice At A Time
  Customers have enough going on in their life, they don't need anymore confusion. Sean D'Souza of PsychoTactics(tm) shares some points about how we confuse customers with too many choices. Yes, too many choices at a point of action can freeze a customer in their tracks.
• Five Steps To Upgrading Workforce Performance (Summary)
  Every employee is different, each produces their own value to the organization. Kaleem Aziz puts forward a controversial point about measuring an individuals performance, while asking some important questions. Like your customers, your workforce must be cultivated to produce the most valuable pool of resources possible.
• There Is Nothing Your Employees Can't Accomplish
  One in four employees working for your company isn't achieving the results they desire, yet alone what your customer demands. They struggle, and even look like they are giving it their all, but without any results they go home tired at the end of each day. ...
• What You Can Learn From Listening To Customers
  I'm so happy to hear Dell Inc (DELL) has stopped using overseas technical support at the request of their customers. This after I spent over 2 1/2 hours on a technical support call, passed through 5 representatives, only to be told I needed additional information to obtain support. ...
• Relationship Builders Have An Employee Retention Strategy
  When you look at it, you often have to go through a lot of bad employees before you get to that one great one. Have you ever calculated the cost of finding that single high quality employee? This is why relationship builders need an employee retention strategy.
• Manifesto For Community Contributors On-Line
  There are a number of comments available about building communities on-line, but little guidance for those contributors that make long-term success possible. Without fresh content...
• Telemarketing Inhibits Business-to-Business Relationships
  What you must get before you make a call, even in the business world.
• The 5 W's Of Customer Acquisition
  Customers are the heart of business. They create every cent of profit, but how much do you really know about your customers. As a good...
• A Call For More Human Interaction In Business
  How to connect emotionally with buyers to sell more of your complex products and services.
• Customers Remember How Well You Did A Job
  Take time to do a job right, as a customer desires it, over doing it fast. There will always be someone who will do it for less, in a shorter amount of time, but explain why you do things differently. When you focus on producing the solution a customer desires, it often doesn't matter how fast you do it.
• Improving Value Of Claims In Written Materials
  Written communications with customers, employees, and partners contribute to much of their understanding of your relationship with them. In order to provide value while maintaining...
• How To Create Extra Value With Pitched Articles
  Articles are a great way to share background information about your product or communicate certain benefits that you want your prospects to consider. These benefits...
• Something To Learn From Business Week's Web Smart 50
  Business Week introduces it's The Web Smart 50, introducing websites over six categories who are using the Web to benefit their customers-- and themselves. In...
• You're Probably Cheating Part-Time Employees
  Are you cheating your employees for personal gain? Your managers probably are, and you don't even know about it. How come part-time workers are paid...
• Lessons From Evolution For The Adaptable Business
  Evolutionary thinking. Darwin didn't theorize