Members | Become A Member | Renew Membership

Complete Archive of Columns

Use the search engine to find specific articles, this loads slow because it contains a complete archive of all columns.

• Getting more buyers calling you
  How to seek out and eliminate all the reasons more buyers aren't calling your b2b technical services firm. Exact steps to take to plug holes in your sales process.
• Cold canvassing by email?
  Learn how to connect with small and medium sized business decision makers using a method that is easy to automate for maximum results in minimum time. Does email canvassing work?
• Understanding the Mindset of Buyers
  How to read the mind of buying customers so that you can quickly convert prospects into sales for your b2b technical services firm. Customer survey insights you can use to understand buying behavior.
• Role of pictures in social media
  How to use pictures in social media to create rapport, increase followers, and some basic rules to observe. Describes ideas for using pictures in your social media marketing activities.
• How to Involve Your Customers in Events
  Powerful interaction tools for use with event marketing to capture new insights for greater profits and customer retention. How to show customers you are listening while discovering customer interests.
• Create Customer Satisfaction Everyday
  How to create customer satisfaction early in the selling process that creates more referrals for your sales results.
• Using Questions for Sales Answers
  How to use frequently asked questions to eliminate prospect objections or questions that may limit your ability to close the sale.
• Are You Paying It Forward
  This one habit pays more than any marketing effort your business can do for building lasting business relationships with your customers, community, and those you serve in business.
• Why You Need a Marketing Budget
  The biggest handicap of most technology services firms is their inability to set aside a real marketing budget, this article addresses that concerns and gives you strategies to fix it.
• Keeping In Touch with Your House List
  Discover the gold mine already in your hands with an easy to follow strategy that turn names into sales for your technology business.
• Still Using Manual Web Forums
  You have seen this kind of lead generation and thought someone made a mistake, if you do not understand why, you may be missing something very valuable on your business website.
• The False Relationship Economy
  What you need to know about building powerful business relationships on-line using social networking tools to help you understand what your customers want to buy.
• Getting More From Sales Measurements
  How to turn simple sales measures into a robust selling system that works for you day-in and day-out to create more sales for your business.
• Deliver with Assurance of Results
  A sure fire method to deliver your solution then have it happily accepted and understood by customers to support premium pricing, plus much more.
• How to use Infomation Products for Lead Generation
  You can attract customers to your business using simple reports and white papers, while positioning your company as a leader in its field.
• Getting C-Level Executive to Opt-In
  Discover the best way to get c-level executives to opt-in on-line so you can send them your message, reaching them at their desk in their email daily.
• More Than A Quarter of B2B Leads are Ignored
  This one thing keeps you from closing more sales and creating better results from your b2b lead generation efforts. Are you making these same mistakes?
• Are You Upselling Service Calls
  How to add a profitable up-sell to every service calls and provide additional value to customers while improving your bottom line.
• Is THIS Business Marketing Advice Bunk?
  How to know if the business marketing advice you read is worth a damn or just hot air from some so called guru, five ways to put business advertising advice to the test.
• Getting More from Sales Tools
  Why your sales people are not using customer relationship management, sales force automation, or other so called selling tools, and what you can do to improve adoption.
• Benefit from Being Most Expensive
  A sure fire way to get the top prices for your product or service no matter what kind of industrial business fits your category.
• Recession Proof your Marketing
  What to do when your marketing efforts stop producing like they once had, how to recession proof your business marketing starting today.
• How Any Salesperson Get More from CRM
  Turn any customer relationships management software into a sales producing profit machine with this simple game plan that any sales person can follow, even you.
• Why Salespeople Avoid CRM Tools
  Have you ever wondered what could be done to get more from customer relationship management as a sales person, here are some reasons why sales people do not use CRM.
• Are You Building Relationships In Service
  A powerful way to cultivate customer relationships even with a customer service call, including points to include in every call interaction.
• Using Free Reports in Lead Generation
  How to use free reports and white papers to generate leads without making these harmful mistakes.
• 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? Discover how the business wars of tomorrow will be NOT be fought with the weapons of today. Insider strategies to increase sales.
• 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
  Tuning your management style to build stronger employee relationships that in turn cultivate the results you want in business and more profits for your organization.
• 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
  How to get started developing a powerful brand for your business and your personal selling efforts, including three clear points every sales person needs to be clear about branding.
• 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.

Explore more columns as a member of Applying Strategic Relations or ask your question today ...