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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.
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.
Are Sales Gimmicks Worth It?
Should you use sales gimmicks to get a prospects attention in lead generation, appointment setting, or marketing campaigns?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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? ...
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. ...
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. ...
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.
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. ...
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. ...
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.