Marketing and Sales

Whenever and whatever your company is pitching, many factors will influence your prospects’ final decision. Gain a competitive edge by establishing a personal connection with potential clients. To acquire their business, try these tips: • Focus and be sincere. If you appear nervous or unsure, you may seem devious or incompetent. If your sales presentation does not address their concerns and you just grind on with a prepared pitch, they will decide you don’t care about them and their problems. Make eye contact and convince them you stand behind the ideas, products or services you sell them. Pick up on their concerns and address

Many companies think creativity means throwing money into marketing efforts and giving lip service to “out of the box” thinking, but such efforts rarely have a positive impact on the bottom line. On July 18, Harvard Businness School Press, Boston, released a new publication by Pat Fallon and Fred Senn outlining a disciplined approach to building creativity actively into the organizational culture, and leveraging that creativity into campaigns that deliver measurable results. In Jucing the Orange, How to Turn Creativity Into A Powerful Business Advantage, the authors show that bankable, creative ideas come from zeroing in on the one key business problem that must

Occasionally, Vulcan Information Packaging has a prospective customer visit our manufacturing plant in Vincent, Ala. As we escort each visitor through our facility, conversation always turns to our people. I am always proud to discuss our 40 employees with more than 20 years of service at our company. All general managers or plant managers, at one time, have noted the value of knowledge available in their long-term employees, but today’s business world can make it easy to forget. Managers should consider the following three benefits of retaining employees: • Long-term employees have a strong knowledge base. Being an industry leader requires a structure of

There are big rewards when sales and marketing are effectively integrated, including improved operating performance and outstanding financial results. Here are five tips to make integration a success. • Beware of the quick fix. Most organizations use Band-Aid approaches, such as integrating data sharing or changing incentive compensation systems, without looking at the whole picture. Instead, create a long-range plan to address a complex set of barriers. • Promote team players. Some say, sales and marketing “personalities” are two very different animals. These two groups think differently, act differently and approach the same customers with very different points of view. When integrating these

Have you ever scrolled through your computer account records or flipped through your file folders while planning your day, and intentionally bypassed a particular account? Did you continue doing the same thing for weeks or months—maybe even longer? If so, you’re not alone. Many of us can trace this reluctance to fear­—fear we’ll get blown off on the phone, fear we’ll sound like Elmer Fudd to this intimidating prospect, fear we won’t know the answers to his or her questions, etc.. And if we do muster up just enough courage to place the call while in this state of mind, our fears can become

If you and your sales team desire increased sales, and want them without increasing call frequency, you only have one choice—excel at persuasive presentations! Selling is simply determining other peoples’ problems and persuading them that you have the solution. Then, asking them to accept your solution—the close—it’s quite simple. Unfortunately, not enough salespeople understand the basics. There are three key elements to persuasive presentations: have an arresting opening benefit statement; explain benefits with features; and ask for the business. The opening benefit statement is a hook to catch your prospects’ interest. In reality, salespeople are saying, “Please give me a few minutes of your

Time management is a continuous struggle. We try to spend more time with customers, and less with paperwork. We try to delegate portions of our “to do” list that can be done by someone else. We arrange our days to spend our time doing the most effective things. We also understand that a large, one-time, up-front investment of time can save a disproportionately greater amount of time down the road. So, we invest in a new computer system and all the time it takes to set it up. We spend some serious time creating annual goals and strategic plans because we expect those exercises

Jooyoung Kim, assistant professor of advertising at the University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, Athens, Ga., is the lead author of “The Six-Construct Model of True Brand Loyalty,” a research paper examining why consumers favor and consistently buy specific brands over time and motives for their behavior. The paper’s co-authors are Jon Morris, professor of advertising at the University of Florida and Joffre Swait, adjunct marketing faculty at the University of Alberta and a partner in a research-based consulting company in Canada. “Our work suggests that consumers’ attitudinal stability, which is based on emotional and cognitive conviction, plays a

If you want your marketing to make money for you, focus on your customers’ feelings and beliefs. Unless you can convince them that you understand them and their problems—that you’re empathetic—they’re probably not going to buy from you. The headline on one of my marketing pieces says, “Hiring a Speaker is an Awesome Responsibility.” And, it is. These days, if you hire the wrong speaker in a corporate job, you could end up in severe trouble. Many professional speakers focus their marketing on themselves—how good they are, how successful. It works, but readers don’t get the message that the speaker really knows who they

Your products or services are often perceived by the market as being similar to those available from your competitors. As a result, being easy to do business with can set you apart, making customer lead generation easier, and making a big impact on your bottom line. It also enhances your brand equity, since every point of interaction is a branding exercise. There’s a great deal of talk these days about building a company’s “brand,” but in reality, brand equity is simply an investment in ensuring that your prospects and customers have a positive experience each time they interact with your company or its products