Every company loses at least some customers each year. You have to find new customers to make up for the ones you lose. And if you want to grow, you have to find even more. After you have identified a specific market and learned how to tell your story, the next marketing obstacle you face […]
The Second Common Marketing Mistake: Not Understanding What You Are Selling
When we talk to potential customers we tend to make the conversation all about us. We talk about our company, our products, and our processes. We fail to see that the goal of a conversation with a customer is to make it all about the customer—their company, their problems, and the better outcomes they seek. […]
The Most Common Marketing Mistake: Failing to Select a Specific, Target Market
Dr. Lisa Lang has focused her career on applying the Theory of Constraints to marketing. She occasionally gives a seminar on the topic of the five biggest mistakes that people make in marketing. You can find a video of the seminar here and here. Lang explains that “marketing is connecting with your target market and […]
How Much Information Should You Give Away?
Scientific and technical companies give away a lot of information. They write articles, give talks at conferences, and publish books. Why would these companies, whose primary asset is their know-how and intellectual property, give so much away? It doesn’t make sense to give away what they should be selling to clients. If they transfer knowledge […]
The Most Important Resource in the Campaign Process: A Promotions Committee
Salespeople depend on a consistent flow of sales opportunities in order to be successful. A tactical approach to sales campaigns will not produce the number of opportunities that they need. Only a small group of senior executives from various parts of the firm can examine the external competitive landscape, draw on the company’s internal resources, […]
Relationship Marketing Explained
Justin Roff-Marsh divides the world into two types of customers, customers who are product-focused and customers who are relationship-focused. One type of customer ‘buys’ a product. (She focuses primarily on product attributes and price.) And the other type of customer ‘buys’ a relationship. (She is less focused on the transaction, and more interested in a […]
The Case for Relationship Marketing
Most companies are good at managing their production process. They’ve designed an organizational process that matches each task in the production sequence with a specific resource, whether it be a person or a technology. They understand what inputs are needed to produce the required outputs. They can adjust throughput to achieve the volume they want. […]
Inbound vs. Outbound Marketing—a False Dilemma?
HubSpot’s founders invented and popularized the idea of inbound marketing. They wanted to contrast their marketing methods to the disadvantages of outbound marketing. Outbound sellers work by reaching out to potential buyers. They contact buyers with advertising, direct mail, email, and phone calls. They even go door-to-door to find buyers. With outbound marketing, sellers control […]