Pick UP The Phone and Ask Why Today

Here are five critical questions to use to analyze why your product or service is selling or not. This is a tool for business leaders to use for strategic managerial decision making.

To understand your sales process better, ask these questions:

Question 1: Why did you _________?

When someone buys [...]

We were sitting in the conference room the other day with a new client.  He’s been in business for many years and is very successful.  He’s ready to reallyramp up his marketing and tackle some lofty goals.

And we’re ready to help. (After all, that’s what we do)

He went on to tell us that he really [...]

At a recent Focus Roundtable on Sales and Marketing alignment (or the lack thereof), we acknowledged the frequently discussed differences between the people who work in sales jobs and the people who work in marketing jobs. Marketing people think of their company’s prospects as a either a homogenous group or grouping of groups (segments), [...]

New data suggests that TV and the Internet have a deep, tangled and evolving relationship. Consumers still love the tube, even though they multi-task while watching and DVR their favorite shows. At the same time the digerati have finally convinced their elder brethren that behavior trumps demographics in media targeting.

Deloitte’s recent “State of the Media [...]

Outbound vs. inbound marketing—what’s the right mix? 80/20 outbound? The reverse? A 50/50 split?

My answer: some of the time it depends, but the answer in one specific situation is clear.

Inbound marketing is simple conceptually. Distributed widely through social media, great content attracts interested contacts who digitally raise their hands in blog conversations, find optimized sites, [...]

Dr. Robert Ross, one of the great marketing characters of our time passed away this week at 92.  Dr Ross (nee Rosen) was a self-made man, a showman, a huckster and a visionary who took on the medical establishment… and won. I had the opportunity to work with him on the launch of Ross University [...]

Here’s a good find I wanted to share with Dashboard Spy readers. The IBM document (link provided below) contains 4 excellent segments:

1) Eight strategies for delivering business intelligence on the web
2) Use analytics for strategic business information implementation
3) Making the operational case for data warehousing
4) 10 ways to begin a data warehouse project

The last topic [...]

I enjoyed speaking on the Focus Roundtable a few weeks ago  on the topic of sales and marketing alignment, along with Dan McDade of PointClear, Tim Sullivan of Sales Performance International, and Karen Hayward of Centerbeam. You can listen to the recording of the event here.

On the panel, we all agreed that Sales and Marketing [...]

Judith Rothrock, founder and president of JRocket Marketing originated an event she holds annually for technology vendors and the analyst community. Called “The Grape Escape”, the event is typically sold out months in advance. We are asking Judith to explain what makes vendors and analysts enthusiastically put this gathering on their calendars year after year. [...]

As more and more brands embrace Facebook, social media specialists have begun to analyze and measure ways to improve communication and engagement. Many of us feel like we’ve been able to mysteriously keep the plane in the air even though we don’t really understand the variables and the dynamics of interactions that keep us aloft. [...]