Market Strategy Articles

Score a Touchdown With These Content Marketing Tips

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In a post for the Content Marketing Institute, Barry Feldman offers up a few pointers to help expand your audience and establish authority in your field. You need a great site to compete Feldman says it’s important to constantly update your site with valuable content and maintain a strategic SEO plan. “A blog is going to be your star player, your authority builder, your captain, so make sure to feature one prominently on your site,” he writes. (See How to Use Your Resources Effectively) Go for the goal “Content marketing champs don’t…

Appealing to Your Competitor’s Customers

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In a post for the Sales Blog, Anthony Iannarino explains how to sell to your competitors customers. “Your competitor’s most loyal and most secure clients are your dream clients,” he writes. “They spend a lot in your segment, and they have the types of needs and challenges that allow you to create massive value.” Iannarino says you can win these clients over time by nurturing the relationships within your dream client’s account. (See 7 Ways Your Competition Is Going to Eat Your for Lunch) He suggests providing clients with ideas…

Using Social Media to Build Your Platform

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In a post for his blog, Chris Brogan offers up the first part of his series ‘Build Your Platform.” “If you seek to make an impact in 2012 and beyond, the time has come to think seriously about your digital presence,” he writes. “The goal of building your platform is to create useful information, to select the best possible media to package and deliver that information.” The key, he says, is to offer content that can solve problems, feed customer desire and  satisfying their insecurities. (See Should You Be Building a…

Sales: Avoid Telling Yourself These Lies

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In a post for Fearless Selling, Kelley Robertson reviews several ways sales people cheat themselves and presents a list of common ‘lies’ heard in the sales world. Sales Lie: “I could reach my quota if my company lowered their prices.” Robertson says price is seldom the primary reason people make their final buying decision. “If you rely solely on price to close deals then you condition your customers to constantly push you for a larger discount or a better price,” he writes. Sales Lie: “I’ve got this deal in the…

3 Questions to Ask Your Hot Prospects

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Separating your hot prospects from the indecisive crowd can be accomplished with three simple questions. Any prospect can pass themselves off as an interested buyer. But will they be as eager when it’s time to sign a contract? This is a distinct challenge when you’re dealing with hot prospects. You don’t want to miss an opportunity. Asking the right questions, says Jill Konrath in this short video, can reveal their true stance. Here is what you need to find out: Why did they decide to look for a change right now? Within the business, what is prompting the change? If they’re leaving a…

8 Steps to Building Customer Loyalty

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In a post for Inc., Geoffrey James runs through eight ways to build customer loyalty. “Without customer loyalty, customers leave,” he writes. “Then you can end up sacrificing as much as a third of your sales year just to get your numbers back to where they were the previous year.” (See Build Your Brand, Increase Customer Loyalty) James says the secret to customer loyalty lies in putting the interests of the customer ahead of your own. He follows up with the eight rules for making…

Salvaging Those ‘Lost Sales’

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In a post for Eye on Sales, Richard Libin highlights the difference between selling and selling now, explaining that the former may be the best way. “Traditional sales methods have always focused on closing the sale, NOW,” he writes. “As a result, many opportunities feel pressured and uncomfortable with the salesperson, and by default, with the business or store, and they leave.” Libin says the ultimate goal for a business should be to build clientele that will return and shop repeatedly, not simply to close a quick sale now. (See The Secret Sauce…

Tailor Lead Generation for Better Hits

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In a post for the Customer Collective, Jonathan Farrington highlights the importance of lead generation. Farrington points out that very few organizations have a formal plan, strategy or methodology in place to manage leads, preferring the “scatter-gun” approach. “Generating leads is an important sales activity that plants the seeds of growth for sustainable business development,” he writes. “When deciding upon which lead generation methods work best for you and your organization, it helps to have clarity on the type of customers that you’d like to attract.” (See Openview Lead Generation Strategies) Farrington offers…

Boost Direct Sales with These Tips

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In a post for Sales Staff, Garrett Hollander offers a few tips on how to increase B2B prospect response. Hollander points out that, according to recent research, it takes 22 dials in order to get a B2B prospect on the phone these days. That said, he offers up a few tips to boost those rates. Power through 200 calls per day, which is a lot of heavy lifting. Target half that number and use other activity methods extensively, like e-mail, lead nurturing, etc. Hollander says the ultimate goal of outbound activities is…

Lead Qualification: Are Your Practices Outdated?

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Since the olden lead qualification days,  the practice of BANT (budget, authority, need and timing) has been a time-honored tradition.

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But is BANT still relevant in today’s sales environments? Business strategist Don Perkins believe that a new acronym may be more effective. He introduces the oddly named ACNE (authority, compelling trigger event, need and engagement) as an alternative to BANT in a recent write-up. Despite its name, ACNE improves on BANT in a number of ways, says Perkins. One of the main issues with the previous lead qualification acronym is that…