In the sports world, as demonstrated in books like Moneyball and films like Draft Day, success in recruiting often means seeing what no one else sees. The same is true for your company. If you’re not looking at your industry and your customers and asking yourself what everyone is missing, you’ll never have the insights…

There’s a critical step at the core of effective marketing, yet it’s often overlooked. It’s finding the real answer to a seemingly simple question: what does your company — or the products and services it provides — actually do for customers? It’s overlooked because the answer seems obvious. It’s crucial because it really isn’t as…

We know that a smile means a person is happy. But research shows that smiling actually makes you happy. In other words, the more you smile, the happier you’ll feel. This is great news for business. If you can persuade your front line, customer contact people to smile more, two things will happen. The first…

A TED Talk by educator Rita Pierson points out what should be obvious: kids learn more from teachers they like, and they like the teachers who like them. Same goes for customers. They stick around when they feel the love, and they drift away when they don’t. Instead of working so hard to get likes…

Plenty of companies use incentives to lure new customers. Let’s flip that around for a minute. What incentive would make your good customers defect to your competition? Does that reveal a weakness you can work on — an opportunity to fortify your position? And as you think about incentives, consider what you could offer existing…

You may buy milk by the gallon, but you don’t consume it that way. A glass here, a bowl of cereal there…a little at a time. But consider e-mail. A lot of companies still send out infrequent e-mails that are as long as your arm. Who reads them? No one. It’s too much. So why…

True story. A company provided its sales team with a gorgeous (and expensive) collateral package that included an elaborate folder with materials of all kinds to fit into various slots, slits and pockets. It was beautiful. Months later, the packets were still sitting in boxes instead of being given out to prospects. Why? The salespeople…

A recent visit to a website suggested that the company “specialized” in nearly thirty different industries. That’s not specialization. In fact, it’s the exact opposite — it’s a company that dabbles, doing a project or two in every market segment but never truly digging deep enough to own any individual niche. True specialization is the…

If your company is like the majority of businesses, you may be guilty of taking your customers for granted. Oh sure…they get a statement every month, or an e-mail…but you’ve long since stopped trying to sell them on your brand. You know who hasn’t stopped? Your competition. Just like you, they’re devoting most of their…

As marketers, we spend so much time trying to generate leads that we sometimes overlook what happens when a prospect finally becomes a customer. Do you have a system in place to ensure that every new customer gets a call — not an e-mail, but a phone call — a day or two after that…