Yesterday I was once again reminded of something I read in a book by Dale Carnegie: "91% of customers say they give referrals yet only 11% of salespeople ask for them." One of my clients said they were really happy with what we had done and that they were going to refer us to their business networking group. And I asked myself, "self, when was the last time you asked for a referral?" Quick rap on the forehead, and then a postit note saying "Ask for a Referral" placed on the monitor. Such

Spring is in the air and it's time for some spring cleaning.  How often do your scrub your contact lists? How often do you check for duplicates and merge them? If you are like most people, not often enough. That's not surprising.  We all get caught up in our day to day work schedules so data cleansing is not high on the priority list.  But it should be.  Bad data costs money - in efficiency, lost revenue, wasted marketing expenditures, and a variety of other ways. And you

ACT has a new eMarketing product.  This feature has been added to ACT v16 Service Pack 1.  It has an easy-to-use template editor so you don't have to be a graphics wizard to product nice looking marketing campaigns.   You can create, send, and track professional campaigns that reach customers and prospects with the right message at the right time, and know who to follow up with first with intelligent, prioritized Call Lists– all from within Act.  NOTE: this feature is only

In an interesting dialog last week, KPIs, or key performance indicators, were the topic but it occurred to me during the discussion that it meant different things to the participants on the call.  That inspried me to write this blog article. What do KPI's mean? And what do they mean to you and your organization. Wikipedia says: "A performance indicator or key performance indicator (KPI) is a type of performance measurement. An organization may use KPIs to evaluate its success, or to

Here's another one of our "We love your tips" posts. I have now helped two clients resolve this issue so I thought - hm - let me turn it into a blog article. By now, I think everyone knows I adore the Swiftpage eMarketing tool.  It's what I use for my marketing campaigns and I have dozens of clients using it as well.  Lately, some of my clients have been having problems editing their HTML templates.  In all the cases, it turned out to be an issue with Internet Explorer (IE

When you hear the term ROI, I am betting you are thinking money.  When I buy this stock, what will be my return.  If I invest in a business, will I get my money back. According to Wikipedia, ROI, or Return on Investment “is the concept of an investment of some resource yielding a benefit to the investor.”  Basically it means whatever you invest, be it money, time or effort, you are expecting some form of benefit. Often I am asked by clients to help them get across

Recently, I read a great article talking about calling prospects.  The main point of the article was that not all leads were equal - you needed to mix it up when reaching out to potential clients.   One of the questions people often ask is how many times should a prospect be called before you give up and call it a dead lead.  The article said it depended on the size of the business.  Smaller business owners were able to make decisions quicker while larger organizations had "

Ever wanted to put together a dog and pony show to demonstrate your services and products? Of course.  Did you think it would take lots of time and money?  You would think that setting this up would probably be a major undertaking that would be a huge time-drain.  I thought so as well.  The first time I had an opportunity to put on a roadshow, I only had a 3 week  advance notice.  At the time, I was very busy and needed to come up with ways to make this happen