Over the past year, I have been reading a lot of articles about how social media is changing the world of sales. What has been happening recently is I'm actually seeing this in action. A couple of my clients decided to survey their customers to ask them how they preferred to be contacted for sales and if they searched social media for product information. In both cases, the customers responded that they wanted to be more "in charge" of the process of researching products and choosing how they

There are so many social media choices for marketing, that it can be challenging to know which is the best avenue for your product. What's the answer? Well it depends. If your market is 18 to 29 year olds, with average annual incomes of less than $50k, then Instagram is the place to market your products. Higher priced products or services won't do well on that platorm. If you are a B2B, Linkedin and Linkedin Groups are a good choice, along with Twitter, particularly if you are a service or

We're starting a weekly "Friday Did you Know?" blog  that we hope you find helpful.  Sometimes a quick tip that we "assume" everyone knows is not so well known.  It's the classic don't assume action.  Here's this week's post. A really nice trick that has been part of the ACT CRM forever is the ability to search a special group of fields that start with ANY.  What this means is you don't have to remember where the phone number is shown - cell or home or business.  

Once again I showed a tip to a sales rep that is so simple but so effective.  The application we are using is ACT, but this could be done with any CRM. We were going over his processes and were discussing how to make his sales calls more effective.  Lately, we are spending quite a bit of time doing business and sales coaching.  One thing that frustrated my client was going out to call on someone and they were not there or had been called away.  This happens quite a lot, even

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 "