This month we're doing another of our Reese's Southern Wisdom blog posts. The timing is actually perfect.  August is a favorite month for travel, family vacations and just getting out of town. For people, that's a good thing. For sales, not so much. With customers not picking up the phone to call for sales or services, a business needs to find a way to bring in revenues during a slow period. Many people are quick to send out email blasts, trusting their computers to do the work of

It's hard to come up with fresh materials for social media. Every weekend when I plan out my tweets for the week, I've settled on having a general theme. It helps me gather material and puts a focus on things that come up spontaneously throughout the week. As I have said before, life in general is the best producer of ideas for posts. My social media theme this week in Nurture Marketing. What led me to this idea was actually reading another article about selling. The article talked about

Our newsletter theme this month is giving thanks (appropriate with November right around the corner). Each of us was challenged to create an article about gratitude, thankfulness, and how to say we appreciate our customers. Since I love social media, I decided to focus on that and how it can help you engage your customers and provide a way to say thanks. Companies talk all the time about maintaining loyalty from their customers but I think they tend to forget it's a two-way street.  Yes,

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

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

For the past two years I have been increasing my involvement in social business.  In the process I also kicked up the amount of blog articles I write.  When we switched our website to a Wordpress engine, it made sense to keep blogging current.  And it has worked in increasing the amount of traffic to our site and created additional business. That's all well and good but now comes the hard part.  In the beginning I had all kinds of information to write about.  News is

When thinking about the right CRM ask the 5 "w's" questions: Where are you going to use it, Why are you using it, When will you use it, What will you write about and Who is your audience. 1. Where - if you are selling GPS equipment to combine owners and you are outstanding in their field (and I don't mean good at what you do, I mean standing in the middle of a corn field), internet connections are probably not available and small devices not an option.   unless.... 2. When - if you

Last week, I had a great lunch with a friend here in town who owns a marketing firm that has a particular emphasis on social media.  One of the things we discussed is the changing face of marketing.   What is also changing is the role of sales and salespeople. That gave me the idea for the article today. I’m going to start it off with this chicken and egg question – which came first – marketing or sales.  Talk to a Salesperson and they will tell you it was them