How to develop an ideology-based marketing strategy. So you think you’re going to publish a newsletter? Hey, that’s not a bad idea! If you make it an e-mail newsletter — like the one you’re reading now — it’s a particularly cost effective exercise. Your distribution costs are nil. Your publishing costs are equivalent only to [...]

Wastepaper baskets, the world over, are full of them. In fact, if there were ever a competition to judge the most self-indulgent of all business communications, the newsletter would have serious competition from only the corporate video for first place! A tragedy, when you consider that newsletters have the potential to be by far the [...]

At best, most marketing communications are irrelevant to most of their recipients, most of the time. At worst, these communications run the risk of damaging the very relationships they are supposed to be cultivating. The problem is, from a marketing department’s perspective; every relationship looks like a sales opportunity. Accordingly, marketing (and sales) people tend [...]

How to use the virtual world of the Internet to multiply the effectiveness of your real-world marketing activities. I don’t know about you, but sometimes I feel that managing a traditional ‘bricks and mortar’ business is downright unsexy! Particularly when stories abound of Web entrepreneurs who have reinvented business as we know it (and become [...]

How to sell expensive (or complex) products and services [Listen to a seminar on this subject!] If your organisation sells expensive (or complex) products and services, odds are, you get most of your new clients by ‘word of mouth’ or referral. If you’ve tried your hand at advertising, you’ve probably discovered that, even if an [...]

As many of you know, I’ve been splitting my time between Australia and the US for the last six months or so. I’ve been interested to see that, although I’ve cut my available capacity in Australia by almost half, our volume of Aussie sales has stayed exactly the same (in fact, in recent times it [...]

Imagine you were to awaken one morning suffering from a strange disorder: one that rendered your eyesight unreliable. When you open your eyes, your bedroom appears roughly as it did the night before. Your bed is below the open window, and your dresser is still adjacent to the door. However, a second look reveals that [...]

and how to fast-track the growth of your business in the process. Over lunch, a CEO recently admitted to me that his financial controller was using his organisation’s profits to build quite a substantial commercial property portfolio. When I asked if this was best use of his organisation’s free cashflow, he smiled, “How did I [...]

Tell me, how’s your conversion rate? Specifically, is your organisation converting the optimal percentage of sales opportunities into sales? My bet is that you’ll find this question hard to answer … for two possible reasons: You don’t know what your optimal conversion rate is. You can’t bring yourself to be happy with a conversion rate [...]

Applying the Theory of Constraints to the design, resourcing and management of the sales process [Presented at: TOCICO Conference, Miami 2004] Introduction The traditional sales process is hard to manage and all but impossible to scale. This paper introduces a radical new approach to sales process design, resourcing and management. The result of this approach [...]