Business Management - Marketing/Sales

I am flummoxed. (Great word, huh?) Lately I have come in contact with several businesses and individuals who have very rude e-mail etiquette. The biggest complaint that I have is a lack of response. How is YOUR e-tiquette?

Every time—and I mean, every single time—I ask a print sales rep how he/she got into the large account they now service, it always results in some bizarre story that turned out well for the lucky party.

Twitter is largely a waste of time for the average small business—with just a few exceptions. People often Tweet my posts, sometimes hundreds of times. A small percentage of those Tweets came from people with tens of thousands of Followers. You would think a Tweet that reaches, say, 50,000 people or more would generate a lot of incoming traffic, right?

Nope.

For example, one article was Tweeted by a person with 57,000 Followers; less than 700 people followed the link to read the article. That’s a 1.2 percent ROT (Return On Tweet, a metric I just made up).

These blogs on planning are boring. I’m bored writing them. I’ll bet you are bored reading them. Maybe the best way to demonstrate strategy is to write a detailed action plan for one of the strategies from the previous blog.

With elastic demand, an increase in a product’s price causes the quantity demanded to decrease. Products likely to encounter elastic demand include those perceived as commodities or near-commodities, those for which there is intense competition or numerous substitute choices and those that have been poorly differentiated.

Allowing these six steps to guide you in your strategic market planning will bring to light the best strategies your organization can employ. It enables you to determine your best products and which ones to market heavily. This avoids the costly mistake of marketing everything to everyone—which rarely serves an organization well.

We spend our day calling and leaving voice mail messages. Our prospects duck, dodge and hide from us, and we curse them under our breath. But then we do the same to those who call us. It baffles me.

Your customers—and especially your prospects—don’t care about you. They don’t care about the products you’re selling, and they don’t care about your company. People don't buy features, they don’t really even buy ROI. What they buy is what that ROI will do for them.

You know that I love to quote clichés here, right? There’s that one about assumptions that we in print sales coaching talk about a LOT. You are making them, and they are KILLING you (professionally) and your sales.

Strategy is one of those words that big-shot CEOs, consultants and MBA professors like to throw at us. They try to make the word seem to be something exotic. Strategy is only a synonym for the word “how.”