Business Management - Marketing/Sales

The power of 20/20 hindsight is important, especially if we actually apply some of the lessons we learn in order to make our present and future better. What follows is a reflection on my past career as a print sales person.

What H&R Block has figured out is that growing customer loyalty is about capturing data and exuding technical superiority. It has realized that the “customer-for-life” concept is made possible by taking advantage of an age-old truth—people are lazy!

What if you are an active listener, but the buyer is not? That’s where flexibility and fit come in. Flexibility and fit refer to matching or fitting your style of communication to another person’s to improve the accurate exchange of information.

The 40/40/20 rule identifies the three main components of a direct marketing campaign and quantifies the import role each one plays in its success. Maintaining an accurate and up-to-date in-house mailing list will help ensure your promotions arrive at the right address with the right information.

As everyone knows, newspaper and magazine advertising has been dropping for several years. One key to offsetting this downward trend is to effectively combine both print and online media. This strategic market planning strategy is built upon three key drivers:

Sometimes, saying the wrong thing or attempting to make conversation about a controversial person or simply uttering the wrong word can be a sales killer. When that happens, you have created an irreparable, irretrievable, horrible perception with a customer and you will never again get past the customer’s receptionist.

When sales people lose an order, most of the time they will blame price. But when they win an order, they rarely credit price. What’s really happening out there? Clients are telling the truth a lot less often than you’d think.

As you push into value-added services, you will need to prove you have your own house in order when it comes to marketing strategy and multimedia techniques. Strategic planning books stress that the first step is analyzing customer and marketing data.

Ego is a double-edged sword. On the positive side, if you don’t have an ego, don’t have faith in yourself, then you’re probably not going to have a lot of success in life. But on the other hand, very often our egos make us feel that we’re infallible...incapable of making anything but the correct decision, regardless of what advice we get.

This column will provide you and your company with an opportunity to participate in a first-ever National Scavenger Hunt for Graphic Arts Company Growth. That's an easy acronym: NSHGACG. The object of the Scavenger Hunt is to develop new accounts for your company.