If you’re a sales person you should be a brand leader

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Brand & Reputation, Marketing

In the last 40 years the concept of branding, as a means of differentiating one company or product from another, has become an important and powerful marketing tool. Enormous sums of money, and extensive executive time has been invested in developing and promoting brands, and making sure that more buyers were aware of the value that a brand had to offer.

Since then many people – particularly those in the public eye, including actors and politicians – have come to recognise the value of developing a strong brand. It wasn’t too long before some

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Delivering “good service” isn’t enough

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Brand & Reputation, Competition, Customer Service, Marketing, Sales Driven Organisations, Sales Relationships, Sales Skills, Teamwork

I was impressed by a brief but excellent ABC News Video on the impact of social media on a business’ reputation and brand, especially when things go wrong and that to reduce or eliminate any negative publicity issues to begin with starts with something rather old fashioned – delivering Service. This got me musing about and the importance of good ‘ol fashioned customer service’ and what it really means today in a digital world.  The team has proposed we adopt C.A.R.E. as our mantra.

What is C.A.R.E. about?

Everyone knows that delivering good customer service is a fundamental building …

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Brand your Salespeople

By / / Brand & Reputation, Marketing, Strategy, Uncategorized

Have you ever asked your salespeople what your company’s brand means? Chances are you will get different answers from different people – and chances are none of their answers will be entirely correct either. In spite of the investment many companies make on developing and promoting their brands to their customers, little is done to build the brand integrity internally. As a result there is often a disconnect between what a company promises to its customers and what the salespeople are saying.

Branding (amongst many things) is designed to stimulate an emotional expectation. Armed with the feelings, stimulated …

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Customer Satisfaction & Retention Booster

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Customer Service, Marketing, Sales Management, Sales Relationships, Sales Results, Sales Tips, Success

It is five to ten times easier to keep a customer we have than to get a new one – so taking customer satisfaction and retention seriously should be serious business. We already have the most powerful marketing tool to boost customer satisfaction and increase customer retention, as well as improve employee morale and develop new products and services that are exactly what our customers want and need. The problem is that most companies don’t use it.

There is no more useful tool in our marketing armoury than our front-line sales and service people. …

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From Mass Marketing to Markets of One

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Collaboration, Communication, Marketing, Sales Skills, Social Sales, Teamwork

”Move over mass marketing welcome to fragmentation and segmentation” was voted by our readers as the third most important sales trend in Barrett’s 2012 Sales Trends Report. Market fragmentation and segmentation is well and truly taking over from Mass Marketing society’s staple way of communicating with buyers for over 50 years. So what will this change look like for our businesses and our customers? Barrett is seeing the relationship between marketing and selling widen as each fights for supremacy in the digital communications era. With this widening gap, marketing will finally …

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Move Over Marketing Here Comes Sales Strategy!

By / / Marketing, Sales Leadership, Sales Planning, Sales Strategy, Success

The pundits (including Barrett) are always reminding sales executives of the need to plan. However, a major miscalculation made by many organisations is viewing their sales operations as purely tactical functions. The result – at best, sales plans become little more than operational imperatives bumping along one quarter to the next with no strategic intent.

More and more, the high cost of selling, longer lead times and the multitude of choice that customers have – coupled with rampant (and often aggressive and diversifying) competition, diminishing product differentiation and …

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Learning how to ride the Boom AND Bust economy

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Business Acumen, Marketing, Resilience, Sales Culture, Sales Leadership, Sales Planning, Sales Results, Strategy

These turbulent, challenging and sometimes volatile times we find ourselves living in are making many of us rethink how we do business, how we live our lives and how we engage with the world. Unless you are hiding under the doona, the rest of us are witnessing and experiencing a major transition from the Industrial Revolution to a brave new world of the New Tech paradigm.

This transition is exciting and frightening at the same time because the ‘new order’ is not ordered at all. It keeps changing at a rapid rate leaving a constant sense of unease. Many of the …

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The Practice of Confusion Marketing

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Marketing, Sales Culture

I wonder how many people, business owners and consumers alike are experiencing excessive frustration, anxiety or even depression as a result of the Confusion Marketing tactics employed by some businesses? Confusion Marketing is the controversial strategy and practice of deliberately sending confusing marketing material in order to hinder consumers’ comparisons with other similar offers.

Many examples are to be found in the telecommunications, banking and finance sectors, where pricing plans, contracts or interest rate offers can be so complicated that it becomes impossible to make direct comparisons between competing offers. You will find that with companies that employ such tactics that …

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Death of the ‘Detailing’ Salesman

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Marketing

If you have been paying attention for a while you will have realized that a lot is happening and changing in the world of selling and buying. The internet and social media are the most significant game changes along with the commoditisation of products.

With access to so much information, the buyer has grown into a more sophisticated, well informed consumer, especially in the B2B (business to business) space. The savvy business person knows that many of those commodity purchases they have traditionally made face-to-face with a sales representative can now be made online thus saving …

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