Sales & Marketing

There is a famous parable that goes something like this: Every morning on the African plains, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning a lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death. It doesn’t matter whether you …

Holiday time is fast approaching and you will likely have increased opportunity to talk about your valuable work with friends and family. How you talk about the work you do can lead to business opportunities and referrals. Below are seven ideas to help you in this area. If you work on a team or in an office with other advisors, …

Take your business to the next level by creating an “It’s All-About-Them” (IAAT) experience for your clients. A company that is founded on the IAAT principle will have valuable services right out of the box. Ask any successful financial advisor, they will tell you. In order to get new clients and keep the existing ones coming back for more, clients …

Essentially a sales manager’s primary responsibility is to recruit, train and motivate his or her sales force to achieve peak performance. Of these three vitally important management tasks, recruiting is the least understood and by far the most challenging. If you’re successful during the recruiting interview process and hire a superstar sales rep, you’ll find that he or she is …

An industry event can be a great way for company executives and associates to meet others in their industry as well as potential clients. While it is important to convey what your company is about at the event, it is equally important to take notes of hot topics in the industry, meet as many people as you can and above …

The most successful companies and the highest paid salespeople place great value on developing lifetime relationships with their customers and actively look for opportunities to render service above and beyond their customers’ expectations. In today’s competitive marketplace, your customers are aggressively prospected and their loyalty cannot be taken for granted. Customer-focused companies and individuals recognize that relationship building and follow-up service …

What’s the difference between someone who achieves their goals and someone who just dreams about them? The starting point is always their level of desire, and how badly they want it. Try to remember a time when you heard how someone defied all the odds and achieved something that seemed impossible. You might have been stunned by their sheer determination …

Whether you’ve asked for a referral or one has been volunteered, what do you usually do with it? Do you say, “Thanks, I’ll let you know what happens,” or do you linger a little longer to learn more about your new prospect? I always advocate quality over quantity (though quantity is always important). Coming away from a meeting with 20 …

Whether your business was an early adopter of social media or your social media marketing campaign hasn’t yet made it to the computer screen, it never hurts to take a refresher course in social media. Just like television networks have no shortage of news to report, social media is a fast-moving animal that requires constant attention because this multimedia marketing …

Many corporations fail because they don’t truly recognize the importance of well-researched marketing in conjunction with a strong, well-educated sales force.  Even though today the internet, newsprint, television, and other direct-to-consumer mediums are available, salespeople are the lifeblood of a corporation.  I feel companies are misguided to think that they don’t need a sales force because of technology.   The …