5 ways Marketing Automation helps Sales Enablement
For anyone involved in selling B2B products and services today, marketing automation is just one tool that helps convert prospects to sales and helps to facilitate more personal relationships with…
Sellers Beware: The Project Behind The Purchase
Behind many big purchases is a project. Indeed the purchase itself may be a project, with a set of steps, a project team, project milestones and so on. Adopting the…
Customer Service Staff – How to Get the Most of Out Them
Are you getting the most out of your customer service staff? I’d bet dollars to donuts that you aren’t, because mostpanies aren’t anywhere close to doing so. See, the mistake that…
Expectations Drive Performance
People rise and fall to the level of expectations set for them. Case-in-point: Today, I had two new hires start at 2nd Watch. I spent the entire day on-boarding them,…
Three terrific thought leader panels from ACCE 2013
ICMI’s ACCE 2013 conference for call center professionals was a customer service extravaganza and a terrific learning experience (see my re-cap here). One of the best features of the conference…
TED Talks for Salespeople: The 5 Not to Be Missed
Sometimes we need little moments of education to shock ourselves out of our normal way of thinking. We think TED talks often do that for our team. (If you haven’t…
Offline, Online: Connected Thinking
For over two decades the internet has changed the way in which businesses and institutions have delivered their products and services to consumers. In fact, the abundance and the range…
5 Obstacles to B2B Market Research and Actionable Customer Insights
English: conference room (Photo credit: Wikipedia) The idea of market research has been around for a very long time. Conceptually, market research is a strongponent of overall business strategy. A…
How Can You Turn Ordinary Customer Service to Extraordinary?
There are a lot of great books out right now about customer experience management and customer service principles. I’ve read many and have mentioned or reviewed a few here on…
It’s Time To Get (Really) Serious About Performance Metrics: What Works, What Has Challenges, and Why….
The recently published 2013 Honomichl Top 50 Report, chronicling performance of major, U.S.-based marketing/advertising/public opinion research firms, shows a an overall decline. Taking out the effect of reduced government spending…
A Pull Marketing Revenue Story
“Se acabo la fiesta.” I must have heard that a thousand times as a kid. Literally translated, “party’s over”. But my mother would use it more broadly whenever she’d had…
New Talent Models In The Pharma Industry
Since the Great Recession took hold, the pharmaceutical manufacturing sector has held a unique position in the economy. Traditionally, and according to theU.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, this industry has…
Wearable Computing: Where Tech Meets Fashion
The hype and hyperbole that arrived with the limited release of Google Glass is beginning to wane. In its place are the current realities of wearableputing: short battery life, voice…
Social Selling Advice: 10 Ways To Get Found More Easily On LinkedIn
You’ve filled out your LinkedIn profile. You’ve uploaded your smiling picture, and you posted a few updates. However, you are not getting the LinkedIn profile views that you had hoped?…
Big Data: Just The Facts
Big data means a lot of things to a lot people. And that’s created a fair amount of fear, uncertainty, and doubt among those charged with managing it. The facts?…
The Best In Personal Banking Apps
Work hard, play hard, but not so hard that you spend all your hard-earned cash. Personal banking can be an important undertaking. Life moves so quickly it’s hard to know…
Why Manufacturing Doesn’t Matter
We all know the factors that have led to economic success in the industrial era: access to land, labor, raw materials, capital, machinery, and (in many cases, anyway) a good…
Reality Check – Are You Ready For The Future of Work?
The Future of Work Moving out of the endless search for the familiar past and bellying-up to meeting the challenges of the new workplace is as much a mind-shift as…
The Mobile Dashboard – Your Window to Business Intelligence
The Mobile Dashboard For Business Productivity Business and IT are usually in a strained relationship at best. Like a married couple, they rarely see eye to eye, and eachplains that…
Innovation Is Not A Differentiator Anymore; Innovation Stickiness Is
Innovation is not a differentiator anymore; Innovation stickiness is. Connected customers in the information age with a ‘web of voices’ expect Innovation to be both faster and surer. For businesses,…