Marketing Strategy

In this week’s episode of Front Lobby Confessionals, Tom Marks talks about sales research and how it supports his trademarked Critical Insight Selling™ technique that sells your wisdom and industry knowledge rather than old-school features and benefits. If you want to sell more and sit on the sidelines less, this episode is for you.

I’m worried. 

For my clients and my friends. I worry that in less than two years they’re not going to know what the hell hit them. For my friends in banking, manufacturing, professional services, technology, recreation, digital services, education, real estate, food and beverage, transportation, insurance, construction and health care.

Each year, with quite a bit of fanfare I might add, Reader’s Digest releases their 40 Most Trusted Brands in America. And each year it’s pretty much the same song and dance. It’s easy to pick apart the findings; after all, with only a very few exceptions, all the brands are national advertisers, some with marketing budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars and a few with budgets that exceed $1 billion.

In the Ad Nauseam Hall of Fame, in the Sales Wing, you’ll find no shortage of sales techniques including SPIN Selling, N.E.A.T. Selling, Conceptual Selling, SNAP Selling, Challenger Sales, The Sandler System, CustomerCentric Selling and MEDDIC Selling (Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision Criteria, Decision Process, Identify Pain and Champion).

Much has been written about the significance of storytelling in sales and marketing. In fact, much has been spoken about the importance of storytelling in everything business related. It’s not surprising that this is a favorite topic of professional speakers throughout the country. 

Emails don't have to look stark, canned, stale and boring. There are more design options available than ever before, ready to spice up your next campaign. 

Let’s face it, everyone’s looking for an edge. An edge over their competitors, a service edge, product edge, sales edge and a relevant differentiation edge. In fact, in the 1980s and 1990s, in political campaign management, we called it the “wedge”. It was as simple as exploiting the opposing candidate’s greatest weakness and staking a messaging "wedge" between the two candidates in an effort to deepen the differentiation.

Any of us who have read the committed atrocities by Harvey Weinstein has been subject to a laundry list of his remarkable movies. I’ve seen many of them and enjoyed most of them, but you’ll read no list here. In every one of these articles, it’s as if these famed movies somehow temper the actions and buffer the bombshells. 

Our thanks to Pamela Sosnowski, at WisconsinRealEstate.com   for her recent article on our agency.