Have you ever received a call from a supplier of yours or some place that you purchased a product?  I think we all have, one thing that drives me crazy is when the person on the other end of the phone has absolutely nothing to say to me that is of any value.  I get a monthly call from a supplier (and I really like their product) but the calls are annoying and a waste of his time and mine in my opinion.  I have told him over and over again that we are happy with their product and I do not need any changes right now, and he tries to up-sell me on the same feature I have told him we don’t need.  This is like negative advertising.  So here is a tip, if you want to do frequent account management calls you have to have something of substance that has the potential to help me with my business or with my recent purchase.  If not, don’t call.  If you have not spoken to a customer in a year then I think it is fine to check in and just ensure that everything is going okay with your product or service.  Most of the time if there is nothing they will respond with “Thanks for the call”.  Mission accomplished.  Its the frequently calls that are the problem.  The key is to think, and sometime thinking is hard so poor account managers choose to be lazy. Come up with ideas that will assist your customer.  If you are selling software, talk about new features that are coming out and how they could benefit your customer.  If you are following up on customer who purchased a car from you discuss methods to get the best fuel efficiency.  Key is educate, communicate like an expert and your customers will appreciate your account management calls. Thanks for listening

Answer, marketing managers understand traditional media. They understand that if I buy radio, I hear my ad on the radio. If I buy a magazine or newspaper ad I see it in print. Same with TV, it’s similar to buying a tangible product as opposed to a service. It’s easier to understand buying a board room table as opposed to purchasing services from your lawyer at $350 per hour. I can sit around my board room table but I cannot experience and touch or see my lawyer putting in all the work they put into a legal document. So what is my point? The point is that online marketing such as pay per click advertising, search engine optimization, and social media tactics are not as easy to understand as traditional media so what do a lot of marketers do, they stick with what they have done in the past, don’t rock the boat. Well here is the deal, like it or not more and more consumers are researching and buying online, so please get your head out of sand and at least meet with an online marketing company and start to learn how online marketing works. We spend a great deal of time educating our clients and some may say this is tiring work but I say I am pleased to meet with the clients that are smart enough to recognize that the Internet is not a fad and it is only going to increase. So either watch this train go buy or jump on board and learn.  Read more...

Prioritizing your work schedule, sounds simple right? Nothing to it, keep a list of what you need to do and then figure out what needs to be done first. I have news for you a lot of people are not good at prioritizing and it hurts their productivity each day. The first key to prioritizing is you need a system to keep track of all your tasks. A good contact management system such as ACT, Goldmine, Salesforce.com and Highrise (37signals.com) will do just fine. Ensure your task list has some form of prioritization, such as high, medium and low priority. Sounds easy, but here is the hard part, you will find that a lot of your daily tasks do fall into the high priority category. This is what separates the people that can prioritize and those that cannot. The key here is to be able to quickly look at a 10-15 high priority tasks and quickly be able to figure out what to do first and last. f you are a sales person you likely will start with prospects that have made an inquiry with you in the last few hours. Our sales team makes it a policy to get back to prospects within 2 hours. So I recommend starting there, then you can look at prospects that are near closing and ensure you keep on them as much as possible to answer any questions and keep the sales process going. Furthermore, deal with customers inquiries that have come in and you have a sense they are not immediate (if immediate put them before the prospects). Finally deal with your internal items such as blogging, tweeting, writing a newsletter article etc. Most employees that are good at prioritizing do their internal work after hours as they want to get as much of the client and prospect work done during the day.  Read more...