Crafting a Message That Sticks: An Interview with Chip Heath
The key to effective communication: make it simple, make it concrete, and make it surprising.
Content: Thought Leader | Authors: Chip Heath, Lenny T. Mendonca, Matt Miller | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Marketing / Sales
Warning to Direct Marketers: Asking These Questions Will Kill Your Conversions
Can asking a question in an ad increase sales?
A question is a tool. And as with any tool, any copywriting strategy or tactic, if a question is not formulated and handled with proper caution it could indeed do immeasurably more harm than good.
Content: Article | Author: Barry Densa | Source: MarketingProfs | Subjects: Advertising, Marketing / Sales
Click Fraud Climbing
Four Overlooked Benefits of Telemarketing (and How to Make the Most of Them)
Whenever I can, I include telemarketing as part of a comprehensive lead-generation program. When it comes to setting sales appointments, populating a database with decision-maker names, or filling seats at an event, there’s no contact method that’s more direct or more effective. The results of telemarketing are usually measurable, too, which is also a rare benefit for any campaign tactic.
But, actually, you can expect more … [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Author: Michelle Palmer | Source: MarketingProfs | Subjects: Market Research, Marketing / Sales
Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions
Irrational behavior is a part of human nature, but as MIT professor Ariely has discovered in 20 years of researching behavioral economics, people tend to behave irrationally in a predictable fashion. Drawing on psychology and economics, behavioral economics can show us why cautious people make poor decisions about sex when aroused, why patients get greater relief from a more expensive drug over its cheaper counterpart … [ Read more ]
Content: Book | Author: Dan Ariely | Subjects: Management, Marketing / Sales, Organizational Behavior
ASSESS -an Interactive Program for Utility Assessment
ASSESS is an interactive computer program for assessing utility functions. A utility function is a quantitative scale of how an individual values different levels of a payoff, for example, the personal value that you attach to various monetary outcomes. The utility function of an individual may be used to help him/her make decisions among complex alternatives involving risk and multiple objectives. ASSESS can elicit a … [ Read more ]
Content: Online Resource | Author: Philippe Delquié | Subjects: Market Research, Productivity / Work Tips
The Internet Can Make Customers Stupid
Myth: The Internet makes customers so well informed that they no longer need sales professionals to help them make business decisions.
Truth: The Internet frequently creates confusion and ignorance, thus producing a demand for highly-skilled sales professionals.
Content: Article | Author: Geoffrey James | Source: BNET | Subject: Marketing / Sales
Avoid Drawn Out Sales Cycles and Win Quality Business
Customers are rarely to blame for long-drawn out delays. Instead, it is salespeople themselves who are the biggest contributors to the delays they find so frustrating. Paradoxically, it is the eagerness to move the sale along that leads them into the trap of prematurely presenting solutions for problems their customers don’t clearly recognize they have.
Content: Article | Author: Jeff Thull | Source: 1to1 media | Subject: Marketing / Sales
List Rental Prices Down, Use of International Lists Rises
The Price Is Right: Optimizing Industrial Companies’ Pricing of Services
Too often, industrial companies are leaving cash on the table – and missing opportunities to cement customer loyalty and boost repeat sales of their equipment – because they base decisions about bundling and pricing their services on anecdotal information. We offer a systematic approach to examining markets, leading to a much more informed perspective on the opportunities and risks in bundling and pricing services.
Content: Article | Author: David Rickard | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: Market/Investment, Pricing
Four Tips for Customer-Centric Copywriting
By framing your marketing message from the customer’s point of view, you’ll craft much more targeted copy.
Content: Article | Author: Sharon Long Baerny | Source: MarketingProfs | Subject: Marketing / Sales
Mark W. Johnson, Clayton M. Christensen, and Henning Kagermann
One way to generate a precise customer value proposition is to think about the four most common barriers keeping people from getting particular jobs done: insufficient wealth, access, skill, or time.
Content: Quotation | Authors: Clayton M. Christensen, Henning Kagermann, Mark Johnson | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Customer Related, Marketing / Sales
Affluent Americans Spend Most on Home, Apparel, Travel
The Role of Experience in Building Value
Tweaking Internal Site-Searches into Buying Opportunities
Your visitors expectations of your site’s search is that it will perform as well as the search they are used to from their favorite search engine.
There are many ways that search result pages can be optimized to provide visitors with an easy means to find what they are looking for — or at least something that will keep the visitor moving through your site. Here … [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Author: Daniel McGuigan | Source: GrokDotCom | Subjects: IT / Technology / E-Business, Marketing / Sales
Sean R. Collins, Peter W. Dahlström, and Marc Singer
The central challenge of a segmentation strategy isn’t how to develop one—a variety of approaches work—but how to make it useful and integrate it into a company’s ongoing planning and performance-management efforts. The segmentation must explicitly link corporate financial objectives to the behavior of people in a segment and to customer experience goals. This linkage allows general managers and marketers to understand how the experiences … [ Read more ]
Content: Quotation | Authors: Marc Singer, Peter W. Dahlström, Sean R. Collins | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Customer Related, Management, Marketing / Sales
US Online Advertising Revenues, by Format, First Half 2007 and 2008
Sheila M. J. Bonini and Jeremy M. Oppenheim
Our 2007 study of 7,751 consumers around the world identifies barriers to buying green at all five stages of the purchase process. In the first stage, awareness, consumers must be aware that a product exists before they can buy it, but many of them don’t know about the green choices in a number of categories. Next, consumers must believe that a product will get the … [ Read more ]
Content: Quotation | Authors: Jeremy M. Oppenheim, Sheila M. J. Bonini | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Marketing / Sales | Industry: Retail
Death of Office Politics
Forget all you know about workplace interplay. Today’s younger generations have rewritten the rules of the game.
Editor’s Note: a lot of what’s written in this article didn’t ring true to me and seemed pure conjecture and a bit cynical but I’m a bit removed from this particular topic so maybe you’ll find it more accurate?
Content: Article | Author: Marilyn Moats Kennedy | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subjects: Demographics, Human Resources, Organizational Behavior
What’s my name, #$%&*?
Doesn’t matter what you’re naming – your product, your business, your website or heck, even your child (which happens to be my current project), your choice is important. Below you’ll find a bunch of ideas, strategies, and tools to make your name discovery a little easier.
Content: Article | Source: Halfagain | Subject: Marketing / Sales