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Home Archive for category "Marketing" (Page 2)

Are You Doing Things Right or Doing the Right Things?

Let’s be clear.  Doing things right is all about being efficient.  Doing the right things is about being effective.  So it isn’t an either/or situation, is it?  We want both, don’t we?  We want to do the right things and do them right.  After all, why would we want to be very efficient at doing

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Price is an Evil Mistress

Price is an Evil Mistress Setting our price is a conundrum, isn’t it?  If we set our price too high, customers go elsewhere.  If we set it too low, we leave money on the table.  So it’s a tough line to walk, but we all have to walk it.  Wait a minute though, is price

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Time to audit your products/services?

Last time, we talked about the importance of knowing profitability by customer, but what about the products and/or services you sell?  Do you know which lines of business are the most profitable and which are the least?  You may think you know where your profits are coming from, but do you really?  Are you sure? 

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Time to audit your customers?

Do you know which of your customers are profitable for you and which are not?  Yeah, if you look for them, you’ll probably find a few (hopefully only a few) that really aren’t contributing anything to your bottom line.  So how do you identify them?  And once you identify them, what can you do about

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“Know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em, know when to walk away, know when to run.”

Walking away from a sale is something that is tough for most business people to do . . . particularly in a tight economy when selling opportunities may be few and far between . . . but sometimes it’s the right move.  A business is set up to effectively and efficiently serve a certain market

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“Goals produce results, not activities.”

Our last posting talked about consistency.  We talked about identifying “critical success factors” . . . operating principles that, when applied consistently, are at the core of a company’s success.  But operating principles are only half the equation.  They are the front end, the input side of things.  They are the consistent activities that produce

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“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act, but a habit.”

In his outstanding book, Great by Choice, Jim Collins relates the story of Howard Putnam, a former CEO of Southwest Airlines. Putnam institutionalized the Southwest Airlines’ “recipe” for success. His “recipe” was not a strategic plan or a vision or a mission statement, but a carefully thought-out list of operating principles. That list included: Utilize

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Marketing 101e

So far in this series on marketing, we’ve discussed three fundamental marketing questions: –          What product or service do we want to sell? –          What “competitive advantage” separates us from our competitors? –          Who is uniquely suited to buy from us (who is our “prime prospect”)? Now, to conclude this series on marketing, let’s talk

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Marketing 101d

This is the fourth installment in a series of basic marketing concepts.  First we described what marketing is, and what it is not.  Then we talked about the problem your service or product will solve, the need it will fill, or the want it will satisfy.  Next we talked about a competitive advantage and why

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Marketing 101c

Maybe you remember the old Jim Croce song that goes, “You don’t spit into the wind, you don’t tug on Superman’s cape . . . “ etc.  The idea is that there are some things in life you just don’t do.  Case in point.  Last time I wrote (Marketing 101b), I talked about problems, needs,

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