Align To Accelerate Sales Performance

Align To Accelerate Sales Performance

Just as alignment is key to your automobile running efficiently and not wearing down the tires, alignment of your management team is also key. Unfortunately, it is also rare. Such misalignment results in silos, miscommunication, misunderstanding and unempowered employees. So how do you ensure your management team is in alignment? Ask them each ...

Tom Smith

Consumer Insights From the Energy Industry Accelerate Sales

By having one-on-one interviews with client management and customers, we learned just how complex the deregulation issues in the energy industry were and how low awareness and knowledge was among customers. Telephone interviews affirmed our findings and allowed us to pursue a segmentation strategy based on industry, energy use and potential savin...

Tom Smith

Positioning Your Brand to Accelerate Sales

The fourth, and final, element of the brand platform I will address in this series of posts is stategic positioning. Al Reis and Jack Trout wrote Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind in 1981. The premise of the book is as important today as it was then. What makes your product or service different and better? Distinguishes a brand within a comp...

Tom Smith

12 Steps to an Integrated Marketing Communications Plan

The Brand Platform: The Foundation of a Cohesive Integrated Marketing Communications Plan Why a Brand Platform? A brand platform will align the company’s goals and aspirations with its resources and capabilities A brand platform sends a message to everyone in the company It should be: 1) short enough to remember; 2) simple enough to understan...

Tom Smith

How Consumer Insights Accelerate Sales

Talking to customers and prospects is invaluable. Big data is great; however, you don't really know what's driving the data until you have a conversation, either online or face-to-face, with a customer or prospect. An open-ended conversation will help you understand how the customer is, or is not, making an emotional connection with your brand. The...

Tom Smith

Align to Accelerate Sales

Vision Mission Values Strategic positioning (i.e., what makes you different and better) Think again. Odds are they aren't. I just heard Jessica Cobbs, Global Brand Director of UPS, speak and their management team wasn't in alignment. If your management team isn't in alignment, what are the odds your employees are all working towards the same...

Tom Smith

Employee Engagement and Empowerment Starts at the Top

Interesting post by the Gallup Management Journal on the "Five Ways to Improve Employee Engagement Now." Only 13% of employees are engaged at work. If an employee is not engaged, they're not likely to provide an outstanding customer experience. If an employee doesn't provide an outstanding customer experience, you're not likely to have many sa...

Tom Smith

Provide Outstanding Customer Experiences to Differentiate Your Brand

Over the course of my career, I've worked with more than 80 clients and companies in 18 different vertical industries. My goal in working with each of them was to identify their strategic positioning -- the long-term positive differentiation of their product, service or brand. What made them "different and better" than the competition. I also attem...

Tom Smith

5 Questions to Ask that Will Provide Insights & Accelerate Sales

I have used analytics and qualitative research to provide consumer insights for more than 80 clients in 18 different industries. The best insights come from having a face-to-face dialog with the respondent. Regardless of if I'm talking to prospects, customers, channel partners or employees, there are five foundational questions that I've found wi...

Tom Smith

6 Rules of Customer Experience (#cx)

Thanks to Bruce Temkin (#btemkin) for his insights in a recent edition of Customer Relationship Magazine. Bruce's six rules of customer experience, along with my own thoughts, are as follows: Focus on journeys, not interactions. Understand the big picture of what your customer is trying to accomplish and help them accomplish it. If a USAA member ...

Tom Smith