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

7 Ways to Leverage Your Best Customers to Accelerate Sales

Do you know who your best customers are? Not the ones who spend the most. Not the ones who visit you most often. The ones that tell others about your products and services. The ones that rave about you on Facebook. You have prospects, customers, satisfied customers and "raving fans" or advocates. Your raving fans are your most valuable customers. T...

Tom Smith

Consumer Insights and Aligned, Empowered Employees

In a recent edition of Communication World, Steve Crescenzo writes about corporate communications for employees and their disinterest relative to other distractions like Facebook, You Tube, et al. While this is a challenge, there is a bigger challenge. One of the biggest problems I see in companies I work with today is the lack of adoption of the m...

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

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

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

10 Reasons to Ensure Your Management Team Is In Alignment

Having worked with more than 80 companies over the course of my career, I've had the opportunity to see how companies function, communicate and empower employees. It is rare to see a company with a management team in alignment with regard to vision, mission, values and strategic positioning. I daresay most senior managers don't understand the mea...

Tom Smith

Improve Communications to Improve Performance and Accelerate Sales

Companies with highly effective communications and change management are 3.5 times more likely to outperform their peers who do not communicate or manage change effectively, according to Towers Watson’s 2013-2014 Change and Communication ROI Study. The study surveyed 651 organizations from a broad range of industries and found the most successfu...

Tom Smith