If you read the title and are still reading, you must have salespeople in your company.
For all of us who interview, hire, train, coach, and manage salespeople, Seth Godin’s recent blog post reflects what I have thought for years. He doesn’t use the phrase “service heart mindset” but that is another way of looking at [...]

The Wall Street Journal has an excellent article on direct mail marketing (DMM). It turns out that dropping the DMM portion of a company’s marketing campaign can trash inbound leads and customer activity. A better idea is to add opt-in email and web presence to your DMM activity, for a truly integrated marketing communications effort.
Read [...]

No business is an island. But while we focus heavily on our customers and employees, we sometimes forget another key stakeholder: our vendors.
An unfortunate discovery yesterday reminded me that it is our job to communicate our expectations to our vendors clearly and unambiguously, and their job to execute crisply. If we are sloppy in our [...]

I just returned from attending Gaspedal’s Word of Mouth Supergenius in Chicago and my head is swimming with creative ideas for improving our viral marketing. The conference providing some simple, hand-on tips for developing and implementing a Word of Mouth marketing strategy in any organization. In the opening session, WOM marketing guru Andy Sernovitz broke [...]

Nobody needs a drill. What they need is a hole. The drill is merely the means to the end.
In our business, nobody needs brochures or postcards. What they need is to grow their business by communicating more effectively with their customers and prospects.
Nobody needs what you sell. What they need is what your product or [...]

One of the best ways to grow your business without breaking the bank is to get free exposure for your company in the news media. Sounds great, but how do you actually get someone to publish the fawning puff piece you always wanted?
Cameron Herold, COO of a cool Canadian company called 1-800-GOT-JUNK gave a presentation [...]

It slays me when a presenter in a meeting or at a conference throws up PowerPoint slides full of words, then proceeds to read them to the audience. I mean, if words alone are enough to communicate your ideas, send an email.
If you use PowerPoint for sales presentations or internal communications, you’ve got to watch [...]

At PrintingForLess.com we serve a variety of small business customers ranging from a one-person shop to companies with hundreds of employees.  Some print only a few jobs a year while some larger organizations may place many orders and may reprint the same type of pieces repeatedly with only slight changes to their art. We have [...]

Okay, I’m coming clean. I have a problem – I am a dyed-in-the-wool procrastinator.  While I’m not yet ready to join Procrastinators Anonymous, I am publicly attesting to the extra stress, late fees, embarrassment and remorse it has caused me over the years.  Fortunately, though, there are some areas of my life where this insidious [...]

Working for a print company, I get to see a ton of different postcards come through our presses.  And from a direct marketer’s perspective, many of these make me cringe.  There are some critical ‘postcard marketing elements’ that need to be included to optimize your results and get a better return on your printing and [...]