An idea worth stealing

I found this at a Beautiful Experience. The post is called 30 Seconds to a Relationship. It's most definitely worth the click through, but in the meantime a selection:

We talked about 3/30/3/30 in our latest version of 4.5 ideas to decommodify your business. Here's more detail about what we mean.

3 seconds This is the benefit of doing business with you.
30 seconds This is the benefit with some elaboration and description.
3 minutes This is the benefit within the context of the problem/solution.
30 minutes This is the benefit applied to the specific client/prospect you are interacting with.

What are you paid to do?

Found this today at The Business of Print It's managed by Mike Philie, a vice president and consultant in the Print Consulting Services Group of NAPL,

We spoke about expectations; as the new sales managers, what does your boss, owner, management team expect from you? Only two of them felt somewhat comfortable about knowing the expectations that lie ahead. Not a good thing.

Alignment in all that we do is a critical component of successful companies. How can we work together as a team if we don't fully understand our goals and objectives?

The problem is that sometimes no one in the company has a goal more than "Get more.. read the rest

Textbooks, Digital Printing and the Dog Food Business

This is a lightly edited version of a column that I wrote in 2006 for WhatTheyThink.com.

"You have to remember that the market for textbooks is like the market for dog food because purchasing decisions are not made by the ultimate consumer" - Barbara Levitt, Clifford Nass; Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 34, 1989

Most printers are in the dog food business. Read the rest

A marketing pro thinks I said something useful

Every once in a while, you get lucky.
The following comes from A Beautiful Experience . It's a blog that is maintained by a marketing firm in Canada.

A couple of days ago I blogged about how to decommdify in a commodity industry (commercial printing). The post was picked up by "The Print CEO Blog" here and it started a healthy discussion. One of the comments was from Michael J, and he drove home a great point -- great service and taking care of the small details is a definite must to decommodify:

From 30 years of selling printing, these are my rules of thumb. read the rest

What is selling, anyway?

Whenever I am trying to think through what's going on, first stop is wikipedia. Here is a thing that caught my eye:

Contrary to popular belief, the methodological approach of selling refers to a systematic process of repetitive and measurable milestones, by which a salesperson relates his offering of a product or service in return enabling the buyer to achieve his goal in an economic way. - Wikipedia

So. . . read the rest