Customer service

How to Use a Feature Benefit Table to Create an Irresistible Offer

by Ivana Taylor June 21, 2011
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If you’re in the process of putting together marketing literature or sales sheets — then you’ve come to the right place. You’ve done the hard work of putting together a product or service — and now it’s time to give your prospects and customers all the information that they will need to choose YOU instead [...]

Marketing Using Your Mobile Phone is a Big Trend

by Ivana Taylor May 20, 2011
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The days of Star Trek are finally here.  For your Friday entertainment, I ran across this fun article that goes over a list of 10 Star Trek Inspired devices that are in use today. With so many new devices and applications hitting the streets at record speeds, you might be wondering how to put some [...]

3 Easy Budget Friendly Brand Building Strategies

by Ivana Taylor May 12, 2011
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Creative marketing can do one of two things for you. Either you can dig yourself into debt and go full force ahead while crossing your fingers, hoping that the return will pay that loan or you can stop worrying and stick to your guns with a low budget. Often times, we have big dreams and [...]

Come Back Baby (Maybe…): How to Deal With Lost Customers

by Steve Wilkinghoff May 11, 2011
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Every business loses customers.  We all like to think we won’t; we all like to think our businesses are amazing enough – and provide enough value – that we won’t lose any customers. But the reality is – EVERY business does. Sometimes it’s our fault – maybe one of our processes or systems didn’t work and [...]

What You Should Never DO or SAY to a Customer

by Ivana Taylor April 10, 2011
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When you first build your business, you vow to treat your customers like gold.  But before you know it, you get busy servicing customers and growing.  Then you start feeling the pressure.  And in this pressure, you start behaving in a way that you would never recognize.  It’s a slippery slope that starts with one [...]

Try These 10 Strategies to Keep a Customer

by Ivana Taylor August 16, 2010

This article appeared on the AMEX Open Forum blog last week.   The idea for the article came out of my realizing that we spend a lot of time looking for creative ways to find and attract new customers, but often ignore doing the same thing with customers we already have.  We often get so [...]

Flip the Funnel Asks WHY We Focus on Prospects and Not on Customers

by Ivana Taylor July 3, 2010

If you’re a reluctant sales rep like me, then you already know how much MORE FUN it is to sell more stuff to existing customers than it is to get out there and find new customers, make nicey-nice, get them to like and trust you, get them to actually consider using your product and finally [...]

Connect with Customers

by Ivana Taylor June 6, 2010

Calling and Connecting with Your Customer – Just Because I’ve been on a soapbox of “loving your customer” for over a decade now.  It got rolls of laughter from the management teams of my manufacturing company employers.  Then somewhere around the late 90′s and the early 2000′s Fast Company wrote an article called “Love is [...]

Finding Your Competitive Advantage #2: Customer Intimacy

by Ivana Taylor August 31, 2009

What if you could increase sales by simply setting yourself apart from the competition with some quantitative, relevent elements that your customer cares about? In this series of posts, we’re taking on the challenge of doing exactly that – step-by-step.  In the first post, we simply got our arms around the fact that a competitive [...]

Find Your Competitive Advantage #1 – The Introduction

by Ivana Taylor August 30, 2009

This week’s book review on Small Business Trends is on “Creating Competitive Advantage” by Jaynie L. Smith.   You can see a summary of the book review as a feature video as well.  It’s one thing to read the book, get the principles and think that it’s a great idea, it’s quite another to sit [...]