sales

How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying

by Adam Blitzer August 17, 2011
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Today’s guest post is by Adam Blitzer, COO and Co-founder of Pardot, a marketing and email automation system.   The key to sales and marketing in a small business is efficiency. Marketing automation technology can help tremendously by eliminating manual effort and nurturing leads. Small companies often have a seat-of-your-pants approach to marketing, simply because they [...]

4 Easy Steps Building a Plan for Marketing Automation

by Ivana Taylor July 25, 2011
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The holy grail of “marketing automation” continues to be the reining “shiny object” within the marketing industry.  First reserved for B2C, then for large enterprise B2B, marketing automation has now expanded into the small business market.  But too often companies think they need marketing automation and implement a full system right off the bat. Before [...]

Sales Management Process: How to Improve Your Sales Team’s Effectiveness in a “Reset” Economy

by Ivana Taylor March 6, 2011
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Nothing happens until a sale is made. Danita Bye, our guest expert, gives us a checklist of attributes to consider when creating and building your sales team.

Competitive Analysis: How to Keep That New Customer Yours Forever

by Ivana Taylor August 27, 2010

While it’s always great to grow the size of the pie with new customers buying new products — competitive selling something we all have to do.  If you’ve decided to dominate a specific market niche and the top customers within that niche are buying from someone else — you’re in a competitive selling situation. I received this [...]

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 [...]

Small Business Tips on Emotionally Connecting with Customers Part 1

by Ivana Taylor May 18, 2009

I just ran across an article that outlined the recent results of some studies that again show that more than 85% of our decision-making is EMOTIONAL and not rational. We’ve all known this to be true on a very basic level, but for whatever reason, we still cling to this notion that we need logical [...]

Selling to Small Business Blog is a Great Resource for DIY Marketing

by Ivana Taylor February 7, 2009

One of the things you can expect from DIYMarketers are periodic reviews of tools and resources that you’ll find helpful in selling to small businesses. We all have a long list of blogs and articles we read every day – but I have to strongly recommend “Selling to Small Business.”  If you’re already an avid [...]