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Marketing

3 Things to Let Go in 2012

by Chris Arlen

Getting started in a new year can be tough. Maybe you’re like me. In this first week back at work it’s easier thinking about negatives, before moving ahead with positives. Here are [...]

click to continue → January 6, 2012

Give to Get

by Chris Arlen

How do you get customers to listen to you? Give to Get is one marketing strategy to do that. But first, a brief philosophic moment before this post winds up with actions [...]

click to continue → November 23, 2011

The Secret Trigger to Inbound Marketing

by Chris Arlen

Get familiar with the difference between outbound and inbound marketing. You don’t need to become an expert but a little knowledge is needed with tight marketing budgets. While both outbound and inbound [...]

click to continue → May 18, 2011

Outbound & Inbound Marketing

by Chris Arlen

Facility service contractors are not known for their marketing prowess – they’re hyper-selective and cautious at best. But for those who market it may seem as if there’s a war between traditional [...]

click to continue → May 12, 2011

Using Personas for Prospect Profiles

by Chris Arlen

Better than shooting in the dark, prospect profiles (aka targets or ideal customers) make sales and marketing more successful. They screen out the undesirable and demote the mediocre, making efforts more effective, [...]

click to continue → June 3, 2010

Selling in our Millennium

by Chris Arlen

The bathwater. The baby. New is better. Too frequently a “new” sales practice comes out that’s the next answer for every sales woe (and you should buy the book and attend the [...]

click to continue → May 12, 2010

What’s Wrong With You?

by Chris Arlen

I’m recovering from the flu and as you can tell by this post’s title my crankiness hasn’t left. So here are a few gripes about business dealings as seen from the customer’s [...]

click to continue → March 10, 2010

Conversions in Selling Services

by Chris Arlen

Service contractors can should learn a great deal from web marketers. Web marketers are data diligent and process aware. They’re  focused on “conversions” – points in their online process that are measurable, [...]

click to continue → January 7, 2010

Voice of the Customer in the Buying Cycle

by Chris Arlen

Last week’s post, The Greatest Sales Question, drew numerous reader responses. A number of them were around a common sales issue facing service contractors. Why aren’t customers more (open / responsive / [...]

click to continue → December 11, 2009

The Greatest Sales Question

by Chris Arlen

What’s important to you? Or put another way, what is your single most pressing challenge today? That pressing challenge is the one keeping you from getting or enjoying what’s important to you. [...]

click to continue → December 3, 2009

Do the Right Thing: Market or Sell

by Chris Arlen

They’re different; marketing and selling. However, they seem to get mixed up in the minds of many who’s job it is to bring in new business. You can see it in proposal [...]

click to continue → November 25, 2009

Crossing the Line

by Chris Arlen

When internal sales talk crosses the line to become outside customer conversation, your perspective and word-choice can leave you fully exposed and vulnerable. The words used in customer conversations are a dead [...]

click to continue → November 5, 2009

Buying and Selling Yorwin

by Chris Arlen

The following story is fictitious, but you’d have guessed that anyway. The marketing and selling lessons in it are true AND absolutely essential to marketing and selling anything, but even more true [...]

click to continue → July 9, 2009

Clarifying Purpose

by Chris Arlen

Mea culpa. After writing Process at the Expense of Purpose I realized I was guilty of working a process without defining it’s purpose. My error was not defining the purpose of this [...]

click to continue → May 7, 2009

Connecting the (web) Dots

by Chris Arlen

The multitude of social media is overwhelming. And trying to find their use in business to business (B2B) is even more confusing. For example, what’s all the hoopla about Twitter? (14 million [...]

click to continue → May 3, 2009

Competing against Lies

by Chris Arlen

No, it’s not fair. From time to time we’ll compete against another person for a job or promotion, or another company for a sale and feel they’re making false claims that will [...]

click to continue → April 23, 2009

The Attention Menu

by Chris Arlen

Seth Godin has a way of describing the unseen so that we say “Oh yeah, now I get it”. But not for me this time. In his post “Blogs, books and the [...]

click to continue → April 17, 2009

Tricked out Marketing Technology – But where’s the Message?

by Chris Arlen

Unfathomable sums of money are spent on sexy new technologies for sending out marketing messages. All this cool new technology can put a fine point on what’s missing in action. And what’s [...]

click to continue → April 8, 2009

$10 Billion for a Worthwhile Bank

by Chris Arlen

There are two things that raise my skepticism meter: #1 Politicians. #2 The word Green. I believe politicians’ motives should always be questioned. It’s a good idea to suspect the first 100 [...]

click to continue → March 27, 2009

Interconnected

by Chris Arlen

The world, our world, evolved a while ago into one world. It’d been happening for decades, helped by technology that enabled information to pass instantly from one side of the planet to [...]

click to continue → December 15, 2008

The Secret to Getting is…

by Chris Arlen

…giving first. Don’t think December and the holidays have overrun the desire for profit. But there’s a phenomenon in business about getting after giving. I’m trying to figure it out, beyond altruism [...]

click to continue → December 8, 2008

Aren’t We There Yet?

by Chris Arlen

The Green movement is no longer new. Almost everyone has heard about it, yet not everyone would be considered green. Knowing and doing are quite separate matters. I wrote the following article,  [...]

click to continue → December 4, 2008

Software is NOT a Service – It’s a Tool

by Chris Arlen

A client of mine recently signed up for Salesforce.com. Actually, a number of clients are using it already, or are considering it. Salesforce.com is a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution. It calls [...]

click to continue → November 11, 2008

“How” as Important as “What”

by Chris Arlen

This past week several senior level clients, in different organizations, shared their frustrations about their inability to get initiatives launched. The executives above them didn’t buy off on them. And these  were [...]

click to continue → October 15, 2008

More Recession Fallout

by Chris Arlen

“Restaurant Chains Close as Diners Reduce Spending” describes more downstream parts of the US economy adjusting to the recession. And that matters if all your business “eggs” are in one basket. If [...]

click to continue → July 30, 2008

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