Expert Advice

Exhibiting at traditional trade shows is one of the most common marketing tactics used by companies targeting the industrial and manufacturing marketplace. The opportunity for direct engagement with prospects, customers and other vendors who could be potential partners or customers is invaluable. An...

FACT: 80 percent of leads generated by marketing are never contacted by a sales person. What a frightening statistic, and what an enormous waste of time, money and resources. "The problem is not that marketing departments are delivering such high numbers of leads that follow-up is impossible. And ...

Consider the left hand of sales methodology and the right hand of digital strategy. It's 2010 and the two hands still do not know what the other is up to. Even with the most advanced of our clients, the digital strategy is focused on lead generation, awareness and a bevy of other activities aimed at...

I was at a friend's dual celebration of birthday and wedding anniversary recently, and as part of the occasion someone had prepared two fantastic cakes, which were both amazing to behold and a delight to eat. While the appearance was all to do with the icing, the taste and nutrition were defined by ...

No self-respecting professional wants to be known as a paper pusher or bureaucrat, but it can be a hard label for them to avoid when they're managing projects. Projects create paper, or more specifically, they create documents. Whether those documents are paper or electronic, they can take on a life...

Less than 15 years ago, establishing a global presence was a conscious decision that a company made. It usually involved long and complex discussions about offices, physical presence and physical travel. With the advent of the Web, all of that changed in an instant. With the establishment of a websi...

Over my 30-year career as a supply chain business process consultant, I've had the pleasure of working with some of the largest corporations in the world -- so imagine my surprise when many of these companies told me that they were continuing to have problems with their supply chain. Even more surpr...

Its 9:00 a.m. on Monday morning, and Fred from the ABC call center is logging onto the company's metrics portal to find out his first call resolution and average handle time. He also has access to a complete set of other metrics that provide a composite view of his performance over the previous week...

The use of analytics in contact centers enables management to extract critical business intelligence that would otherwise be lost. By analyzing and categorizing recorded conversations between companies and their customers, useful information can be discovered relating to strategy, product, process, ...

Businesses will probably always have customers who want to place their orders by fax. When there are manual tasks involved in processing those orders, they can present a serious problem because companies may fall short in meeting expectations of the customers who place them. There is a fundamental c...

With the advent of technologies enabling buyers with increasing insight into the sellers' products and competitors, the traditional strategies of bringing qualified prospects to a closed deal require a new set of contemporary skills among sales staff. In September of 2009 research for "Sales Trainin...

CRM and marketing systems are all geared toward getting people to buy. After all, the whole point of investing in these tools is to increase top-line revenue. At least, that's the argument we make to our bosses when we seek to implement them. Those tools are getting better all the time, and one area...

The revolutionary changes in the buying process mean that the sales process seems to be shrinking while the marketing cycle is growing. How do we then stay engaged and determine when the time is right to strike? We need to get involved early -- when the buying process begins -- by providing educat...

More than ever before, project managers are looking to technology help mitigate the risk of project failure. According to a recent list of Top 10 Project Management Trends, "the implementation of new PPM solutions [in 2010] will soar. Program and project managers, under pressure from senior manage...

As a marketer, you need a control panel to make decisions. The world is moving faster and faster every day, enabling literally billions of interactions about your company and products around the globe. What you need is real-time intelligence. The term "real-time" used to only apply to Wall Street an...