Sales advice

Beware the conventional wisdom.

The Courting Phase of Customer Relationship Management

There is a lot of advice out there about how to run your business, and some of it is actually pretty good. However, in a competitive marketplace you can't let slavish obedience to commonplace wisdom turn you into a clone of the shop next door.

An evangelist is someone that will go out and sing your product/service’s praises to anyone that will listen. There is no more credible referral for a new customer than a narrative of sincere satisfaction from someone they know.

(And No, It's Not Your Weekly Meeting)

Context controls how consumers perceive your product and its value.

Ideas For Motivating Your Small Business's Employees

If you're trying to get information on a potential customer, there's no better place to go than their competition. You'll find plenty of information, and gain some exposure in the meantime.

There's something which your five best customers can tell you, and it's something which you're not going to hear anywhere else.

Your customers are already your loudest and most effective advertisers, for better or for worse. If you can learn to utilize their position as potential advocates, you may find that they hold a world of new prospects.

Getting discouraged by prospects turning you down, saying it isn't the right time? A simple follow-up can change the whole future of those leads, so don't miss out on them!

There can be a huge advantage from separating yourself from the pack. Salesmen are often viewed in a negative light, so we have some advice on how to make yourself stand out, avoid that classification, and increase your sales

The term "pipeline" gets thrown around every day, but you might now know quite what it means. We're here to explain how it works, why it's important, and how to design yours.

Every step of the pipeline is important, but shaping your customers' impressions after the sale is the most important, and we're going to explain why.

Forget the old motto “100 calls before lunch, 100 calls after lunch."

It's time to close that sale!

Choosing your name is one of the first steps. It's also one of the most important. Don't rush through it.

In this blog post I'm going to go over my findings. I'll tell you what worked, what didn't work, and I'll even give some real numbers which seem to be almost impossible to find anywhere else online.

When designing and optimizing just about any website, the conversion rate is one of the most important statistics to focus on

My last post discussed what it means to be a lean startup. In it, I suggested that lean startups need to "release early and release often."

I just read this post on Lifehacker (and watched the accompanying video which I embedded above) and I'm feeling very liberated from normal grammatical constraints.

If you work at a software company, then you know how hard it is to avoid feature bloat. You obviously want to listen to feedback from your users, but if you implement every feature requested, your software will end up complicated and uninspired.

As you may have heard, Google is giving up on Google Wave. Wave was a new communication and collaboration tool that was meant to reinvent email.

Shouldn't we make it as easy as possible for our customers to get ahold of us?

Earlier today, I received an email from a friend of mine asking for a copy of my PhD thesis proposal to use as a guide while he writes his own.