Here are some of the dumber things I have heard from people about marketing and sales: I think I’ll place one ad in a trade magazine do you think that will be worth the money? I sent out a hundred sales letters and only received ten responses and five orders. We decided to make this […]
You Have To Love Your Product
You’d better love what you sell. That’s what successful salespeople do. First, a true story about company loyalty…on steroids! My father was a very hard-working Coca Cola salesman. No matter the weather, rain, or shine, snow, sleet, hail, whatever, he was out there every day driving on the back roads of Maine, delivering his heavy […]
Producing The Greatest Products Possible
Laurene Powell Jobs was once quoted as saying that her husband Steve and legendary Apple designer Jony Ive would spend hours discussing corners, yes that’s right corners. I also read that Apple had an entire Quality department dedicated to boxes including a device that would check how those boxes would open and close. How many […]
Marketing: They Can’t Buy From You If They Don’t Know Who You Are
One Ad is not Marketing Marketing is important. If you want people to know who you are and what you do you have to market your company. Think about it, if people don’t know your name, if they don’t know what you do, if they don’t know how to reach you, how are you going […]
Check Out The Restroom!
There is a huge grocery store in Ohio called Jungle Jim’s International Market. From what I hear this is the best and most interesting grocery store in the world! Yes, you got that right… grocery store. And that store has the best restrooms in the world. They pride themselves on their restrooms and how well […]
Sales People: Get With Social Media
Sorry, but you cannot keep ignoring marketing or even social media Remember when we thought it was funny for one of our fellow sales people to say something like,” no I don’t know how to “twit” or “tweet” or “twitter”, or whatever these kids are doing these days.” Or something like, “What is the point […]
Think Different
Remember when Steve Jobs came back to save Apple from the brink of disaster, and the first thing he did was launch an ad campaign that featured people who changed the world by thinking differently? He featured famous people from Bob Dylan to Albert Einstein to John Lennon and many others all of them bright, […]
Marketing Your Rep Firm
Who are you and what are you doing here? If you want to stand out as a rep company, you have to get your name out there. And that means getting involved in some good old marketing and branding. The good news, is that there are practically no rep companies paying any attention to marketing […]
Marketing Your Contract Manufacturing Company
Does anybody know your name? Unlike PCB shops where there are now less than 200 left in North America, there are well over 1000 contract manufacturers of all shapes and sizes. Everyone knows the big guys from Celestica, to Flextronics, to Sanmina to Plexus all of them doing hundreds of millions to billions of dollars, […]
Contract Manufacturers Need Sales And Marketing Too
Artwork courtesy Bob Tarzwell (gallerydeboer.ca/portfolio/tarzwell-robert/) For many years now, too many that I want to count, I have been a real pain in the neck advocating that all board shops need marketing, they need to advertise, send out newsletters, hire and manage, measure, and motivate sales people, create forecasts, and account plans and pay attention […]