Seven Steps to Shorten Your Sales Cycle
Thu, Apr 11, 2024 | Posted by Bob Sherlock
Does your company provide customers with expensive business inputs?
Or are you crucial in other ways to your customers’ business success?
Does your company provide customers with expensive business inputs?
Or are you crucial in other ways to your customers’ business success?
Thu, Jan 11, 2024 — Second in a 3-part series Reflecting on Business Self-Improvement It’s a common question people are asking themselves in January: What’s the self-work I need to do this year to make myself healthier, happier, more financially secure.... But as a CEO obliged to your board, employees, and stakeholders, are you asking the same questions of your business?
Mon, Jan 8, 2024 — First in a 3-part series Reflecting on the Past and Setting the Stage for the Future It’s January. You’ve probably thought about New Year’s resolutions, even if only to decide firmly against them. January also is when my husband and I mark our birthdays. So, while we aren’t the formal resolution types, we are especially prone to take this time to think about the year behind, the year ahead, and where we want to be in the future.
Mon, Jul 31, 2023 — Your company’s brand equals your market position and value proposition. It’s your entire strategy in a single package that is as important to your customers as it is to your long-term success.
Fri, Jun 23, 2023 — On June 22, 2023, I read an article in the Wall Street Journal about “the H-bomb,” which I learned refers to mentioning that you are a student at or an alumnus of Harvard University. Harvard College’s dean, in a Crimson (the campus newspaper) article where he was asked to give a word of advice to seniors, decided that the best use of this opportunity was to say “Don’t gratuitously drop the H-bomb.”
Thu, Feb 9, 2023 — Become a big fish in your pond In my previous blog, “What Tech CEOs Get Wrong About Positioning,” we introduced the concept of market positioning – and specifically, how it helps your customers connect the dots between their needs and your product or service. Of all the marketing strategy lessons we at Chief Outsiders share with founders and business leaders like yourself, positioning ranks among the most critical. It truly is a difference-maker for businesses that wish to become the leader of the pack -- to become, in fishing parlance, the big fish in your pond.
Wed, Oct 19, 2022 — Who is the most important brand ambassador at your company? Is it you, the CEO, whose job it is to motivate, inspire, and exude confidence in your company, its products, and its services? How about your business development team, whose sole purpose is to funnel new client lifeblood into your veins and arteries? Or is it the marketers, who toil to define and develop your brand and make it ready for prime time?
Wed, Sep 14, 2022 — For more than 100 years, scientists and philosophers have been asserting that if a tree falls in a forest, and no one is there to hear it, then it does not make a sound. The lesson for marketers is resounding: If your brand is not resonating in its preferred landscape, it is likely that your most desired buyers will never be there to hear what you have to say.
Thu, Jul 28, 2022 — If you are a CEO that is lamenting slowing sales and lagging growth at your company, it’s tempting to place the blame directly at the feet of the sales team – those well-intentioned front-line soldiers who are responsible to turn your solutions into the bucks that feed the company growth. Indeed, most CEO’s I talk to feel this way – when product and market fit is not happening with enough velocity, or visions of declaring leadership in their market are unrealized, the obstacle standing in the way is always sales.
Tue, Sep 7, 2021 — “Hi – I’m Don Lee. I help companies build growth engines.” After reading those first two sentences, are you intrigued? Do you want to know more about me? Do you wonder what a “growth engine” is, and how I help to build them? If so – and I hope you do – you are getting a sense of how powerful a personal brand can be in marketing yourself – not necessarily as a tangible commodity, but an intangible resource that can be of value to you, the customer.