by Richard Fouts | October 7, 2011 | 4 Comments
When I was a little kid, my dad brought home a computer. We couldn’t wait to see it work … wow, a computer in our house! It was unimaginable. Correction, what was unimaginable was how long it took my dad to get it up and running. Hours of technical manuals, phone calls and unreadable error [...]
Category: Brand awareness Uncategorized Tags:
by Richard Fouts | April 24, 2011 | 2 Comments
Take a look at this list of career opportunities at a major consulting firm: Our organization is looking for experienced professionals in: - Paid Search - SEO/SEM - Marketing Analytics (SAS) - Digital Marketing and Advertising - Digital Brand Strategy & Transformation - Interactive Account Management - Web Analytics - Social Media Implementations - Mobile [...]
Category: Marketing Strategy Marketing communications Strategic Planning Uncategorized Tags:
by Richard Fouts | December 28, 2010 | 4 Comments
Come on admit it, you’ve said this to yourself a million times. But there is a new trend looming that just might offer a cure to ‘death by PowerPoint’. It’s from Japan and it’s called PechaKucha, which literally means ‘chit chat’. The idea behind this technique is simple. You show 20 images for 20 seconds [...]
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by Richard Fouts | August 11, 2010 | 4 Comments
This story truly represents the perfect storm – of the bad experience – where the customer, the employee and the provider — all collided. In this case, both employee and customer were having a bad day – on the same day. The timing was perfect. Both came face-to-face with their own break points – the [...]
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by Richard Fouts | May 27, 2010 | 1 Comment
Why you ask? Well, for starters CA is changing its name to CA Technologies. For those of you that were under a rock last decade, CA’s chairman was given a 12 year prison sentence after giving the green light to overstate the firm’s revenue by $500 million (to pump up the stock price). The firm [...]
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by Richard Fouts | April 2, 2010 | 2 Comments
The Boss would take issue with marketing and communications people that include “exceed customer expectations” in their mission statements (or those lists of core values you see hanging in company cafeterias). Why? “Because I want them to come to my next concert,” he replied when a pesky reporter called him “ungenerous and almost stingy when [...]
Category: Personal selling Public relations Uncategorized Tags:
by Richard Fouts | January 5, 2010 | 5 Comments
The biggest challenge is convincing customers to be references. Customers naturally become concerned about the time required to be a reference (especially if you want them to be available for a telephone conversation with a prospect). Hence, there are two things you can do: 1. Tell customers you put a limit on the number of [...]
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by Richard Fouts | October 19, 2009 | Comments Off
One of my favorite pieces of advice from Guy Kawasaki’s book, Reality Check, is about the value of entertainment. As business leaders, Guy tells us that our number one goal, when presenting, is to entertain. Sure it’s important to inform, and you have to be insightful, but if you bore people to tears, you won’t [...]
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by Richard Fouts | October 5, 2009 | 6 Comments
How many times have you said, “She was born to be a finance manager, or a realtor, or a cab driver … or a competitive analyst?” I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone link DNA to these other professions, but plenty of people still think sales people come from the factory with special “sales genes.” [...]
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by Richard Fouts | June 4, 2009 | 12 Comments
I know, I know; social media is transformational and a game changer, but seriously folks, it’s just another channel. Granted, social networks help you locate many prospects you may never have found with traditional techniques, but consider these two statements, both from marketing executives in tech firms with similar years of experience. 1. Social media is creating [...]
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