On Our Bookshelf: The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging

Book: The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging

Author: The Editors of The Huffington Post with an Introduction by Arianna Huffington

Summary: The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging is exactly what it says. In addition to insights and and posts from famous bloggers, the guide provides helpful basics such as a listing and short description of the most popular blogging services and optimizing your blog for search engines. Although the book has a decidedly political and journalistic orientation, it is an excellent place to start for blogging of any kind, and even contains a “Glossary of Blogging Terms” for total newbies.

You’ll love this book if: You are ready to jump in and start writing.

You’ll hate this book if: You allow the guide’s political frame of reference get in the way of its educational content.

Words of Wisdom:

The blogosphere thrives on authenticity. No one really sounds like a law paper, an academic paper, or a PowerPoint presentation. So your blog shouldn’t sound like that either. You want your posts to sound like you at your most witty, entertaining, and relevant. Tape yourself as you critique something you read in the newspaper. If you take out the “ums” and clean up the grammar, a transcription of this tape could be the start of a good blog post. Or don’t clean up the grammar.

Why we think this book is important: Blogging is a touchpoint opportunity that cannot be overlooked. Your organization’s blog is the ideal medium for your organization to have an ongoing authentic conversation with your customers.

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On Our Bookshelf: Discover Your Sales Strengths

Book: Discover Your Sales Strengths: How the World’s Greatest Salespeople Develop Winning Careers

Author: Benson Smith & Tony Rutigliano

Summary: Discover Your Sales Strengths: How the World’s Greatest Salespeople Develop Winning Careers is a wonderfully counterintuitive exploration of developing star salespeople. The book’s premise is the idea that focusing on a person’s strengths will allow them to perform at an exceptional level, while focusing on weaknesses merely produces average results.

You’ll love this book if: You want to try a new strategy for improving your sales results, and the results of your sales team.

You’ll hate this book if: You are steeped in “old school” sales training, such as “working to improve” people’s weaknesses.

Words of Wisdom:

Focusing energy on weaknesses might improve performance somewhat, but – contrary to conventional wisdom – great performance comes from strengths. Knowing your talents, understanding them thoroughly, building them into strengths, and seeing how you can put your strengths to work every day isa key to greatness and, our research would attest, the surer path to success.

Why we think this book is important: Your salespeople are quite possibly your organization’s most important customer touchpoint.

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Want more? Check out the long and winding version of this book review.

Bridging the Strategy Gap: Getting to Execution

I’ve heard executives talk about the importance strategic planning is given within an organization, and I’ve seen much of the impressive output from expensive consultants.

And while it’s easy to bash these 100-plus page PowerPoint “paper bricks” that often end up gathering dust when some other consulting firm produces them, my tune changes pretty quickly when it’s our recommendations sitting neglected on the shelf.

The fact is, great strategy – whether brand, marketing or business management oriented (in our case, often all three) – can only succeed if it’s actually implemented. When something goes wrong or nothing happens, it can leave the organization unchanged or (even worse) only partway through a critical process.

A recent engagement with a growing financial services firm drove this point home … again. Where does it go wrong? While we see our job as the planners and champions of change, it takes internal leadership and motivation to drive it. Great leadership is about implementing change as well as developing the strategies to create change. You can’t have one without the other.

But not all leaders are naturally equipped, or empowered, to deal with the challenges that this role will throw at them. Whatever their “official” role (whether you’re leading from the top or the middle), leaders need to be able to drive strategic change in their organizations, and motivate others to join them.

I’m thinking we need to add a role to our toolbox: just call me Coach!

Listen. Your customers are speaking

You may know it. I certainly know it. But many brand experts don’t know that customers can provide you with a myriad of intriguing insights into building your brand –– and boosting your business. You just have to offer them an open channel of communications.

After all, once you’re privy to what your customers are thinking through ongoing customer research, you can truly enhance their relationship with your brand.

• After inventing the minivan 25 years ago, Chrysler approached IDEO to re-imagine the minivan.
  

  Inspired by multipurpose family rooms, Chrysler’s popular Town and Country minivan features new interior configuration concepts that allow passengers to talk, work, eat or play together in transit, shifting the minivan’s image from a human cargo vehicle to one that enables quality interactions.

  The result? At this week’s 2009 North American Auto Show, a panel of 100 consumer-minded Detroit News reader-judges — rather than industry professionals — selected the 2009 Chrysler Town & Country as the best family vehicle at the 2009 North American International Auto Show.

• General Motors is listening, too. Check out GM’s blog, FastLane:
  

  Amid growing concerns about the economy, our long-term energy security, driving cars that have less of an impact on our planet, and ever-expanding urban congestion, we all seem to be coming to the conclusion that the automobile as we know it — powered by a combustion engine — must eventually go the way of the horse and buggy. It is simply not sustainable.

These are just a few examples of being able to measure relevant customer metrics over the long-term to gain accurate, actionable results. Brand research helps you understand more about your prospects, your customers, your shareholders, and others, so you can step up your sales pitch to the loyal ones and stop wasting your money on those who aren’t as faithful.

With the right tools and the proper step-by-step guides to improve your research practices, you can more easily capture, codify and interpret information to move your marketing strategy forward.

So whether you need to present perceptual brand attributes to a data-oriented board, to make a case to extend a product line, or to justify some long-delayed pricing updates, brand research can serve as the foundation to build your case, get better mileage out of your marketing budget, and enjoy more sales.

What’s the true cost of Customer Lifetime Value?

How often have you heard the phrase Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)? According to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia with over 1.7 million articles, it’s “a metric that projects the value of a customer over the entire history of that customer’s relationship with a company.”

But even if you’re unfamiliar with this phrase, don’t ignore the dynamics of marketing to your base. Politicians do this especially well. But no one does it better than the TV networks.
A few years ago, ABC was in last place among the big three. But now, by giving its base what it wants, Disney’s network has runaway hits like Lost, Desperate Housewives, Dancing With The Stars, Ugly Betty and Grey’s Anatomy.

In fact, many companies totally ignore the impact that loyal customers can have, when the benefits of increasing it are so dramatic:

> A 5% increase in retention can create an 85% increase in profits;

> A 10% increase can translate to a 20% increase in sales;

> Extending customer lifecycles by three years can triple profits per
customer.

As you’ve no doubt heard, it’s difficult to improve what we cannot measure. So it’s even more difficult to accurately project how much you should spend to acquire, service and keep your customers if you actually don’t know their value.

But it’s ALWAYS far less expensive to reach out and market to your current customers than to your prospective customers. That’s why tracking your CLV will help you –– and your organization –– find, keep and profit from the right customers.