The Shortest Path to Higher Revenue

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The fastest way to find out what your next customer wants to buy, and how they want to buy it, is to ask your previous customers what they were looking for and how they went about buying it from you. In other words, if you want to increase your revenue, reverse-engineer your successful sales.

The information you gather, and the customer-driven actions you take afterwards, will start you on a fast track to higher revenue. Everything your company does – from product development to after-sale support – will be more attractive to customers and generate the kind of revenue momentum that makes it fun to come to work every day.

Taking this approach eliminates the chronic problems that plague marketing and selling efforts, including:

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About the Author

Kristin Zhivago is a Revenue Coach to companies of all sizes. She helps CEOs and entrepreneurs increase their revenue, by understanding what their customers really want to buy from them and how they want to buy it. Clients have included IBM, Johnson & Johnson, Dow Jones, Bazaarvoice, and hundreds of other companies. Kristin also speaks worldwide on the subject of increasing revenue, marketing, sales, and social media. To read Kristin Zhivago’s complete biography, click here.

Are You Ready to Declare War?

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There are millions of companies in the world.

Most fail far short of the owners’ ambitions. You would think they fail or frustrate for millions of reasons.

But there are really only four.

How can that be? Only four? Yes and I will explain.

Let me start with the first:

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About the Author

Mark Stevens is the author of Your Company Sucks: It’s Time to Declare War on Yourself (BenBella Books, August 2011) and CEO of MSCO, a results-driven management and marketing firm, and a popular media commentator on business matters, including marketing, branding, management and sales. To read Mark Stevens’ full biography, click here.

How to Speak American: Building Brands in the New Heartland

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“I think the Heartland is a nice place to raise children. People are nice, but they’re dumb, overweight and gullible. They wear tacky clothing and jewelry. They’re racist, unworldly and dumb.”

Marketing executive in New York City

If you are reading this column, you most likely play a role in building brands. You may even share the views of the marketing executive that I quoted above. If either is true, you need to take a deeper look into this massive segment of America.

From what I’ve seen, many marketers don’t understand the New Heartland. At all. They have wasted time and resources, and the results delivered, no matter how strong, are only a fraction of what they could have been. The Heartland consumer is a unique segment that is ever evolving and requires constant attention for brands to remain relevant.

This segment is underestimated, underserved and misunderstood, and that presents a huge opportunity for brands who become Heartland savvy. It is my mission to make sure that your brand will be among them.

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About the Author

A brand strategist for more than 20 years, Paul Jankowski has created and executed consumer promotions for some of the world’s largest and most successful companies, including Pepsi, Ford, FedEx, and Beyonce. His experiences targeting the “typical American consumer” on the East and West Coasts coupled with several long drives within America’s interior in his Ford F150 provided fertile ground for his study of an often-overlooked segment of the population, what Paul calls “America’s New Heartland.” As Author of How to Speak American: Building Brands in the New Heartland, Paul shares his groundbreaking insights and has emerged as one of the most respected voices in marketing today. To read Paul Jankowski’s full biography, click here.

Forget Brand Preference – Win the Brand Relevance War

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There are two ways to compete in existing markets – gaining brand preference and making competitors irrelevant.

Brand Relevance

The first and most commonly used route to winning customers and sales focuses on generating brand preference among the brand choices considered by customers, on beating the competition. Most marketing strategists perceive themselves to be engaged in a brand preference battle. A consumer decides to buy an established product category or subcategory, such as SUVs. Several brands have the visibility and credibility to be considered – perhaps Lexus, BMW, and Cadillac. A brand, perhaps Cadillac, is then selected. Winning involves making sure the customer prefers Cadillac to Lexus and BMW. This means that Cadillac has to be more visible, credible, and attractive in the SUV space than are Lexus and BMW.

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About the Author

David Aaker, author of Brand Relevance: Making Competitors Irrelevant, is Vice-Chairman of Prophet, a marketing consultancy that helps senior executives balance their organization’s short-term business needs against their long-term growth goals, and Professor Emeritus of Marketing Strategy at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. One of the world’s leading experts on branding and the winner of three awards for lifetime contributions to the science of marketing, David has published over 100 articles and fourteen books; including Strategic Market Management that has been translated into eighteen languages. To read David’s complete biography, click here.

Pricing Strategy: Pricking the Veil of Value Exchange

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Our understanding of pricing has come a long way since 1890 when Alfred Marshall published his treatise on the economic scissors of supply and demand. Pricing is no longer a purely economic challenge to be addressed through studies of market elasticity. It can’t be solved by lowering prices until customers’ purchases improve factory utilization rates. And, it can’t be solved by allocating costs and adding markups. Rather, pricing today must be focused on value exchange.

While experts and executives agree that price should reflect value, the pricing to value mantra fails to clarify the decisions executives must make. That is, what is the value that price should reflect? Whose perception of value should determine price? And, how can value be modeled and quantified? In other words, pricing decisions today requires actionable insights.

These insights must derive from a marketing orientation of the firm with a clear economic understanding of value exchange. The marketing orientation focuses the purpose of the firm towards serving customer needs profitably – an orientation supported by the late greats Peter Drucker and Theodore Levitt. The economic understanding of value exchange reminds us that customers will purchase when the product delivers value in excess of its price after adjusting for alternatives, and the firm must deliver products at a price in excess of their cost. These are two very simple concepts.

Combined, the marketing orientation of the firm, and the economic understanding of value exchange, provides the foundation for developing insights required for executive decision making in pricing strategy.

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About the Author

Tim J. Smith is the founder and Managing Principal of Wiglaf Pricing and an Adjunct Professor of marketing and economics at DePaul University. Well-known in the industry as a thought leader in pricing, Dr. Smith has presented seminars on pricing to professional audiences around the globe. With hard-hitting, focused messages for executives, Tim encourages actions that lead to dynamic results. To read Tim’s complete biography, click here.