Long Live the Experts

Long Live the Experts

If you’ve been keeping up with the experts (ahem), you’re like to have noticed many of them writing obituaries for branding (case in point). There’s a short list of reasons for which people write such things: They want to be controversial, in which...
Sales vs. Marketing

Sales vs. Marketing

If you want to make yourself instantly unpopular, say this in a sales meeting: “Marketing is not a sales-support function. Sales is a marketing-fulfillment function.” But make sure the door is unlocked, the hallways are clear, and the elevator is held...
Cool Stuff

Cool Stuff

We recently conducted a survey of 1,500 companies from the Fortune 1000 to determine what those companies would like their new websites to feature if they could have new websites just by snapping their fingers. These are the top five responses: Cool stuff More stuff...

Lightning Rod

We once consulted with a company that had developed a new software application for revenue-cycle management. Their initial target market was large hospitals and medical centers. Justifiably jazzed, the company got its sales team revved up. It hired a telemarketing...
The Science of Best Practices

The Science of Best Practices

Though we’ve written about best practices before, we still hear references to them and read articles about them with disarming frequency. That frequency is disarming because it reflects stasis — a kind of settling for inactivity or unimaginativeness, rather than...