Competitive research is important, but it can be hard to find time to do it. Trusting someone else to summarize for you can leave important holes in your understanding of competitors’ strategies and processes. I want to make sure I’m clear about who I am and where I fit into the marketplace, as well as…
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Most salespeople are extremely agile. Extremely agile. Salespeople want to say “yes” to anything. Agility is critical to success in sales. A great process is critical, too, but being flexible to meet each customer’s needs is equally critical. Agility often breaks down once you get past sales. Operation teams often are far less agile by…
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Though I already have provided my opinion of the best NBA giveaways, the experts at ESPN ranked the top five NBA giveaways this season. There certainly are some creative promotions, and even with the ones I thought I had seen before, I noticed cool, new features that I wouldn’t have thought of. ESPN gave the…
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Timothy James Richardson, my uncle, passed away on Sept. 9, 2016 following a long, 15-month battle with cancer. He was 63 years old. My grandparents raised me, and when I was 16, my uncle came to live with us. Until then, I knew him as Uncle Timmy the doctor—kind of stiff, kind of stern. Over…
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Instead of a question today, I’m going to pass along a tip from a client. I’m always interested in new ideas to simplify the accounting, bookkeeping and order management systems for ad specialty distributors. And recently, my client, Bruce Cunningham of Great Ideas in Santa Fe, N.M., shared an idea that reduces paper usage and…
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With the final presidential debate between candidates Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton taking place tonight, I started thinking about the most important aspect of the election: the promotional products. At least for me, I much prefer perusing political merchandise than listening to political propaganda. The best part about this election is that supporters have taken…
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Be bad at something, perhaps a few things. Consider being downright awful at one thing. Why be bad at something? Simply put: So you can be great at the things that matter. Consider Amazon. It isn’t great at “in-person” customer service, even though it is great at customer service. In fact, it offers some of the…
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In my last article, I discussed the No. 1 reason why most people in our industry aren’t rich. In that article, I stated that there is no good reason for people in our industry to make less than $500,000 per year income unless they choose not to. To some, that may sound like a lofty,…
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As I look at Center City Philadelphia from my office window, it is clear something big is happening: Cranes are at work, hoisting materials to new high-rise buildings. From high-value commercial properties, mixed-use developments and hospitals to multi-family housing and luxury condominiums, there is more building and revitalizing going on in this city than in…
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Question: What do you know about buying groups? Answer: There are variations of buying groups in our industry—from a couple of distributors banding together loosely to companies that offer other services and approaches. To answer this question fully, I went to Jamie Coggeshall, president of AIMastermind (AIM), a group that purely is a buying group.…
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