Your customers want to know why you are able to do what you do, how or where your learned to do it, how have your industry and your peers recognized your accomplishments, and other measures of fitness we call “credentials.” Credentials come in a wide variety of forms. There are the basic ones like […]
In my continuing series on differentiating your brand, I’m writing today about references and how you can develop them as a powerful way to stand out from your competitors. I’m not talking about testimonials from happy customers here; I wrote about that idea yesterday. References can be distinctly different from testimonials in positioning your brand […]
Testimonials from customers or supply-chain partners can serve as powerful differentiators. Building your brand on testimonials means you stand out from your competitors in customer loyalty and customer delight. Doing business with you makes people happy, or solves a big problem, or gives them new opportunities–or all of the above and more. And whatever product […]
I’ve been working on a series of blog posts about ways to differentiate from your competitors, focused on 31 ways that you might choose to define brand promise. One way is to highlight your method of getting the results your customers want. I don’t mean process (I’ll talk about that next) but rather the way you […]
Everyone’s heard of a “niche” market as one way to differentiate your company from others. Perhaps you sell business-to-business, and you sell only to schools, or to salespeople, or to entrepreneurs, or to HR Directors, or to manufacturers. Or you sell to consumers, perhaps to men, or to teens, or to lawyers or gardeners.You might […]
What is it that makes your company special? How are you different? Why should a customer buy from you rather than from someone else? Learning to express your distinct value proposition is a key requirement for growing business with bigger customers–especially if you are a small company going after customers that are significantly bigger than […]
Are you one of the executives who still think social media is frivolous, trivial, and unrelated to your business? Think again! In this article, I explain the value of just one of the social media tools to find a personal introduction into a new large account prospect, to locate employees and past employees that you…...
A version of this post was originally published at BlogWorld. Many large companies have rigid policies prohibiting employees from any business-related social media activity. If that’s your practice, I recommend you reconsider. The Whale Hunters help B2B companies accelerate their growth by selling bigger deals to bigger customers. Most of our clients have a complex sale, such […]
I highly recommend Jill Konrath and Ardeth Albee’s new eBook: Cracking the LinkedIn Sales Code. When The Whale Hunters work with our clients, we always encourage the leadership team and subject matter experts to create and/or improve their LinkedIn profile and activities. Few are coming even close to capturing the value in the network. That’s […]
I did an EDGY Perspectives teleconference on this topic, which is essentially an overview of some of the key principles of Whale Hunting. There's also a discussion of how the RFP process fits into your overall whale hunting process. Here's a link to the audio recording. And my thanks to Dan Waldschmidt for featuring me! I am […]
Whenever you hold the position of “the best” for a period of time, you become vulnerable to many kinds of attacks. You can’t afford for your team to become complacent about your #1 position.
Are you developing your products and services in concert with your customers, or are you internally focused?