Trade shows are a Mecca for competitive intelligence. Nowhere are there more people who want to share their knowledge and insight with you: industry experts, prospects, competitors, other industry participants such as suppliers and distributors and journalists. This is cooperative intelligence at its finest since everyone is marketing to you whether at formal presentations, exhibitor booths or even informal places like the conference bar or hotel café.
On March 23, I will be giving a 2 hour session entitled, “Improve your ROI: Proven Tools & Techniques for Integrating Sales & Marketing” at the American Marketing Association’s Spring Marketing Workshop which takes place in Denver, Colorado from March 22 – 25 at the Westin Tabor Center www.westintaborcenterdenver.com.
With all the buzz around connecting through social networks, cold calling is often forgotten. While cold calling is a nervy way to conduct research, if you’ve done your homework ahead of time, you can be successful in gathering information quite expeditiously.
When marketing and R&D are truly focused on understanding and acting on customer needs, it makes both of their jobs easier and their results more productive! This is a powerful competitive weapon since this is not the case at many companies. Perhaps R&D can be masters of the art of possibility while Marketing can master the art of the Possible– that is what customers want and are willing to pay for.
I am amazed at how quickly librarians can build off their information expertise and applied it to analytics. Here’s an example of how they dove into win loss analysis. This article discusses an approach to conducting win loss analysis including start-up issues and questions we would pose to customers depending on if we won or lost the sale.
Teach Sales elicitation skills: they don’t get it anywhere else and it will help them close more deals and collect information to help your company develop better products. Some of the best elicitors are more introverted since they are likely to be more thorough in their preparation for elicitation interviews. Introverted people are often better listeners than extroverts, so are often more skilled at getting the other guy to talk!