Win new customers—and keep them coming back Whether you run a billion-dollar company or a mom-and-pop small business, you have to know your customers and know what they want. Written by three marketing experts, Tips & Traps for Marketing Your Business is filled with marketing best practices that show you how to win over new customers and make existing customers more profitable. You’ll also find practical and proven marketing tips and traps to help you grow your business, lessons learned from realworld experience, and tangible examples from the leading companies in business today. Connect with your target market Unlock hidden streams of profit and increase sales Develop and deliver a compelling story for your brand Effectively and profitably manage customer relationships Determine how much media weight is enough and how to avoid spending too much Attract customers to your Web site

“My favorite book of the year.”—Doug McMillon, CEO, Wal-Mart Stores Harvard Business School Professor of Strategy Bharat Anand presents an incisive new approach to digital transformation that favors fostering connectivity over focusing exclusively on content. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY BLOOMBERG Companies everywhere face two major challenges today: getting noticed and getting paid. To confront these obstacles, Bharat Anand examines a range of businesses around the world, from The New York Times to The Economist, from Chinese Internet giant Tencent to Scandinavian digital trailblazer Schibsted, and from talent management to the future of education. Drawing on these stories and on the latest research in economics, strategy, and marketing, this refreshingly engaging book reveals important lessons, smashes celebrated myths, and reorients strategy. Success for flourishing companies comes not from making the best content but from recognizing how content enables customers’ connectivity; it comes not from protecting the value of content at all costs but from unearthing related opportunities close by; and it comes not from mimicking competitors’ best practices but from seeing choices as part of a connected whole. Digital change means that everyone today can reach and interact with others directly: We are all in the content business. But that comes with risks that Bharat Anand teaches us how to recognize and navigate. Filled with conversations with key players and in-depth dispatches from the front lines of digital change, The Content Trap is an essential new playbook for navigating the turbulent waters in which we find ourselves. Praise for The Content Trap “A masterful and thought-provoking book that has reshaped my understanding of content in the digital landscape.”—Ariel Emanuel, co-CEO, WME | IMG “The Content Trap is a book filled with stories of businesses, from music companies to magazine publishers, that missed connections and could never escape the narrow views that had brought them past success. But it is also filled with stories of those who made strategic choices to strengthen the links between content and returns in their new master plans. . . . The book is a call to clear thinking and reassessing why things are the way they are.”—The Wall Street Journal

Most salespeople lose the deal before they ever get started! It isn't uncommon for the customer to have already made a decision before most salespeople even learn of the opportunity. Most salespeople have to beat the preferred competitor by a significant margin just to be considered equivalent. Don't you wish that you could be the preferred vendor in all of your opportunities? Selling is a difficult career in which to make a living; it is not uncommon to have the commission check denied before the salesperson even gets a chance to win. Analysis of thousands of sales situations has made it phenomenally obvious that most salespeople begin their sales campaign so late in the decision-making process that they are virtually guaranteed to lose the order. To make matters worse, when they do start the campaign early enough, most salespeople do not know how to control the prospect adequately so that they can guarantee their victory. Typical turnover for a sales department is 10-20%. Many companies see turnover that approaches 40-60%! This turnover costs them 50% of their revenue-generating capability. In any organization that exceeds 25% turnover, the loss of trust with the customer can be astounding as the new salesperson tries to rebuild the entire relationship. In any given quarter dozens or hundreds of companies do not make their forecasted numbers and are dramatically punished by Wall Street. This book will provide the management of a company with a framework to teach their salespeople how to attain their quotas with higher profits. It will also allow salespeople to rise to the top of their organization and be the super-achievers who win awards, trips, bonuses, and respect. In this book, I will show you how to eliminate your competition and maximize your commission.

Explains what business plans are and why they are important, provides information and advice on the process of researching and writing an effective business plan, and includes worksheets, forms, charts, and resources.

Big things can develop from the smallest seeds. Like giant Redwoods, your association can benefit from the powerful ideas in this book. Most Associations are trying to fill the need of their members. In most cases, those association members want some sort of increase in their business through better marketing, increased sales, or improved leadership. However, the association itself is ALSO looking for these same things. In Growing Your Organization, you will find real world examples of ways to get the increases in revenue, members, retention, and improved volunteerism. Using the methods of today's giant successful corporation, and throwing in proven low cost, highly effective practices of associations across the country, we have created this workbook for you. This workbook will help you: - Make your marketing messages connect with potential new members! - Give you low cost/no cost ways to drive membership and revenues. - Share tools to increase Board participation, and increase event attendance. - Improve word of mouth buzz for your association. - Make growing your association fun.

To stay competitive in today’s market, organizations need to adopt a culture of customer-centric practices that focus on outcomes rather than outputs. Companies that live and die by outputs often fall into the "build trap," cranking out features to meet their schedule rather than the customer’s needs. In this book, Melissa Perri explains how laying the foundation for great product management can help companies solve real customer problems while achieving business goals. By understanding how to communicate and collaborate within a company structure, you can create a product culture that benefits both the business and the customer. You’ll learn product management principles that can be applied to any organization, big or small. In five parts, this book explores: Why organizations ship features rather than cultivate the value those features represent How to set up a product organization that scales How product strategy connects a company’s vision and economic outcomes back to the product activities How to identify and pursue the right opportunities for producing value through an iterative product framework How to build a culture focused on successful outcomes over outputs

Explains how companies must pinpoint business strategies to a few critically important choices, identifying common blunders while outlining simple exercises and questions that can guide day-to-day and long-term decisions.