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I am giving a talk this afternoon at the Inbound Marketing Summit in Boston and here is the essence of the message I plan to deliver. For the past 10 years or so I've been using this definition of marketing — Marketing is — getting someone who has a need to know, like, and trust you. With each passing year, I've found this non textbook definiti Read More

The Truth About What Motivates Us Dan Pink has a new book coming out at the end of the year — Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us — that may help people rethink the entire notion of the carrot and stick approach to motivating and rewarding employees. Seems that autonomy is a much greater motivator than we understand. Dan will Read More

I know, I know — another goofy made-up word, but hey, it's Friday so outsourcing design to the crowd became croutsourcing. The point is that the web has certainly made it much easier to find great design from around the world and on the flip side created an unlimited market for those wishing to sell their design services. Read More

Mondays are good days to think about change, establish new habits, and embrace chaos. And, all of those things come with successful marketing — it's just part of the deal. You can't not like marketing, not do marketing, or concede you're no good at it — marketing must become a habit you come to love. It's tough to get around to marketing, I get Read More

LinkedIn pushed an upgraded feature through today that makes it a much more powerful small business prospecting and relationship tool in my book. When prospecting on LinkedIn in the past you could type in a keyword or specific company search and locate people you might want to reach out to. For many folks this is the greatest benefit of LinkedI Read More

The latest release of ACT! CRM software (2010) includes a feature that I've been pushing for and am starting to see as standard fare in CRM — the inclusion of a contact's social media activity stream. Now, from inside a contact record you can view that contact's activity on Facebook, LinkedIn, or twitter. Subscribe to RSS for their blog or even cu Read More

mountainsI've added a weekend post routine that I hope you enjoy. Each weekend I write a post that features 3-4 things I read during the week that I found interesting. Generally speaking it won't involve much analysis and may range widely in topic. (Flickr image included here is also fav image of the week) Enjoy! Good stuff I ran across this Read More

Many marketers have been taught the concept of the marketing funnel. The idea being that you bring leads into the top of the large opening in a funnel and push the ones that become customers through the small end. The problem I've always had with that is all the focus is on the chase. I happen to think that real payoff in marketing comes from expa Read More

Google Wants to be the Local Place Google seems to constantly add little tweaks to all of its various products. The Google Maps search product is inching more and more towards the turf currently occupied by the likes of Yelp and CitySearch. Not content to be a directions engine Google has added a feature that's being dubbed Place Pages. Now whe Read More

I have to admit that part of the motivation for the title of this post is to excite the sales oriented folks out there, but no question, the Internet has forever changed the practice of sales. Today's salesperson is often greeted by a sales lead that knows more about the technical or historical aspects of a product, service, or industry than th Read More