December 19th, 2008 by Brian Cors
Everybody has a different approach to keeping track of all of the tasks that they need to accomplish, projects they need to manage and people with whom they need to follow up.
In the old days, the only choices available to us were paper-based. The best systems out there were from Day-Timers and Franklin-Covey, and they helped you to organize yourself by encouraging you to group items into different categories that were separated out into different pages. They worked well, but the planners themselves were somewhat bulky and it was a laborious process to carry forward and reorganize your tasks as you went along.
Today, we have numerous options to electronically manage our tasks. Yet very few people systematically use electronic task management tools. The most widely-used tool is Outlook, which enables you to add tasks to its task management database, then filter and sort those tasks by due date, category (if you assign one) or other criteria. To me, this approach quickly becomes overwhelming as the tasks begin to mount, and re-prioritizing and re-dating the tasks within Outlook is a time-consuming process.
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December 6th, 2008 by Brian Cors
MarketingSherpa has released a report entitled “Top 10 B-to-B Lead Generation Marketing Mistakes.” This top-10 list is very different from the first one that MarketingSherpa published a couple of years ago. In this day and age of electronic marketing where technology is changing rapidly, that’s not surprising. The game is always changing, and it’s a constant struggle to keep up.
Here is their list:
- Mistake #1: Calling a monthly email newsletter a “nurturing program”
- Mistake #2: Telephoning leads to qualify them…days later
- Mistake #3: Big booths at the big national shows (year after year)
- Mistake #4: Using a free trial or free demo as your mainstay offer
- Mistake #5: Focus on “we, us, our”
- Mistake #6: Stock photos and hard-to-read type
- Mistake #7: Referrals not working
- Mistake #8: Lack of investment in PR
- Mistake #9: Blocking search engine spiders from your best content
- Mistake #10: Time-consuming registration forms
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November 23rd, 2008 by Brian Cors
As they say, variety is the spice of life. When interacting with your target market, variety in the methods and means of communicating with customers and prospects is the spice of successful marketing and, in the end, a catalyst for improving top-line revenues.
This mind map depicts a simplified multi-dimensional approach to communicating and interacting with customers and prospects. This approach uses a variety of methods and media to communicate with a targeted audience, while also providing that audience with a variety of valuable information designed to educate that audience with regard to how you can address their current and future needs.
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November 10th, 2008 by Brian Cors
The cost of cyber-threats such as viruses, spyware and phishing schemes is truly staggering. The Consumer Reports National Research Center estimates that 1 in 4 people have encountered a major virus attack, resulting in an average cost of $109 per incident and a nationwide cost of $5.2 billion in total damage. Spam, spyware ($2.6 billion in estimated damage) and phishing schemes ($630 million in estimated damage) have also caused tremendous financial and productivity losses.
There are a variety of measures that everyone should take to protect themselves from cyber-attacks…
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October 28th, 2008 by Brian Cors
A few weeks ago, Jeffrey Zaslow published an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal that discussed two ways that people handle their email inboxes. There are the hoarders – those who keep every email that they’ve ever been sent – and the deleters, who religiously clean out their email inboxes and delete as many emails as they possibly can (then go back to the hoarders if they need to reference an email from the past).
Jeffrey’s original article hypothesized that your email inbox strategy reflects who you are and how you handle the rest of your life. He surmises that if you’re a hoarder, then probably you’re a hoarder and untidy in other parts of your life.
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October 15th, 2008 by Brian Cors
Do your sales and marketing teams get along with each other, or are they often at odds?
In a recent Harvard Business Review article entitled “Ending the War between Sales & Marketing,” authors Philip Kotler, Neil Rackham and Suj Krishnaswamy argue that in many companies, the sales and marketing organizations don’t get along because of economic (since they’re competing for limited financial resources) and cultural (because sales and marketing people have different skill-sets and areas of focus) differences. They suggest solutions to improve the relationship between sales and marketing and, more importantly, to improve a company’s bottom line. Read the rest of this entry »
October 2nd, 2008 by Brian Cors
For the past few months, I’ve been looking for a web-based calendar-sharing service that makes it easier to coordinate schedules with others. I also needed this service to be able to synchronize with Microsoft Outlook and my Palm Treo.
After months of searching, I’ve finally found a service called AirSet (www.airset.com) that meets these needs and works great. It’s also free (AirSet makes their money by extending the AirSet functionality to cell phones).
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September 19th, 2008 by Brian Cors
About a year ago, I purchased a Palm Treo 650 with the hope that the device would not only combine my cell phone, calendar, contact list and email inbox into a single device, but that it would allow these elements to interact in ways not possible with separate devices.
I haven’t been disappointed.
In particular, I like the way I can search through my entire list of contacts to find and dial the person I’d like to call. I also like the way that the Treo uses the phone number of an incoming call to look up and display the name of the contact who is calling, enabling me to decide which calls to answer and which calls to send to voicemail.
The Treo 650 uses the Palm operating system. Relative to what I’ve seen and read about with regard to Windows-based Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), the Palm operating system is much simpler to use and requires fewer stylus taps to accomplish the same tasks.
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September 6th, 2008 by Brian Cors
As I stood in a very long line on a recent Saturday at CostCo to return a faulty monitor that I had purchased there, I thought to myself: what a waste of time. I had picked the busiest day of the week to visit CostCo and, as a result, I was spending a significant amount of time simply waiting.
Obviously, I was not optimizing my time and my day.
Fast forward to a few days later. It’s mid-afternoon – the time of day when I’m least effective with sit-still “thinking” activities – and I’m trying to write an article for The Productivity Edge, but my mind keeps drifting and I can’t seem to produce meaningful prose with any efficiency. It’s taking me twice as long as it normally does to write the article.
Once again, I was not making the most effective and efficient use of my time.
Sound familiar? Without proper planning and discipline, it’s easy to fall into traps whereby you are not fully optimizing your time, talents and energy. The pressure in today’s society to do it now, have it now and have it all exacerbates the situation. By planning ahead and rationing our impulsive urges, we are better able to optimize our limited time and energy on a daily basis.
Here are some suggestions to help you optimize your time and energy…
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August 24th, 2008 by Brian Cors
So you’ve decided that your company needs to take the plunge and invest in a CRM (customer relationship management) application that enables you to share and centrally manage all customer-related information. Now the question is: do you invest in a CRM solution that is installed on one of your servers, or a solution that is hosted on a CRM vendor’s servers and accessed by your users via their web browsers?
If you desire to get up and running quickly, nothing beats the hosted solution. There are numerous benefits that the hosted solution provides:
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Everybody has a different approach to keeping track of all of the tasks that they need to accomplish, projects they need to manage and people with whom they need to follow up.
