third-tier suppliers Archives

Give your sales strategy a huge leg up!

Dive deep for more customer insight. The purpose of your business is to create customers. In fact, it is the customer who determines what your business is. Obviously customers are crucially important to sales efforts. But don’t we need to understand more about what makes them tick? Don’t we need to know more about the perceptions that ultimately drive their opinions and decisions? Would it help i...
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Business development requires bravery.

Who’s not afraid to stand up and reach out? It’s tough staying objective. Especially when it comes to your own business. It’s much easier to let the Vision go fuzzy and accept the deceiving, but compelling, comfort of the status quo. This form of comfort is a disease and it is never good for a business that wants to grow. Among many of the problems, comfort sustains an atmosphere that is suffocati...
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Lessons from a successful dictator/CEO.

“If you don’t ask, you’ll never get ” and 39 other tips. There’s one very positive trend in the economy right now. The number of small business bankruptcy filings has been dropping an average of 19 percent* year-over-year since the floor fell out from beneath us in 2008. Sure, there are fewer startups but I have a hunch that we’re getting smarter if not more careful about how we run our industrial...
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3 Elements of strategy you must have to succeed!

If you don’t know where you’re going, any old way will do. If your company is not working on surviving you have to be focused on growing, excelling and achieving goals. That’s a fact. Because, invariably, when we take our eyes off the target we usually miss. In other words, if you don’t get everyone rowing in the same direction, you’ll soon be working survival again before you know it. It can be a...
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7 Lesson package on efficiency and other survival skills.

New source for inspiration and wisdom will surprise you. Survival mode is a familiar place for way too many business managers. It’s not a place you want to visit often or want to be in very long. Once in it though, you want nothing more than to be out of the woods in a hurry. But what if reaction speed just isn’t your strong suit. In this post, I introduce a short new book that focuses squarely on...
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A four-step prescription to help you drive markets

Create impact where it matters most. In my previous post I suggested that in order to gain the greatest insight we must “look broadly outside the industry.” Well here’s an example by way of a comparison of the metals industry to, of all things, the airline industry. I discovered some striking similarities as well as some interesting common ground. The exercise illustrates how, by simply having mor...
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