Relationship versus transactional

I heard a great discussion on the Rob Black radio show yesterday about relational versus transactional businesses. The gist of if was this. Know which one your business is and operate things accordingly. How do you know which one you are? Here are some guidelines:
Relational
You rely heavily on word of mouth business.
You see your customers [...]

How NOT to use Facebook

As a habit, I follow closely what my companies competitors do…press releases, articles, service offerings, etc. And now with Facebook its as easy as becoming a fan of all my competitors to follow exactly what they are up to.
One of the companies I follow is Adecco. Great company, tremendous amount of success. No one can [...]

You are not in the service business

You are not in the service business, you are in the relationship business. And when you think about it this way you act differently. Here are some examples:

If you are in the Service Business you might ask “How can I help you?”, if you are in the Relationship Business you might ask, “How are you [...]

I lied

A while back I wrote a post titled “Never offer a discount.” I even wrote a second post on the subject of offering discounts which you can read here. Both posts discuss the reasons that you should never offer a discount. In a nutshell, you should provide value and keep your prices firm. Don’t cheapen [...]

So you’re a service company and service is not your priority?

The management team at my company recently sat through a presentation done by Staffing Industry Analysts. They are an organization that tracks all sorts of trends within the world of staffing. It can be a little dry for those of you that don’t like numbers, charts and graphs. Their presentations don’t usually provide anything too [...]

Its not the size of the logo that counts

The title of this post really says it all. Don’t make your logo too big. I see it over and over, almost like a company feels that it won’t get noticed if their logo is too small.
The companies that pay boatloads of money to manage their brand and logo don’t use large logos, so why [...]

Have to vs. get to

If you are not telling everybody about your service, then its probably not that great. You recommend movies, restaurants, and TV shows to others without hesitation. That’s because you have an emotional attachment to them. They brought some joy to your life and you want to share that with others. But do you have the [...]

Whatever you blog about, don’t do this

I came across something last week that shock me to some degree. A major, multi-national company had made a post to their blog that basically outlined their services. It was like reading a company brochure. It was painful to read. I almost commented on the post but realized my sanity would be better served if [...]

Who needs collateral material?

The topic of collateral material comes up often at my company. Its one of those things that everyone has an opinion on, and every opinion seems to be a little different. From copy to color to images to layout, everyone seems to love offering their opinions on how a brochure should look. But is collatreral [...]

The road less traveled

As I was sorting through my feeds over New Year’s looking for something that seemed interesting, I came across a post on GigaOM. Its titled With 2008, Let’s Say Good-bye to Mediocrity. My first thought was that it is truly sad that we even have to be saying this, and I think Mr. Om is [...]