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Sales & Marketing Management Magazine

The Customer Database: A Compass for New Clients and Markets
If you're committed to finding new customers or markets, or expanding your market share, then a well-designed customer database is an absolute necessity.

Making a Good Second Impression
It's all about what customers expect from a product to begin with, and helping customers understand how a product can help them, requires that salespeople help set those expectations.

Are You and Your Marketing Agency on the Same Page?
As the U.S. and world economies bump along the bottom, customers repeatedly ask their marketing agencies to do more with less. Here are seven tips to ensure you're getting the biggest return on your own marketing investment.

Communicating Your Value in a Tough Economy
In the lifecycle of a client engagement, there are multiple opportunities to communicate your value to a client. In fact, before you've even started to engage with executives in the client organization, you should start thinking about the value of your solution.

Case Study: Cydcor's Outsourced Sales Solution
One of the oldest methods for achieving sales growth is still one of the most effective parts of the marketing mix today: face-to-face sales. Many businesses, however, lack the staff and resources to deploy targeted face-to-face sales campaigns across geographies. Enter Cydcor.

12 E-mail Marketing Tips for Valentine's Day
Valentine's Day is rapidly approaching, and whether you personally view it as the most romantic day of the year or an annual ordeal splashed with tacky red and pink decor, there's no question it can have a positive effect on many small businesses.

COLUMNS

Smart Marketing: Closing the Marketplace to Open Opportunity
To dramatically increase your marketing results and ROI, I'd suggest a change of scenery. My recommendation: Move from an open market to a closed market, especially with your best customers. The climate is very different.

The Sales Clinic: Learning from 2009's Sales Mistakes
2009 had some interesting lessons to impart in terms of sales and sales tactics—things we should all learn from whether we're a salesperson, sales manager, director, or business owner.

Incentive Insights: How "Balanced" Is Your Sales Incentive Plan?
Many companies have inserted "balanced selling" mechanisms into their sales incentive plan, with the intent of encouraging their sales forces to sell multiple products—and penalizing them if they don't. Yet these same companies eventually scrap the balanced selling incentive because it doesn't work, is overly complicated, or in some cases, actually reduces sales.

Guest Column: How to Access Executives in Tough Times
Many executives are willing to meet with a salesperson recommended by someone internally, indicating that establishing relationships at lower levels of the organization is critical before trying to access a senior executive's calendar.

NEWS & STRATEGY

OneSource Launches LiveContent Platform
OneSource has announced the launch of its LiveContent platform, an offering that combines traditional compiled data, editorial content, Web mining, and social media into a unified information service.

Webtrends Selects Eloqua Platform
Eloqua, developer of the eponymous marketing automation platform, has been selected by enterprise customer intelligence company Webtrends as its marketing automation solutions provider.

Epsilon Partnering with Kraft Foods
Marketing services firm Epsilon has announced it is developing a direct-to-consumer marketing solution for Kraft Foods, including database and data management, consumer data integration, permission-based e-mail marketing services, multi-channel campaign management, and interactive Web services.

TeamSupport.com Offering Live Chat
TeamSupport.com, a provider of SaaS-based customer service and help desk tools, has released a Live Chat enhancement to its flagship customer support application.

EVENTS & PRODUCTS

Free, On-demand Webinar on Outsourcing Ad Sales
Nielsen Business Media, SMM's parent company, is currently still hosting a free Webinar titled "Boosting Media Profits Through Advertising Sales Outsourcing."