Puffery Will Derail Your Brand

Self-Promotional Content Turns Off an Audience

The content that we see and hear about a company and its products and services is often an unproven litany of self-testimonials and competitor comparisons.  Anyone can say "we're the leader in the field ..." or “we deliver the highest customer satisfaction”.  These image positioning statements are separate from actual customer experiences and will disable a branding strategy.

Conversely, character expression builds a strong brand identity that is earned through consistent small steps that produce authentic experiences and valid expectations.

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By John Bernardi

Unique Value Propositions Raise Brands And Proposals To The Next Level

Unique Value Propositions Raise Brands & Proposals To The Next Level

Strong UVPs Guide Buyers Away From Commoditizing Your Business

 

An elevator pitch is your situational sound bite response to someone who asks "what do you do?" Your goal is for them to invite you to discuss what you can do for them.

Without tag lines, puffery or jargon, a Brand UVP introduces a non-price related common ground early in the lead nurturing process. When an important lead becomes "sales-ready", it's time to create the right Proposal UVP.

A strong UVP that is etched into the core of your business will impact everything from back office to front office.

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By John Bernardi

Fearful Of Interviewing Customers After Key Engagements?

Quality Reviews

Identify Gaps After Important Customer Projects

• Customer Experience
• Products and Services
• Attitudes and Behaviors
• Easy To Do Business With
• Customer Facing Processes
• Touch Points
• Channels
• Complementary Partners
• Communications

Prove Total Customer Satisfaction by gaining approval for logical next steps, referrals, new ideas, and customer participation in authoring success stories.

Discover Uncontrollable Business Risks: Competition, technology, economic, social, regulatory.

Interview The Customer, Partners And Team

Your interviewer must be perceptive about things that are difficult or unclear so that you can gain a deep understanding and insight about your business.

Important Vs. Urgent: The CEO's Dilemma

Important Vs. Urgent: The CEO's Dilemma

If you don't complete the urgent stuff, you will fail.

                                    But

If you don't complete the important stuff, you won't thrive.

Importance Vs. Urgency Applies To Marketing

Marketing means finding customers and converting them to raving fans because of their great experience dealing with your people, channels, touch points, and products and services that give them pleasure or eliminate pain.  If you can't do this, you will always be suffering the pain of competing on price.

What Happens When Business Owners Retire?

When Business Owners Retire 

What Enables Them To Sell, Merge Or Transition To A Legacy?

If I were looking for a company to buy or for a merger partner, I'd be searching for one whose core competencies wouldn't walk out the door with its current owner.  Ethics, integrity, design, engineering, production and customer service are baseline essentials, but the company's customer facing competencies must be atop its resume.

As a CEO, are you also responsible for business development and closing key deals?  Unless you can proudly brandish excellence in customer facing competencies as a business differentiator, you will not be optimizing your company's legacy.  This means process competency in marketing, business development, sales and CEM that is supported by the right automation tools and implemented by the right people.

The real value of a business relies on the quality of its customer and product/service portfolio assets. Market penetration, market development and new product/service development competencies will enable you to optimize the ROI of these vital assets.

It's time to make the investment - and this can't be outsourced!

By John Bernardi