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5 Great Ideas for CEO’s in a Tough Economy

Guest post by: Jeff Ogden

Article Overview: With the economy continuing to slump, business leaders are looking for fresh ideas to grow revenue. Here the President of Find New Customers shares five fresh ideass.

5 Great Ideas for CEO’s in a Tough Economy

B2B demand generation | Five Tips to Improve Results Here are some tips to crank up business in a tough marketplace.

1) Get out of the office now

• Go talk to customers. Ask deep questions. Listen. Show them you care.
• Go talk to salespeople. What are their biggest concerns? What would they change if they could change only one thing?
• Go talk to staff too. Ask more questions. If they could just do one thing, what would that be?

2) Clone your customers

Johnny Anderson of Bulldog called his program "Two Headed Calf." The idea is to take your best customers, figure out what and why they bought, and recreate it over and over. If it worked in the past, clone it.

3) Re-craft your value proposition

don't care what you call your product or what you say it does. In step one you went out and talked to customers. What do THEY say your product does is what it does.

4) Show some love

Customers want love. Employees want love. When I was VP of Sales and Marketing for a UK based search firm, I was told I have a "very happy" sales team. I left and happiness went out the window. Their number one salesperson left the firm.

5) Marketing please

Go talk to the marketing and sales folks again. What are you doing to drive demand? Do you have email campaigns, webinars, white papers, podcasts, customer testimonials, search optimization, lead nurturing... Is your website optimized for search? Try dialing your own phone system. (I bet you've never done this. You'd be appalled how bad they are.)

6) Go viral

Find influential people and pay attention to them. Make it easy for people to share with friends. Get a bit crazy and hound publicity.

Please vote for Jeff Ogden of Find New Customers for "50 Most Influential People in Sales Lead Management for 2011"

Jeff Ogden is the President of Find New Customers "Demand Generation Made Simple" and the host of Mad Marketing TV. Find New Customers helps companies rapidly grow revenue by transforming how they attract, engage and win new customers. Contact Find New Customers at (516) 495-9350 or sales at findnewcustomers.com.

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Article Tags: b2b demand generation, b2b lead generation, btob demand generation, btob lead generation, demand gen, demand generation, demand generation companies, demand generation company, find new customers, lead gen, lead generation, lead generation companies, lead generation company, sales lead generation



Related Forum Posts
Re: A Post About Posts - Great to be here with you Ideas
Re: Interested in Pinterest? - This means pinterest is here to stay and this is what ideas is all about. Ideas make the world go round. Ideas is the fuel of this economy.
So much for a family life - I can't imagine these CEOs get much quality family time. It's funny, although these are all CEOs of successful companies - how successful are they themselves? I guess if you define success as being the CEO then it's fine, but for me success shouldn't come at the cost of spending time with your family and friends.
Re: 4 Ideas for Viral Marketing - [quote="T.J.":2hozy913]Hey, Ideas University what do you think about the spiderweb marketing system?[/quote:2hozy913] Please tell me (and probably several other people on the forum) what this is. I've never heard of it. IdeasUniversity, this is a good strand. I hadn't even noticed it until now. Great ideas. We've thought about the articles, but just never seem to have enough time to write ones we feel are good enough to use, so maybe writing one e-book would be better.
Re: What I'm reading this weekend - Nov 5, 2010 - Tough to say Yinka - I'm usually working about 25 hours per week - a lot of that is online. For most of these articles I pick them up from my RSS feeds, recommendations from friends, or Twitter posts. I'll do a quick skim of the article and if it looks interesting I'll save it for later to read.


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