HOMEOWNERS QUESTIONNAIRE by Jack Fries Have your producers use this questionnaire from Jack Fries to garner needed information from Homeowners prospects: HOMEOWNERS I...

lsquo;STOP THE WORLD; I WANT TO GET OFF! By Richard Weber For 12 years and 150 articles, Richard Weber wrote a monthly series on 'Due Care' for Life Insurance Selling maga...

10 BASIC PLANNING INITIATIVES THAT WILL ADD TO YOUR BOTTOM LINE by Ken Buehler The need for planning has never been greater. While planning focuses on profit...

There's nothing better for business than a booming economy. Unfortunately, it often encourages faulty thinking and spawns erroneous ideas. When sales are strong and profits meet projections, we're quick to take the credit. When things go sour, external forces get the blame.
A good economy tends to mask distorted thinking and inappropriate ideas. For example, personal computer sales have been drifting downward, even while prices have been dropping. Manufacturers are petrified. Out of near desperation, they jack up power to a sizzling 500 MHz to try to capture customer attention. Just as this happens, free PCs appear. In the midst of all this, one company rediscovers itself. To IBM's credit, it figured out what business it's in: solutions.

The goal in business is to outdistance the competition and make profitable sales by producing more customer-friendly products or services. To reach this goal, you need an advantage to improve your batting average-but it's getting more difficult and complicated to obtain this advantage, let alone keep it.

A CPA firm spends $11,200 on a Web site that attracts only a handful of visitors. An insurance agency invests $80,000 in an advertising campaign and no one sees the ads. An alternative health clinic sends out 8,000 direct mail fliers and gets 26 responses. A manufacturer spends $28,000 on an attractive brochure that no one uses.

'So dawn goes down today, nothing gold can stay.'
Robert Frost
'There are no more power elites.'
Manuel Castels in The Information Age
The painfully obvious implication of these quotes can be seen in the business world: IBM pulls its PCs out of retail venues because it no longer considers them profitable. The Wall Street Journal reported that in 1998, there were $301 billion in sales via the Internet, while the manufacturing sector did $350 billion in overall business. It took the Internet roughly 36 months to reach this figure; manufacturing needed 150 years.

19 TIPS FOR GETTING RISK SUBMISSIONS ACCEPTED We subscribe to the 'win-win' theory of negotiating when placing business with our company underwriters. The placement has to be '...

22 EFFECTIVE WAYS TO OUTMARKET THE COMPETITION by John Graham Outmarketing competitors is easy - if you do it right. This takes a combination of work and savvy, but the results ...

Out-marketing your competitors is easy if you do it right. It takes a combination of work and savvy, but the results can...