lsquo;DEDICATED AGENCY MANAGEMENT by Chris Burand Once your agency reaches a certain size, dedicated agency management is essential for continued success. Agencies ar...

10 WAYS TO AVOID LOSING THE SALE Many publications are in the business of telling you how to succeed at selling. Guidelines, strategies, and techniques exist in abundance. However, there isn't ...

10 WAYS TO IMPROVE IN-HOUSE TELEMARKETING by Peter Belanger Follow these proven principles and watch your telemarketing program grow sales and earnings. The mistakes that agen...

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.

Becoming accustomed to a growing economy is easy and dangerous. Although there are always pockets of problems, we forget that success is often more the result of a good economy than our business acumen. If everyone else is doing well, our major challenge becomes how to pull ahead of the pack. Unfortunately, many business people tend to get a bit lazy-and that's when we can get caught.
There are ways to become more successful, keep business booming, and give companies the opportunity to gain a competitive advantage. Here are 15 ways to develop an extra edge:

A MARKETING MINDSET CREATES CUSTOMERS by John Graham As the insurance organizations marketing meeting began, the president stated, We need more sales. This might see...

Trying to get fish into the boat before catching them sounds crazy; it wouldn't make...

lsquo;AND KARNACK SAYS hellip; by Diane Herbert and Pamela Millard Take a close look at your capacity and take the steps needed to position your agency for the wild ride ahea...

APPROACHING FRIENDS FOR REFERRALS: I by Bill Cates How do you approach friends, and others, about the work you do to get referrals? One of the challenges is that they haven...