Despite fax, e-mail, and Web site marketing, direct mail remains one of the most effective methods for conveying your company’s message to prospective clients. John Graham provides tips for making your direct mail efforts as powerful as possible in this document.

As the corporate misdeeds of executives continue to dominate the news, we hear about the curses of greed and immorality. But John Graham calls these executives disloyal. This article focuses on the importance of loyalty in a company and the need to hire loyal employees.
It’s time to get our heads on straight. That 60s phrase is a perfect fit for today’s confused and disturbing business climate, as each newscast brings darker revelations of corporate abuse.

Now is the season to be on the lookout for the thieves. In rocky economic times, they come out to prey on companies eager to hold on to current customers and find new ones, introduce new products and services, or simply increase their market share.

When it comes to paying for a professional service, most of us are skeptical when the bill arrives in the mail.

If you're in sales, you can identify with this situation - about two weeks after starting a new job, you begin to doubt your decision. You detect a widening gap between what you were told to expect and what actually occurs. After only a month on the job, you conclude, 'I think I made a mistake.' You're probably right, because salespersons seem to be more prone to selecting the wrong job. Too often, their profession's tendency to stress the positive and minimize negative factors extend into their approach in choosing a job.

Knowing what customers expect may be the most important key to successful selling. While every customer is interested in getting an appropriate price, many salespeople seem to think that price is the primary issue. As a result, they lead with price and seem to base most of their sales presentation on cost issues.

Do customers really want more personal service? The answer may seem obvious, but is it? It's true that there are plenty of complaints-many of them justified-about shopping in stores where sales and service personnel are in short supply and the workers lack training, courtesy, and a desire to be helpful. But is all this a plea for bringing back old-fashioned personal service? It may seem so, but what's actually happening is quite different and far more significant.

Customer service begins with thinking like customers.
A good place to start is with language. Thought and language mirror each other, and when the right words are used, the organization begins to behave as if they were true. Use the wrong words and the opposite happens.

There may come a time when your agency's communications needs exceed the capabilities of in-house personnel. You want to concentrate on producing new business, developing products, and servicing clients. Who has the time and expertise to create newspaper or radio advertising-or perform the myriad public relations functions necessary to keep your agency in the public eye?

Every company faces crises that have the potential for doing serious damage to its reputation, image, and/or financial stability. Events that might’ve been minor or even unnoticed a few years ago could now wind up on the evening news or on page one of the newspaper. While some incidents are insignificant, others can be devastating. Yet when they occur it’s often difficult, if not impossible, to know whether the problem will evaporate or escalate, blow over or boomerang.