In our last post, I mentioned that Kevin Riley of The Allied Group (among others) shared a few ideas for how to use referrals for business development purposes. Last week, he distributed a document with his process outlined in greater detail. Here it is, almost verbatim: Step by Step Referral Process Choose people that like you professionally or personally – and who trust you. List 3 business contacts...

Last month at SMEI Boston's roundtable breakfast, conversation focused on sales tips. Yesterday, we talked about how to ask for referrals. Here are just five pieces of wisdom shared among many: Have the right mindset. Some of us are not as diligent about asking for referrals because we are uncomfortable with the process. But if you offer a good service or product, it's important to believe that you have...

We attended a very worthwhile AMA Boston event earlier this week, which featured Chad White from Responsys, who was speaking on the subject of good and bad email marketing practices. Here are a few of the thoughts he shared related to email marketing: 1. Less is more. A smaller, higher-quality email list is better than a large one with lots of inactive subscribers. 2. Stay out of the ISP doghouse....

Each month, SMEI Boston (Sales and Marketing Executives International) hosts an excellent roundtable discussion that explores all things related to... you guessed it - sales and marketing. The roundtables are mostly an opportunity for folks to come and share ideas, wisdom, and knowledge, and we always walk away from the conversations with at least a couple good ideas gleaned from others for our own sales...

We had lunch with our friend Adam from Wistia today. Wistia is a video hosting service that provides some seriously good analytics to help their clients understand viewer engagement with their online videos. Adam and his fellow Wistia pals regularly make the case for keeping things short with online video. This time was no different. "Forgive me if I sound like I am lecturing," he mentioned at one point,...

We have been working on a couple of different video production projects for MIT's admissions office, and the first of the videos was posted to their site earlier this week. In our pre-production conversations with the admissions folks, one of the things they made clear was that they wanted the video to really focus on debunking misperceptions of MIT, versus extolling what the Institute offers.  In...

I've discussed before the subject of how long a marketing video should be, and the question was one that we recently explored with a client. We are working on a series of online videos for them, and one of the videos was proving to be problematic. We watched the first draft of it and thought it was good but not great. We reviewed what we had done and decided that we were trying to pack too much into...

In this 75-second video, Rachel shares a couple of thoughts on why it's valuable to understand your audience's engagement with your online video, which can be easily measured if you have solid video analytics. Transcript: So understandably, folks want to have their marketing, fundraising and sometimes even their training video up on their websites.  There are a variety of hosting options out there;...

A gentleman came in to visit us today who is interested in getting some fundraising and marketing video for his organization.  One question he asked was:  "What am I getting when I hire a professional video production company that I might not get if I sought out a camera guy to shoot some footage for me?"  This is a very sensible question, and there’s no single answer, of course – cameramen...

Let’s suppose you’re a tech company and you need to create a marketing video that explains your technology.  There’s a good chance that you’ll need to create a script, accompanied by some kind of graphics or animation to illustrate how your product works, since it's hard to give an on-camera demo of your software or medical device in action. So where do you start with your script?  The first...