Sometimes I’m shocked by the amount of time it takes for the “obvious” to become apparent to me.

We just completed a review of 100 of our clients as a means of calibrating our Target Filter and determining the characteristics of our most successful clients. We’re always trying to define our best prospects, not just those with the “potential to buy our services with speed,” (although that’s a very important quality), but those with the “greatest potential to implement our system with success.” The latter is the more important quality for us. It’s the quality on which our brand is built. To pick our prospects for the future, we wanted to use our past clients as our base data.

For the sake of the analysis, we defined successful implementation outcomes for our client as having one or more of these qualities:

1. Landed at least one account that was 10 – 20 times the size of their average account
2. Doubled their rate of sales revenue growth in the 12 month cycle following implementation
3. Grew targeted existing accounts by greater than 40% within six months

From our analysis, the companies that achieved these outcomes by implementing the Hunt Big Sales system exhibit the following characteristics:

• Between $5M and $125M in annual revenue
• Privately held with majority ownership in the CXO positions
• Profitable operations over most recent 3+ year period
• Senior management has been working together for 2+ years
• Company has and implements its Strategic Plan
• CEO/Executive Management invests in professional development

This last quality was UNIVERSAL! (To be clear, I’m not talking about their investment in HBS since that was a given due to the nature of the study.) In every case that we’ve seen remarkable success, this quality was also present.

And it makes sense. Just think, Tiger Woods has 5 coaches; Roger Federer – 4; Shaquille – 3. It seems that the best invest…

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Ever since i called my marketing partner a “nag” in my post about Twitter a couple weeks ago, she’s been wearing the name around like a badge of honor. I always worry about people who mistake insults as compliments (I kid!), but I guess if you knew her you’d understand.  She lives for this stuff…

So, as these things go, she’s now gone off and created a cartoon character of herself and even given herself an official title within the company (I wish I was kidding). If you didn’t already receive her newsletter this morning (yes, her newsletter), you can find her official announcement below. One good thing I CAN say about her new persona is that it, I mean, she,  will now be doing all of the dirty work that I can’t bear to do myself. Workshop promotions, telling you how great I am, bragging about things that don’t need to be bragged about…that’s all her department now.

So, without further ado, The Marketing Nag has a “very important” announcement to make…

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