CATEGORY: Marketing

Knowing when to be an Order-Taker, an Up-Seller or an Advisor

You’ve heard the pejorative phrase . . . ”Oh, he’s just an order taker.”

OK, we know what that means: that the person in question just takes the order and doesn’t bring anything of value to the sale.  The statement implies that a robot could do the work.

Hmmm, not so fast.  There are such things as good order-takers and bad order-takers, no? 

Haven’t we had good or bad experiences at our favorite fast-food place? 

And in some situations, maybe that’s all the customer really needs. (What! that’s sales blasphemy!)

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Cool tech at Capitol Communicator event . . .

So I attended a Capitol Communicator  www.capitolcommunicator.com event in DC last evening (9/30/09). 

It was a release party for their new offering, the online SourceBook http://tinyurl.com/y9slotg, which I assume will become something like the “LA 411″ www.La411.com for the mid-Atlantic region.

I always enjoy attending these CC events, as I get to network with a great mix of media peers . . .

. . . and the Capitol Communitor is an excellent e-zine.  (Kudos to the combined business savviness of founders Paul Dunning and Phil Rabin along with fellow marketing team member, Amy Schwab http://tinyurl.com/y8no9cj)

But what also caught my eye at this event was the showcasing of a device called “Boxci” http://www.boxci.com/ created by Bethesda-based A.M.G. (Alternative Marketing Group) www.amgww.com

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Do you use Skype?

Chances are that you have heard about Thomas Friedman’s “World is Flat” economic model http://tinyurl.com/m4yn4t. 

Well, I like to consider myself as a prime example of that. 

Here’s how:

You contact Video Labs www.VideoLabs.net for media replication (CDs, DVDs & videotape) & related multimedia services via e-mail and the internet.

You e-mail, .ftp or overnight your materials to us. 

We complete your project and return the finished products the same way they arrived.

You pay by credit card.

Cool — the world is “flat” indeed.

Yet even with clients now in Africa, Europe, Latin America and Southwest Asia, as well as North America, I remain on a quest for new ways to make my world “even flatter.”

Skype is just one such new way to do that.

You probably have heard of Skype www.Skype.com, the video/phone service available over the web.  I have an account with Skype.  My Skype name is david.ryan47.

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Real world example on “Why I Twitter” . . . and further thoughts

If you haven’t read my initial blog about Twitter: http://tinyurl.com/d99dl6 , I encourage you to do so before reading this blog, because this article is a real-world example of what I lay out in that post.

With that said, here goes:

While sipping my coffee this Sunday morning, I read in the print section of today’s Baltimore Sun a McClatchy newswire story about OLED displays and how they are about almost to enter our everyday lives.

This is just the sort of article I like to refer to in the “David’s Website Picks” section of my website http://tinyurl.com/4lw9ag

So I went to the Sun website www.BaltimoreSun.com and tried to find the article.  Hmmm, maybe just me, but I couldn’t find it.

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