The Big Fat Marketing Blog

Yesterday was one of those days-of-scrambling in the Multichannel Merchant newsroom. Harry & David filed Chapter 11 (we could have treated that one like a New York Times obit and written it up months in advance, but posted it when word of Chapter 11 hit), and that really wasn’t the big story.

Consumer publications are starting to open its eyes and understand the magnitude of eBay’s $2.4 million purchase of GSI Commerce. eBay sees the writing on the wall: the online auction space is not going to thrive forever, and there’s a lot of competition in the online marketplace space. With GSI Commerce’s platform, expertise and customer base, they can drive the ecommerce space instead of just being a participant. more

Here’s the story from MSNBC news.

The hot new audience for direct marketing service vendors is the smallest of small businesses, if industry buzz is any indication. One-, two- and few-store retailers are increasingly being sought by the customer relationship management and database/analytics communities.

This makes sense: The low- and mid-hanging fruit of larger organizations, which can readily tap (and pay) marketing and analytic talent has been fairly well harvested by service providers.

But the plug-and-play offerings geared toward the smallest businesses often fail in one critical aspect. more

Last week I flipped through the index of a review copy of former Verizon Wireless CEO and president Denny F. Strigl’s new book “Managers, Can You Hear Me Now? Hard-Hitting Lessons on How to Get Real Results.”

I must admit I haven’t had time to take a good look at the tome yet, but I was amused by the entries on email I came across. The following may come as a shock to some of you, so sit down and perhaps have a minion ready with a palm frond to fan you should you get the vapors…..

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This is the final piece in the three part series of StorySelling. The first two articles dealt with what StorySelling is and why you should be employing it now. This article will show you how to turn your story telling into StorySelling.

StorySelling allows you to connect with your clients at the level where decisions are made.

Great StorySelling, like great marketing itself, begins with a goal. You need to determine what you expect your StorySelling efforts will do in terms of increased leads, conversions to sales or more referrals, among other metrics. Without an established goal, you may as well just keep cold calling and hope you luckily find the right customer.

You begin the process of StorySelling by asking lots of questions so you can truly understand what is important to your prospect or customers. Once you understand their wants, desires and needs, you can craft a brilliant, real-life story example that will resonate with them and their situation. This technique works much better than bombarding your audience with complicated charts and graphs. more

Chief Marketer was saddened to learn recently that veteran nonprofit list broker and manager Carol Enters died March 8 of complications from breast cancer. She was 82.

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