Consumers are moving outside the purchasing funnel—changing the way they research and buy your products. If your marketing hasn’t changed in response, it should.

He can close, but how's his interpersonal sensitivity? A guide to screening sales candidates.

Understanding customer behavior is key to creating marketing campaigns that generate high response and revenue.

One of the best ways to understand customer behavior is to study customer migration patterns—to learn when and why a customer ends up in a segment different from the one he or she had been in.

The starting point for those studies is your customer-segmentation model. After you decide which approach to use to measure migration, the process is a virtuous circle of analyze, segment, campaign, and analyze again.

The next task, requiring strong analysis skills, is to tie the observed migrations to company activities, such as a marketing stream, and to customer purchase behavior.

The final task is to apply the results of that analysis to your marketing campaigns to generate revenue and boost customer retention.

SCENARIO: You’ve got a long list of leads and you need to winnow out the ones that aren’t likely to buy. You need to fill the pipeline fast, so you don’t have time to beat around the bush. You’ve already confirmed that a “prospect” has a problem that your offering will solve. You must now find out if the deal is real…

Which question give you the most useful information?

Customers continue to demand greater value at ever-lower prices. But for many companies, the ability to produce savings through more traditional cost-cutting measures is nearly exhausted. The solution: Combine cost-cutting initiatives with design and development activities, using cost-driven product and service innovations to create new streams of profitable growth.

No company can afford a flawed understanding of customer profitability, least of all in a recession when the margin for error (as well as profit) is whisper-thin. The flip side is that improvements in this area can be a very effective way of bolstering the bottom line — and companies can often make those improvements with only a modest initial investment.

The time is right to ask marketing to develop of more valuable and insightful report. A report that benefits both marketing and the C-Suite. An at-a-glance report that quantifies the overall impact marketing is having on the business and how well initiatives are increasing customer acquisition, retention and share of wallet. This report is known in the industry as a dashboard. These five steps will help you and your marketing team get started.

Companies can seize the opportunity in mergers by involving employees and customers in the integration process, retaining critical staff, generating momentum by quickly winning key accounts, and serving the right customers in the right way.

Buyers look for value. The more value you provide, the more likely you are to become the provider of choice. Presentations offer you excellent opportunities to provide that value at different stages of the sales cycle. Here are five ways to create more value in your presentations.

Despite the abiding beliefs of the dot.com era in the eventual evolution of all markets towards frictionless price competition, only a small minority of uschoose to regularly purchase the least complex products via the web. Here, Dr Hugh Wilson examines the challenges facing organisations in defi ning and building the most appropriate channels to access a widely disparate and retail-savvy consumer environment.

Many organizations can achieve substantial growth by entering a new market with a well thought out and flawlessly executed plan. The operative words here are well thought-out and flawlessly executed. This article outlines a ten-step process any size company can use to successfully enter a new market.

Use the principles in this article to tighten and fine-tune your company description, and test it with prospects. See what they conclude about which problems you solve and for whom. When they answer correctly, you'll know you hit the nail on the head.

Here are 7 more sure-fire headline templates that will work when you’re aiming to score more readers

Here are 5 more headline templates that work, but use them at your own risk. If you don’t match up an appropriate headline structure with your content, you might crash and burn worse than if you just came up with a headline off the top of your head.

When you make decisions that respect and honor customers, you will earn their admiration and, eventually, their love. Then customers will begin to grow your business for you.

Customers who love you won't be able to stop raving about you. But you need to earn the right to their story first.

Rather than giving a one-size-fits-all solution (because there isn't one), my goal is to encourage you to evaluate how you make decisions in five categories.

Stoney deGeyter offers up The Best Damn Web Marketing Checklist, Period!, a master website marketing checklist covering over 400 specific items over 23 topics. These topics include things such as website development, SEO, usability, accessibility, etc. This list doesn't cover any "how tos," which are essential ingredients to successful online marketing, but sometimes you need to first know what to do so you can then discover how to do it.

Any headline that lists a number of reasons, secrets, types, or ways will work because, once again, it makes a very specific promise of what’s in store for the reader. A nice quantifiable return on attention invested goes a long way toward prompting action, and as long as you deliver with quality content, you’ll have a satisfied reader.

Plus, these type of posts and articles are perfect for building your authority and demonstrating a mastery of your area of expertise. If you’re business blogging, that’s key.

With that in mind, let’s take a quick look at 7 classic “list” headlines that you can remix on your blog when you’re looking to boost readership (and maybe even get a little link love).

So, you’re seeing too many of those “how to” and list headlines, and want to try a few different angles?

Let’s move beyond those common headline formulas you see over and over, and add some new blood to your attention-grabbing arsenal.

You can write a headline in an infinite number of ways. However, certain types of headlines have proven themselves repeatedly for many years. By following the “formula” of these headlines, you can give yourself an edge when you are serious about persuading someone to read and respond to your copy.

The following 9 headline formulas are some of the easiest to write and the most powerful. When it comes time to write a headline, try one of these first. At the very least, this can give you a creative jumping off point to write a headline that works.

A pre-post analysis compares the average sales levels for a period prior to the marketing campaign with the sales levels during and possibly following the campaign. Though the calculation is fairly easy and the data is similarly easy to access, the question remains: Is it accurate and reliable?

Marketers are good at using peer influence to sell products, but few executives understand that it can motivate customers to help companies achieve other goals, such as saving money. Even fewer seem to be aware that the improper use of peer influence can elicit behaviors contrary to what was intended.

An entrepreneur will not always succeed in positioning his latest innovation the next “new thing.” New research suggests that the creation of a new category depends not only on the novelty of the technology but also on whether the existing labels in the market are well understood.

Six steps to getting Web site visitors to take your link bait and how to hold on to them.

Accenture research has found that despite its importance, the sales function in many companies is not excelling—for two significant reasons: insufficient employee awareness of corporate sales strategy and basic shortcomings in the behaviors and capabilities of sales people.

Some companies have attempted to address these shortcomings by creating a pay-for-performance culture—shifting more of what they pay people from fixed to variable compensation—in the hope that money will provide sufficient motivation to exhibit behaviors consistent with the company’s strategic direction. Yet in doing so, many have confronted a cold reality: The process and technologies on which they have long relied to devise and administer incentive compensation plans are woefully inadequate to meet today’s unpredictable business environment. Changing customer demands require more agile sales strategies and far more flexible incentive management programs. While companies expect to use variable and incentive compensation to motivate the sales force, the shortcomings of their current capabilities for managing incentives often compel them to take overly reactive measures to accomplish this.

Accenture’s research and client experience reaffirms that a new approach to incentive management can eliminate the shortcomings common in most companies and, in the process, transform an incentive compensation plan into a tool that truly influences the “right” sales force behaviors. Such an approach also can play an important role in more effective people development, which Accenture has found to be critical to building a high-performance anatomy—the culture and organization that enables some companies to consistently out-execute their competitors.

Key to the success of this new approach is the view that a company’s incentive management capability must do more than simply issue paychecks accurately and efficiently. To reinforce desired sales force behavior, an enterprise incentive management capability must clearly demonstrate to sales participants the link between what they sell and what they earn. Only when salespeople can make an explicit connection between their paychecks, the compensation plan and, ultimately, the company’s sales and corporate strategy will their selling behavior more consistently align with desired sales strategy.

FutureNow analyzes and expands on Seth Godin's list of difficult and important questions you have to answer before you spend a nickel on a site redesign.