Phil Lauterjung

Let’s face it, we all say we are “customer focused”.  Or some other such term.  If we were to ask our best customers, would they have a positive response?  All of them?  How about your own front-line employees?

Here are 5 warning signs that you might be heading off a cliff in your customer focus.  Read more... (580 words, 2 images, estimated 2:19 mins reading time)

No, this is not another Top 10 list of anything.  I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty tired of seeing those.  I know that they sometimes have some interesting insights, but enough already!

As a history buff I do know that there is value in looking back and learning from the past.  The old axiom of hindsight being 20/20 is often very true.  And, as technology advances ever faster it becomes more difficult to take a breath and review anything.  Read more... (419 words, 2 images, estimated 1:41 mins reading time)

After seeing a number of articles proclaiming the end of 2009 as the end of the decade I began to question that in my mind.  I also asked my wife and a few good friends who would take my question seriously and not think that I was a complete idiot for asking – partial idiot maybe, but not a complete idiot.  Unfortunately no one was really able to answer the question fully.  My wife gave it the best shot by explaining that numbering starts at zero and goes up from there.  I knew that already, but she still humored me being the great wife that she is.  Read more... (319 words, 2 images, estimated 1:17 mins reading time)

We all know that sales cycles have lengthened for most of us.  However, The TAS Group, a sales software and training company, has aggregated anonymous data from their customers to come up with some very interesting insights into what’s really happening with sales cycles.  Please note that they kept in mind good business practices and privacy issues in this data.

Here are 5 facts that you might find to be surprising:  Read more... (456 words, 2 images, estimated 1:49 mins reading time)

If you are a regular reader you know that I don’t do book reviews.  The reason is, as a very wise man once said, there is nothing new under the sun.  I don’t mean to say that there aren’t very good books published on various topics.  There are.  But, once you’ve read some of the really top books on a given topic you really don’t need to keep reading new ones – most of them simply repackage, or state things with a different twist. [ I probably just blew any chance of a publisher ever picking up anything I might write with that comment.]  Read more... (576 words, 2 images, estimated 2:18 mins reading time)

It seems as though I come across an article every day that questions the use of Social Media as a legitimate tactic to use in business.  The big question is can Social Media be measured?  Can you get an ROI from Social Media?

The best answer that I can think of is – it depends.  Kind of a weasely answer, but bear with me for a moment.  There are currently over 350 million people on Facebook and nearly 50 million on LinkedIn.  There are also tens of millions on Twitter, but that seems to be a more difficult number to pin down.  My point is that there are very large numbers of people using these communities to talk about what matters to them.  Some of them might be your customers or prospective customers.  Read more... (532 words, 2 images, estimated 2:08 mins reading time)