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Selling Pain Relief

Join IMC-Arizona on March 9, 2007, where Larry Mandelberg will present "Corporate Lifecycles; How and Why Organizations Grow and Die". He will take each participant on a highly interactive journey thru the corporate lifecycle theory, stopping along the way to identify their ideal target client stage. Key issues covered include:

• Identifying functional & dysfunctional organizational behaviors


• Making informed decisions involving change


• Anticipating conflict and reducing friction

The ability of organizations to deal with common problems effectively is the difference between success and failure. Organizations learn to deal with these problems by themselves or they develop abnormal 'diseases' which stymie growth - problems that usually cannot be resolved without external, professional intervention.

The theory of corporate lifecycles analyzes the stages organizations go through as they come into being, grow, age, and eventually die. By defining these stages, the evolutionary process of aging becomes a roadmap map where you can locate any organization and anticipate where it is headed. This 'roadmap format' provides insight into when, why, and how an organization must change. It also helps explain how behaviors that were once healthy can become dysfunctional.

Participants will:

• Understand the changes successful organizations must go through as they grow over time
• Gain knowledge and tools to leverage corporate lifecycles to engage with your ideal prospects
• Use corporate lifecycle insight to educate and engage your current clients

Selling Pain Relief
The University Club
39 E. Monte Vista Road
Phoenix, AZ 8500

7:15 - 7:45 am

Registration, Networking, Breakfast

7:45 - 9:00 am

Main Presentation

9:00 - 10:00 am

Session after the Session

Click here to register

Advise Appreciated

Ok now it is time to ask for some advice from my more experienced colleagues.

I met with a potential client today who absolutely needs to employ my services in order to be successful. The methodologies I advocate (leveraging social media for marketing and PR) are pretty new to the business world. There were two principles. The decision maker appeared to be stuck in the conventional, old-world model. The other 'gets it' but I suspect does not have enough influence to sway the decision-maker.

How do some of you convince a sceptical decision-maker that the revolutionary product or service you offer is not only key, but his only hope of success?

There are many great success stories, some of which I used today. Unfortunately, I don't have enough of my own success stories yet to carry the day solely based upon my own reputation.

Thanks in advance

You should be Monitoring your Reputation

You should be monitoring your reputation and what is being said about you on the internet. Why? because one kid in Iowa with a blog and five readers can kill your reputation, that's why.

In the old days, big companies had news clipping services. Once a week the top executives were presented with a copy of every mention of the company in any newspaper or magazine in the country. Such a service was expensive back then. It costs zero today. When some blogger halfway across the country says something nice about you in his blog you can know about it within minutes. Nothing turns that blogger into a raving fan quicker than a personal email thanking him for his kind words about your company. Conversely, if he said something derogatory you have a chance to reach out to him and make amends before it turns ugly. How can a kid in Iowa with a blog and five readers ruin your company? Because his readers have blogs too and at least one of them probably has a few hundred readers and some of them will post the story on their blogs. And so on until you have a supernova on your hands.

It is easy to create blog and news searches in Google and subscribe to the RSS feeds of the search results. I also recommend setting up searches on Digg because many times something will show up on Digg long before Google if it is hot. Using an RSS reader, you can then check on your subscribed feeds as often or as infrequently as you want.

You should set up searches on:

• Your name.
• Your company name.
• Your website URL.
• The names of all of the public-facing people in your company.
• The names of your products and services.
• The URL of each product/service page on your website.
• All of your trademarks.

Once you have put those in place, then go back and do the same for your major competitors and industry leaders. Add searches for the interesting keywords in your industry and you have a your own personalized giant driftnet stretched across the internet.