Philippe Matthews Show Guru Advice, Author Reviews, Tech Reviews, Entertainment News

Most small-company business development managers are newbies, even if they don't realize it. Here are six types of deals to stay away from

With offices and virtual employees scattered across the U.S., here's how SCVNGR and LevelUp keep connected, and stay cool. Fun and games course through the heart of the SCVNGR company culture

If you can't draw a hard line, you may end up losing both the sale--and your shirt. On Friday of last week, I posted a list of 10 strategies for outselling a huge competitor

Evidence points to information from trusted sources getting a better hold on our brains than the noise from everything else. So it's no surprise that companies want to capitalize on those feelings.

P&L targets are supposed to help a company create more value. But used incorrectly, they can erode business value and consume growth opportunities from the inside. We saw a business recently that was being “eaten” by its P&L targets

Keith Ferrazzi offers tips for getting your team to work together more quickly and effectively. Welcome back to part 2 of our 2 part interview series with Keith Ferrazzi–speaker, thought-leader and author of New York Times bestseller Never Eat Alone. (Here’s part 1: Networking Secrets for Sales Calls .) Today Keith’s letting us tap into some of his insights on how to make people more productive when they’re working together, and developing solutions together to the problems that we have, especially in the sales process.

%excerpt% Continue reading here: Big Marketing Mistake You May Be Making

What do the 135 million people and more than seven million companies on LinkedIn know that you don't? All too often I receive resistance when I suggest to a client that she utilize LinkedIn to build vendor, partner, and prospect relationships. But what might first feel like an intimidating pilgrimage into foreign land can result in a journey of growth, connection, and prosperity.

Get the most out of your CFO: Encourage him or her to explore beyond the bean counting to identify profit growth opportunities for the business.

The startup Womply recently brought us Groupon-like "effortless offers." Today it launches Loyalty Cloud, hoping to slice through the messy customer-loyalty market with the "simplest loyalty program ever for local merchants." Last month a new startup, Womply , launched to bring "effortless offers" schemes to local merchants--coming with an impressive pedigree because it's co-founder Brandt Squires was formerly GM and Head of Sales at LivingSocial . Just weeks later, Womply has an additional offering--Loyalty Cloud--that promises the same sort of effortless experience but for customer loyalty schemes, rather than Groupon -style "special offers." According to the new sitei, it's simplicity rests on the fact that, "Merchants create offers that reward customers for repeat visits and Womply handles everything else, from marketing and remitting offers to customers, to providing analysis and insight on the amount of revenue generated as a result." To this end, Womply's new Loyalty Cloud is trying to be a complete one-stop shop for local business loyalty schemes: Simpler even than stamping a rubber stamp on a collector card, and providing deep customer analytics that would be tricky to get any other way. It manages this by being seamless from a customer and merchant point of view, with the transaction happening "in the cloud" via "Womply's high-tech platform that enables the company to spot credit and debit card transactions at participating merchants and to push cash credits to customer payment cards." The whole thing is designed to be merchant-centric, rather than focussing on the deals or the end-user customers.

Business owners: For better sales efforts, do each of these 30-minute tasks just once a week--but do them every week. Feeling overwhelmed

One business owner's strategy for embracing her role as the boss. This is a guest blog post from Vanessa Merit Nornberg, President of Metal Mafia , and a member of the Inc

Part of the reason we go on vacation is to feel refreshed when we get back, right? That's why the laptop and iPhone come with me

The dumbest thing you can do is to assume all prospects are potential customers. Here's how to tell the difference.

Building these steps into your operations will help you to significantly improve customer retention and create significant value for your business. We hate to sound like a broken record, but we can't say it enough—developing loyal customers is the most important thing you can do for your business