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Tools are diverse and certainly not limited to those below. Strong writing skills are always needed to translate customer desire into engineering content, and then back into terms the customer can appreciate. Strong creative abilities and good ideas are also important to embellish and communicate a sense of excitement for the product. Creative elements like color, space, graphics and typography can all help or hinder the success of the presentation. But perhaps most important is having a strong intuition or sense of what's right and what's wrong that can only be acquired through experience. Over time, skilled communicators develop an intuition that helps them read the audience, the customer, or the employees. The value of sound judgment should never be underestimated.

Planning for Profitable Growth
Is your company growing faster than your profits? Many organizations are stuck in no profit zones and their leaders struggle to find a way out and into more lucrative markets. Downsizing, reengineering and other techniques to improve efficiency will not add profits over the long haul. It is true that these improvements in efficiencies can positively affect the operations of the organization. However, since they are easy to reproduce by competitors they are not strategic and seldom add value. In fact, changes to impact efficiency can have a serious negative impact on the organization's knowledge base and it's ability to learn. Consider what will happen if a traditional company which manufactures durable goods buys a fast moving, smart and hip Cambridge software company. All of a sudden, lunch begins at 12 noon! Planning for merging the resources, the distinctive competencies, and the growth of two organizations to deliver a greater combined value is a vast undertaking. But as in most successful planning exercises people--their distinctive competencies, and their unique values are the key. Cross functional cooperation and membership is the key to creating practical strategies that can be successfully implemented to create value.

Strategic Positioning and Packaging
Implementing positioning strategies is much easier to do and less expensive than implementing repositioning strategies. However, in many cases, current circumstances may require a complete reorientation of the organization's worldview. Knowing what your organization's distinctive competencies are is a beginning to enhancing your strengths and your competitiveness in the future while minimizing your weaknesses. Creating the right corporate mission, vision and then aligning them with strategies and tactics to produce action always requires cooperation and harmonious cross functional goals that people in many different functions can believe in. Making strategy practical starts at the grass roots level with practical tactics and people. The case study "Has talent, needs customers--An engineering lab profits from its first strategy experiments" shows how strategic repositioning can evolve into a new world-view.

One way to figure out your niche is to ask your existing clients. If many of them hired you for the same reason, there's your answer. Define your niche in thirteen words or less. If you can't, how can you expect your clients to know? Put your positioning statement on your business card and your letterhead. The name of your business and its presentation contributes to your position in the marketplace. Pick a name that will have some meaning to your prospects, thereby making your marketing job a little easier.

Corporate Identity
Do your customers and employees view your business as you do? Often executive perceptions of corporate identity are not in alignment with what customers or employees believe. Advertising benefits the customers do not care about or telling customers stories that they do not believe, will reinforce their unwillingness to believe to believe what you want, and can even reinforce their negative perceptions. People form beliefs that define identity based upon their previous experiences with your organization, which include direct interactions as well as what others have told them.

Enhance your identity by painting a picture for people that is in alignment with what they already believe.

Web Site, Internet and Intranet Development
The web has become a powerful enabling tool for the Strategic Business Forum. The Forum's marketing mix includes direct mail, e-newletters and the web site provides final validation, continuity, and historical documentation. Making content available on the Internet offers attractive advantages over conventional media. You can advertise on the Web and avoid paying high advertising placement costs. You are not as restricted by space, size or color so you can explain more thoroughly the complex, intangible, or technical. However, there are perhaps more web sites on the Internet than homes in America. If you build a site how do you know they will come? It is important to realize that they won't unless you strategically market the site.

Integrate the corporate web site, the intranet, and their business presence with the current business processes and structures to avoid conflict and misunderstandings later.

Strategic Sales Development
I remember walking out of a client in San Diego and my partner asked me, "what are we selling?" With all the pressures of being on the road, I had forgotten to ask the customer what he wanted and then sit back and listen. Instead, I talked to him about our products--all of them. Every great sales person knows how important it is to ask the customer what he wants, and then focus all of the discussion around that need. The Internet is a very useful tool for preselling and qualifying customers. Internet based application summary forms can be used to gather lots of valuable data about the customer's needs--especially if the questions and content are changed frequently and maintained by sales people.

Advertising
In an advertisement for Raytheon every word had to count so the products could be presented in the most dramatic way. The objective of the campaign was to build recall. First time in print this ad was reviewed by Harvey Ad Q. It beat every other ad in it's category in recall except for a two page spread by Raytheon Corporate that had been consistently running every month. The ad's cost was about half of the two page spread. Advertising is an investment and its results always should be tested. Test your advertising with a fax number if it is aimed at businesses, or post office boxes and e-mail addresses to separate responses from regular mail. They also take less ad space, and people are less likely to make an addressing error. Test the size, the offer, and the frequency of the placement for the ad. Ask for action and make it easy to respond. Free is a powerful word, but if you use it in advertising be prepared for the response and to follow though. Once your organization has achieved a level of credibility and awareness then it may be time to consider advertising to persuade the customers to try your product. Advertising is the most effective method of convincing people to act or try your product. You may also consider using advertising to contribute to brand awareness by increasing the frequency of the customer's exposure to your products or services but a mix of tactics to build brand awareness is most effective.

Advertising is not the best method for changing perceptions, or fixing problems. Since it magnifies everything, advertising that you have solved problems when you haven't, will make the problems appear worst. It also is difficult to increase trustworthiness or credibility with advertising, even though testimonials are often used for this purpose. They often only provide some reinforcement to another event like an editorial or feature article. Testimonials should not be considered the only building block of credibility, public relations plays a greater role.

Public Relations
Significant original research, technical breakthrough, or an exciting visual adds tremendous depth and credibility to the content in editorial. This image of the artifact discussed in the story "The bombsight war: Norden vs. Sperry" shows how original research and an exciting visual can add depth and credibility to editorial content.

Public Relations provides the crucial link of credibility in the chain of persuasion. There is seldom a substitute for good positive editorial reinforcement of your positioning strategies and nothing worst than bad negative editorial that contradicts or challenges your strategy. Customers will always believe the media's editorial before they believe your advertising. Sound public relations certainly provide powerful persuasive tools, but it is not free and it is difficult to control and plan. Considerable time, relationship building, research and content development are all required to produce a strong persuasive public relations tool.

Some things can be done to build timeliness. Do a survey or run a contest and turn the results into a press release. Personalize the press release with notes in the margins to highlight relevant points. Print lasts, and it's easier to put a clipping in your book of testimonials. Do research and target five solid media outlets to pursue. Send them releases every month for six months and always call the editor. Once you get publicity put it to work. Copy press clippings or excerpt quotes and include them in every direct mail package you send out. There is no better way to gain instant credibility with potential customers. The most important part of your press release is the headline. It has to grab the editor's attention and position the release as newsworthy.

Literature
Literature tells customers what the organization is committed to and it adds a sense of permanence or reliability. It acts, as reinforcement to advertising and sales, but certainly can not substitute for these tactics. Copy can define benefits, photography can make products or services appear more tangible, and illustration can add mystery and excitement. The greatest strength of literature is also its greatest disadvantage. The customer with a PO on his desk is looking for the best solution to his/her needs. Your literature may imply that your company provides his or her solution, but if it is not stressed the customer may think you are not committed. If the literature is multipurpose, and designed to sell everything to anyone the sense of comment will not translate and the customer will probably look elsewhere.

Template software can help you create fair looking flyers and brochures fast but as with everything else the important thing is communicating content and purpose. Don't worry about looking original. Looking good enough is more important. The most important parts of any piece of collateral are the headline and the how easy it is to order. Make it easy for people to respond to you. Be specific, use short headlines, describe the benefits, include the positioning statement, ask for action, and clearly show how to reply, i.e., address, phone, fax, URL Let your positioning help you decide how to create your printed materials.

Direct Response
Direct mail is the most commonly recognized form of direct response, but there are many others. In a pure sense, direct response asks the receiver for a specific response to a specific request. It is highly targeted both in its design and execution and is popular with smaller emerging companies and others selling into vertical markets. A one or two percent return on direct mail is considered a good investment by many. This can become expensive, especially if the return is not generating enough profits to pay for the promotions. What is its purpose? What will it accomplish? These are two important questions seldom asked prior to launching many direct response efforts. I have actually been involved with direct response efforts that generated more than a 20% return. These were targeted and personalized mailings written to individual customers by an executive as if he were their friend. Obviously, they reciprocated in friendship and relationships were enhanced.

Dress up your envelope. If it looks hand rather than mass mailed, it's more likely to get opened. Address by hand and use stamps. When people receive mail, they read the salutation first and the PS Next. Make it a personal invitation to action by highlighting your most attractive benefit. Don't stop mailing to a list until the results can't justify the expense. When writing a direct mail letter, let people know with the first eight or ten lines what you are selling. Test your direct mail. The list is far more important than content or style, followed by the offer and creative is a very poor third. Keep in contact with the people on your list.

Newsletters
Newsletters are one of the best ways of building credibility and creating awareness for a brand, product, or service. In order to work, however, they must be considered more of an educational tool than a sales tool. Don't expert them to persuade as much as inform. They are especially powerful for small to medium size companies with limited resources and are very good when the product is complex or intangible. They are ideal for consultants.

Create succinct newsletters since most people use newsletters as a means of getting useful information quickly. The newsletter is a selling tool but it has to educate as well. Don't design a fancy newsletter, but instead design for legibility. Reduce the cost of the newsletter by creating a self mailing piece. You'll save the cost of envelopes and the time to stuff them. And perhaps even more importantly, everyone who sees the newsletter will have an opportunity to discover you. Have someone else besides yourself proof the newsletters.