SEO and Marketing: What is HubSpot? - YouTube

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LinkedIn Marketing: 7 Tips for the Small Business

LinkedIn has over 135 million members, the majority of whom are professionals, in 200 countries.

For businesses looking to connect with particular industries or specific business demographics, its powerful search facilities and networking opportunities make the most out of a limited marketing budget.

The following LinkedIn tips will help you focus on the network’s potential;

1. Listen to your market
LinkedIn Groups can essentially provide you with free market research if you spend time browsing in the right places.

Once you have identified your target market, you can search for the groups in which people are discussing the sorts of problems or challenges they are facing, or learn more about how they would like to do business.

2. Maximize your profile
Make the most of your company profile by filling in all the sections, including the keywords, which will help others find you.

Be sure to keep all links current and customize what you can. For instance, you can change the URL to be your company name rather than a string of numbers and letters.

You can also upgrade your account to allow you to do more, such as using the InMail service to contact members, get introductions to companies and see more information on potential contacts.

3. Make the most of what you already have
You can use LinkedIn apps to link your blog, portfolio and other content directly into your LinkedIn feed.

You can also upload YouTube videos, SlideShare presentations and other media. Or you can set your Twitter or Facebook updates to post automatically to LinkedIn.

If you do this, however, beware of how you would like your business to be portrayed; frivolous Facebook or Twitter remarks may seem out of place on LinkedIn.

4. Use LinkedIn Ads
LinkedIn Ads can offer a low-cost alternative to traditional advertising, with a potentially wider and more targeted reach, including CEOs or senior decision makers. Because of the detail in LinkedIn accounts, LinkedIn Ads can specifically target your demographic by industry, geographic location, seniority, age or LinkedIn Group.

5. LinkedIn recommendations
One of the best ways to build your business’s reputation on LinkedIn is to ask for recommendations from customers, clients or business partners.

Recommendations from others will show up in their profile, meaning that their own network will see it, which gives you a much wider reach than your own network.

You can also use LinkedIn’s Recommendation Ads to have your recommendations placed strategically on your customers’ profiles.

6. Make the most of LinkedIn’s search feature
LinkedIn has detailed search criteria in their Advanced Search, which can help you target your efforts and reach contacts or other networking opportunities in a more focused way.

In addition to keywords, names, location and company, you can also search industries, groups, seniority, experience, function, company size and several other categories.

7. Manage your goals
It is important to realize that, as with any social network, LinkedIn is a tool for connecting but it is only as good as the way you use it.

You can maximize your effort by having clear goals of what you want to achieve, whether it is numbers of client connections, hits to your website, recommendation targets or an increased exposure with a particular demographic.

Keeping your goals in mind can help you focus on where to concentrate your resources and create a more successful outcome.

Costs associated with Effective Social Media

There are two ways to execute effective social media marketing:

1. Stand-alone as a distinct separate silo within the company or marketing department
2. Integrated as part of a holistic marketing strategy

The first method – stand-alone Facebook or Twitter marketing – is good for companies with limited resources, who want to drive a small group of customers to take action.

Investing in a small stand alone social program can be $1,500-5,000 a month.

The biggest bang for the buck is from Facebook and Twitter updates which drive traffic to a value-add blog.

Knowing your audience and the different buyers you have, then writing a blog aimed at them once or twice a week is the most effective way to leverage Facebook or Twitter. You can also add a teaser, with a high quality photo on your Facebook site, and Tweet about the blog.

Using Facebook and Twitter to amplify a blog is a long-term strategy that can take 6-12 months to become effective, but once you have the machine working it is very valuable marketing. You build loyal followers and create an advantage not easily taken away.

To jump-start a stand-alone program, Facebook ads drives traffic to your brand page, and Google Ads drives people directly to the blog. These are the quickest way to get some return on your investment, in a short time i.e. a week or two .

For $30-100 a day you can use Facebook, Twitter or Google Ads to amplify your message. Be sure to set dedicated URL’s to analyze traffic using something like Google Analytics, and make sure you try three or four slightly different ads.

This allows you to measure the response rate to the different wording and determine the most effective.

If you are a Fortune 1000 company and have dedicated web and online staff, then Facebook and Social Media marketing should be thoughtfully integrated into your event marketing, product launches and customer service.

For an incremental $100,000 a year you can start to get a much higher ROI from your events and sponsorships. If you allocate $5-10 million to social marketing and have dedicated staff for the social media function you should follow five best practices:

1. Integrate social media with product launch, events, and customer service. (Read more about using social media to drive revenue in a recent blog.)
2. Respond within minutes or hours (not days) to any comments on social media about customer service, product capability, sales locations etc. You need to track your company or product name to do this.
3. Tell a continual story through social media. There should be an ongoing thread, trend and voice to your efforts. This includes showing pictures from your events to give your Facebook fans a sneak-peak at videos and don't forget to use the power of 'crowd sourcing'.
4. Measure and Analyze everything. If you can’t measure it you can’t manage it. Getting great amplification from events through social media  experiences should be compared with direct response from Google Ads and money spent on SEO.
5. Stay educated – Facebook has it’s EdgeRank, Google has it’s SEO algorithm, Twitter has GroupTweet - multi-grouping and all these things change. This will change your strategy on a regular basis. Read a lot about it and attend seminars or find peer groups to keep up to date on best practices.

Some companies are spending $10million plus on social media. They are getting phenomenal returns in part because many of their competitors have not figured it out yet.

Be the first ones in your industry to really leverage it and figure it out and you will reap the rewards but raise your awareness and measure the risks carefully.

The Marmalade: Making Hi-Speed Slo-Mo videos

Heineken U-code - YouTube

QR codes have been getting a good bit of flak recently as a fad that are mostly used by brands and marketers but ignored by consumers. There have been some pretty silly uses but this latest campaign from Heineken is actually a very smart and social way for them to be used at a music festival.

The idea is that everybody attending can have their own QR code printed and stuck to them which when scanned gives information about them and what they like doing. A bit like their social media profile but in the real world.

As they say in the video music festivals are all about meeting new people and the QR codes were a way for shy people to do this without others thinking that they were freaks although it does involve holdingout your phone and physically scanning somebody.

While it is a smart idea in terms of breaking the ice it works even better for Heineken as a brand as it turns festival goers in to walking billboards for the company.

Ten Myths About Social Networking For Business - Forbes

Here is a short guide to social networking misconceptions. Each is accompanied by a tangible action plan that you can take right now.

Myth 1: Everybody is on social media.

Image by The Library of Congress via Flickr

Why it’s perpetuated: Experts will show you pretty statistics on how more than 80% of people heard of a product through social media. This is a scare tactic to get you to hire them. The truth is social media is not on every one’s radar–not yet, anyway.

Action plan: Even if your target demographic is not on social media, you can harness the power of the Web by making it easier for search engines like Google to find your website (known by geeks in the trade as “search engine optimization”). Remember that this approach takes some time to gain momentum.

First step: Pepper your website with well-trafficked key words. How to pick them? Go to the Google Keyword Tool and enter about 20 or more generic terms that relate or describe your product or service; look for relevant terms that get several thousand monthly queries but it’s not enough to find popular key words.

You have to find ones where your site can compete–that means finding words that, if typed into Google, will spit out a page of results where your site ranks nice and high.

The key to ranking high on a search results page is to have as many high-quality sites as possible pointing links to your site (this goes for articles, information graphics and other forms of content, too).

A high quality website is chocked with content and follows Google’s Quality Guidelines. How many high-quality links do you have to attract? There’s an easy way to get a feel for that number.

For each key word, copy web addresses of the top sites that pop up in Google when you search on those key words. Then paste each of those web addresses into www.MajesticSEO.com and click “Explore.” Instantly you will see how many other sites are pointing to each particular web site.

If the first 10 addresses you chose are each attracting tens of thousands of links, it’s probably not worth your time to try to compete on that particular key word to get quick exposure on search engines.

However, if the third or fourth site down from the top of the search results page is only attracting a few hundred links, you just might be able to hoist yourself onto that top search page in a few months or less with some concerted effort.

How to increase the number of links to your site quickly? Start by courting relevant bloggers. Find the most active scribes by searching relevant keywords on Google Blogsearch.

Send each blogger a short, not-too-sanctimonious email saying you’re a fan of their work, and that you might have some content you think their readers would really enjoy; include a link to your site in the message.

Interested bloggers will refer to your link in their articles, making it more popular in the eyes of the search engines.

Materialism in youth linked to self-esteem

Peer pressure, targeted marketing campaigns and bad parenting have all been blamed for increasing materialism in children. Until now, there has been little evidence showing when this drive for material goods emerges in kids and what really causes it.

In one of the first studies to focus on the development of materialism among children, Deborah Roedder John, a professor of marketing at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management, reveals that a young person’s level of materialism is directly connected to their self-esteem.

In her recent paper “Growing up in a Material World: Age Differences in Materialism in Children and Adolescents,” in the December 2007 issue of the Journal of Consumer Research, John and co-author Lan Nguyen Chaplin, assistant professor of marketing at the University of Illinois and Carlson alum, report the results of two studies conducted with children in three age groups.

In the first study, they found that materialism increases from middle childhood (8 and 9 years old) to early adolescence (12 and 13 years old) but then declines by the end of high school (16 to18 years old). This mirrors patterns in self-esteem, which instead decreases in early adolescence but increases in late adolescence.

“The level of materialism in teens is directly driven by self-esteem,” said John. “When self-esteem drops as children enter adolescence, materialism peaks. Then by late adolescence, when self-esteem rebounds, their materialism drops.”

In a second study, John and Chaplin boosted self-esteem by giving children positive information about peer acceptance. Children were given paper plates with positive descriptors about them, such as smart and fun, which were provided by their peers in a summer camp setting.

This seemingly small gesture drastically reduced the high levels of materialism found among 12 to 13 year-olds and the moderate levels of materialism found among 16 to 18 year-olds.

“Particularly relevant,” said John, “is the fact that by simply increasing self-esteem in teens, we see a decreased focus on material goods that parallels that of young children. While peers and marketing can certainly influence teens, materialism is directly connected to self-esteem.”

It is clear from this study that 'label' marketing is cynically aimed directly at the self-esteem of young children, teenagers and young adults.

For parents interested in instilling positive values in their children and teens, the message is clear: encouraging a sense of self-worth among young people can reduce the impact of cynical marketing and the emphasis on material goods.

Strategic focus and knowing when to say, No!

First you have to have a strategy and secondly, you have to be able to stick to it. So, make sure you develop a good strategy, one that is a) potentially successful for you and b) one that you can stick to.

Having done that, you now face the daunting task of turning down projects that are not part of you stratgeic focus. Is this possible for you and if it is how is this achieved?

1. Focus! Stay on strategy.

Send a clear message to your team and your clients. Everyone on the team needs to know what the business stands for and to know that it isn't simply there to hoover up money as and when it comes across it.

It is also a statement to clients that let's them know where you stand. It says "We are good at hwat we do and we know what we're good at and we won't let anything distract us from delivering great results to you."

2. Saying "no" to the wrong type of projects.

This is tough but it protects the critical underbelly and fragile wobbly parts of your business. Many consulting firms get overwhelmed by major projects and while they're working hard at trying to ramp up the business and at the same time delivering the projects, they're not spending time selling, marketing or building new client relationships.

Therefore, when the major projects come to an end, they find themselves in a flat zone. Now you have to start the saless boiler up from scratch. Everyone is exhausted from the last project but now you have to tell them to get back on the streets to find new work again because there is no new work warming up on the back burner.

Peaks and Troughs

By saying "no" to disruptive projects, you protect yourself from demanding distraction and can then continue to spend time developing solid new client relationships and deepening existing ones. This builds client loyalty and trust and ensures there is a regular flow of work, which, if you manage it well, will steadily grow at a manageable pace one that is in sync as the company grows.
3. Saying "no" supports the small business model.

Micro-economics. This is simply the basic formula that connects supply, demand, and price. If you continuously increase supply by saying yes to everything, because demand is high, you run the risk of applying a downward pressure on your pricing.

If you say "no" to work that is not cost-effective, you are re-enforcing the statement that your services are "in demand" and your pricing "reflects that demand." You are selling on and applying a real market "value" for the product or services.

The other option is;

• lowering your price over time because
• the quality of your work deteriorates because
• your overloading your workforce /talent (you) because
• you are desperate to generate new work because
• you're in a self-inflicted cycle or downturn because
• other

Turning away work is not an easy decision to make. It can be a very painful decision for a small business to make but a necessary one.

Are you just a gal or guy that can't say "no," even if your business depends on it. Have you better ways of keeping your business focused? Get in touch now!

Sales Tactics: Selling Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt

Don't Fall for it!
Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD) is a tactic of rhetoric and fallacy used in sales, marketing, public relations, politics and propaganda.

FUD is generally a strategic attempt to spin or influence public perception by disseminating negative information designed to undermine the credibility of their beliefs.

The term originated to describe disinformation tactics in the computer hardware industry and has since been used more broadly. FUD is a manifestation of the appeal to fear.

An individual, may use FUD to;

• invite unfavourable opinions and speculation about a competitor or their product and services
• increase the general estimation of switching costs among current customers
• maintain leverage over a current business partner who could potentially become a rival or
• other misc reasons

FUD techniques are crude and simple in most instances but occasionally they can be very subtle, employing an indirect approach.

Product Release and Marketing: Be original and committed

These guys sell more balloons than their mosre passive colleagues. It's certainly clear that they are more committed to selling and that enthusiasm comes across.

Product release is about building expectations, creating want through anticipation and then revealing the product to the customer with due ceremony and excitement.

If you have to fake it then maybe it's the wrong approach or the wrong product for you. If you are committed to the product and need more impact, how are you going to add more to the occasion, apart from buying a big white horse. You certainly need to form a posse and raise the energy levels in your team and everyone you touch.

How to make a 1 page Portfolio that sells product

Making a 1 page portfolio that sells product..................

Market Place - Looking at 5 Digits, Again, for the Dow - NYTimes.com

Market Place - Looking at 5 Digits, Again, for the Dow - NYTimes.com

The Dow, which closed up 124.17 points, at 9,789.36, on Monday, is within reach of 10,000. Who would have thought?

At the depths of Wall Street's crisis, when traders were despairing and shares of Citigroup were trading for just over a dollar, Dow 5,000 seemed a likelier prospect than this.

But now, one of the most-watched measures of the financial world is on the cusp of jumping back to five-digit territory.

That does not mean the economy's problems are over, or that 401(k)'s are going to be made whole anytime soon. In fact, this milestone could even stall the rally if enough investors use it as an opportunity to cash in their gains, analysts say.

Shared via AddThis

Kindle and eBook Readers: Nice to have but ...

The introduction of e-book readers to challenge Amazon’s Kindle has brought new price competition to the market.

The launch of Sony’s $199 Reader and Interead’s $249 Cool-er prompted Amazon to drop the price of its introductory-level Kindle 2 to $299 from $359 within months of its debut.

Despite this change, prices still have a long way to go before e-book readers get beyond the early adopter demographic, according to a study released this week by Forrester Research.

Even among frequent readers with a disposable income and a household income above $75,000, current prices put e-book devices firmly in the expensive luxury category. Forrester’s survey of 4,700 online consumers in the U.S. found average consumers believe the real value of e-book readers is between $50 and $99. This is well below the cheapest reader, currently on the market.

Only 14 percent of consumers said that prices of $199 or higher fall even within the “It’s expensive but I might consider it” range, according to Forrester.

“The maximum addressable market for e-readers as they are currently priced is substantial — but to reach the largest market possible, the prices will need to come way down,” Forrester analyst Sarah Rotman Epps wrote in a blog post about the report. “And even then, e-readers are never going to be as big a market as MP3 players, which 110 million U.S. consumers own.”

Twitter and Facebook attacked by the DoS Bots: Who was affected?

The recent outages to Twitter and Facebook were allegedly directed at a Georgian 'dissident', in an attempt to censor what he was broadcasting.

The wider questions concern Twitter and the silent majority who are using the service, the ones who were hardest hit by the outage.

I hesitate to say users or people because the short answer is; that the most frequent users of Twitter are the News Streams and Info Bots. Followed rapidly by the Marketeers!

Sysmos Twitter Analysis

A couple of months ago, social media analytics firm Sysomos closely conducted an analysis of the people on Twitter and how the service was being used. What it found, among other things, was that five percent (5%) of Twitter’s 11.5 million accounts post about 75% of all the tweets. That's an outstanding result and it led the firm to dig deeper into that magical five percent (5%).

The Pareto Principle

The Pareto principle (also known as the 80-20 rule, the law of the vital few, and the principle of factor sparsity) states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. This is clearly not the case with Twitter.

Analysis Results Released
This week, the company released the results of the deeper study and highlighted a few important findings about that elite five percent:

• 32 percent of all tweets made by that active group were generated by machine bots that posted more than 150 tweets per day.
• The number of machine-generated tweets is probably greater because many of the bots post fewer than 150 times a day.
• Based on the two reports, it appears that nearly one-quarter (24 percent) of all tweets overall are generated by those active bots.

Twitter Spammer Bots

However, these bots are essential Twitter spammers. These are the automated tweets that comes from valid sources, e.g. news services. Most Technical websites and Blogs will encourgae you to foolow their sites via an automated Twitter feed.

Sysmos CEO

In a blog post, Sysomos co-founder and CEO Nick Koudas said:

"It’s a fascinating exercise to really focus on the most enthusiastic Twitter users, and what they are doing. Our findings, particularly the percentage of tweets contributed by bots, is definitely eye-opening and we hope they shed light on how Twitter is used today and by whom.

We think this is one of the first reports to focus on the most active members of the Twitter community to provide interesting insight and perspective. We will continue our updates with additional analysis of the micro-blogging service."

Note Bene

Also worth noting is that;

• 88 percent of this active group, posts at least once a day. Of that group,
  
• about one-third joined this year, compared to the
  
• 72 percent of all Twitter users are new this year.
  

Keywords
Lastly, the most popular keywords within the bios for those active users included: Internet marketing, music lover, Web designer, video games, and husband/father.

Doing Less With Less leads to less

Where do you stand in today's market? and who's standing there with you?

Now that your company has fashionably reduced its staffing levels and you have survived the axe, are you being asked to do more with less, in the wake of these layoffs?

Yes you say, but are you actually doing more? I'm sorry but the real answer is; probably not. According to a US survey conducted in December by Leadership IQ.

When the US research and training firm polled 4,172 workers at 318 companies that had recently laid off employees, 74% of the people who responded said their own productivity has declined. Other findings:

• 87% of surviving workers said they are less likely to recommend their organisations as good places to work. (Quelle surpris! This is a sign of a badly handled layoff)
  
• 64% of surviving workers said the productivity of their colleagues has also declined. (The bad layoff was indicative of poor management motivational skills in the company)
  
• 81% of surviving workers said the quality of service that customers receive has declined. (This should have alarm bells ringing! This way, monsters lie!)7
• 77% of surviving workers said they see more errors and mistakes being made. (Realistically, they may be looking closer, with a more critical and negative attitude or have access to more info through expanded roles)
• 61% of surviving workers said they believe their companies' future prospects are worse.
  

This summary is probably correct, if their customers are sensing negative vibes and are experiencing reduced service, in today's buyer's market. Staff and management should be made aware that they have a vital role to play in convincing customers that there is value to be had by maintaining their loyalty.

Loyal customers and repeat business should be cherished, protected and sustained through innovation and strong management.

If the company has implemented reduced staffing levels without refreshing the management team, its motivation and its attitudes, then the only changes they will need to manage are the shrinkages of its customer base, the obsolescense of its products and services, with the subsequent failure of the whole lame duck enterprise.

Do not mistake Movement for Action

Reduced Security

An urgent demand for talent in several areas is eclipsing broad, knee-jerk reactions to greatly reduce budgets and cut staffing levels, projects and fixed asset purchases, without thinking carefully about the consequences and future requirements.

Undeniably employers made mistakes in past downturns, huge miscalculations founded in the white hot heat of cost-cutting that wounded them badly later on. It limited their ability to respond quickly and when the smoke cleared and the rebuilding started, they were left floundering.

It just shows how little IT management has learned since last time. Managers have not learned the lesson that it's not just about cutting spending, it's about managing the risks and being smart within their spending limitations. Know your boundaries and work within them.

One of the worst instancies if this in the IT security field. Current economic conditions are having a negative impact on the majority of security budgets. Many companies have initiated a hiring freeze or staff reduction exercise, necessary measures due to the financial crisis.

Security-decision makers in over 100 companies have been asked about their spending plans for the coming year and to gauge the impact current economic conditions are having on budgets. Of 159 respondents, 64 percent indicted that the economy was having a negative impact on security spending. Another 19 percent said the economy currently had no impact. Just 6 percent said the crisis was having a positive impact on their organization's security budget.

Security budgets will decrease for 35 percent of respondents and remain the same for 42 percent. Just 23 percent thought spending would increase in the coming year. Those numbers are a switch from last year, when more companies expected to increase security spending. In 2008, 38 percent of companies planned to increase their security budget and just 24 percent expected to see a decrease in spending.

One firm is actually in the minority and plans to spend more on security in the coming 12 months. "We are increasing from previous years. I would have to say the increase is around regulatory issues as well as general responsible security program expansion."

Security spending is often driven by compliance and policy decisions. This falls in line with what other companies also said, with a majority indicating that policy and compliance are the main justifications for security spending.

Security decision-makers were asked if they planned to increase or decrease spending in the following areas: Business Continuity/disaster recovery, data loss prevention, identity management, compliance and regulations, outsourced security systems, physical security, policy and risk management, and staff.

In all but one category, more than half of respondents expected spending to remain at similar levels.

However, when it comes to spending on staff, 41 percent expect to see a decrease in spending. Close to 60 percent have either implemented, or plan to implement, a hiring freeze.

Additionally, 35 percent of companies asked, indicated they have had to go beyond a hiring freeze and have actually reduced security staff, or plan to reduce headcount in the next 6 months. It will be interesting how this affects security in the coming months and whether we will see more outsourcing of protective measures. A dangerous path to walk and one that can only increase the threat to organisations.

Let's hope we soon see an end to these 'interesting times'

Measured Action for Tough Times

IT Consultants and solution providers are, like everyone else, vulnerable to the recession. However, a recent Market survey shows that IT Consultants and solution providers are preparing to weather the economic storm forecast for 2009. With a lot of good fortune and luck allied to smart planning and insight, they could be positioning themselves for growth in 2010.

US Dollars, GBP and Euros
The dawn of the Obama era in the USA and the infusion of hundreds of billions of dollars, pounds and Euros in stimulus funds are not enough to clear the economic storm clouds gathered over North America, UK and Europe.

Since the beginning of the New Year, the U.S. economy alone has shed nearly 600,000 jobs. Gross domestic product fell by 3.8 percent. And the forecast for the remainder of 2009 calls for sluggish or negative growth.

Consultants poised for 2009
The technology sector, with its IT Consultants and the solution provider community poised to withstand the recessionary pressures of the general economy. The 2009 Market survey of 200 North America IT Consultants and solution providers, reveals that solution providers are very cautiously optimistic about their business prospects in 2009. They fully expect a reduction of enquiries, sales, revenues and profitability. They’re cautious optimism means they are preparing for the worst while hoping for the best.

Weathering the storm
IT Consultants and solution providers are not taking the sluggish economy in their stride. While there is a natural inclination to retreat to a safe place and ride out the downturn, the Market survey report shows many consultants and solution providers are preparing to implement, aggressive business development, sales and market plans. In an effort to not only weather the recession but to power through it and position themselves for growth in 2010 and beyond.

Gross Revenues
Gross revenues from product and services sales increased for 46 percent of solution providers, while only 24 percent saw their top lines shrink. A near equal number of solution providers (45 percent) reported increases in their 2008 profits, while 25 percent said their profits declined.

Ordinarily, healthy revenue and profit increases would be welcomed news for solution providers. But participants in the Market survey were witnessing a phenomenon caused by the recession.

Customer spending down
Consultants and solution providers reported customers spending was down and their existing budgets reduced. This is in anticipation of not getting full funding in 2009 or in anticipation of end-of-the-year budget cuts. Business-technology customers, ranging from small businesses to large enterprises, are expected to continue investments in technologies critical to business operations. This will focus on smart applications and systems that directly reduce costs or innovations that open up new revenue opportunities.

Do not be fooled, they are certainly not freely opening up their checkbooks. IT Consultants and solution providers report that their customers are already cutting back on orders, delaying project implementations and canceling projects to save money.

2009 Forecast
The stated paradox above, is part of the reason why nearly one-half of consultants and solution providers expect their revenue to increase in 2009, while only 32 percent expect a decrease. The key indicator of how tough 2009 will be for solution providers is seen in the number that expect flat year-over-year revenues;

• 30% of solution providers said their 2008 revenue was relatively the same (plus or minus 5%) over 2007,
  
• 21% expect no change in year-over-year revenue in 2009.

• The clear shift to no change or declining revenue reflects longer sales cycles and customers not committing to engagements.

The survey paints a similar picture for profitability;

• 51 % of solution providers expect no change or a decline in their year-over year profits.
  
• 64 % believe their profits will slide by 15 percent or more this year.
• 55 % of optimistic solution providers expect their profits to increase by 15 percent or more.
  
• No solution provider participating in the Market survey, expected profits to sink by 100% or more. Perhaps trying not to think the unthinkable.
  

Consultants and solution providers dependent upon conventional hardware sales expect the largest decreases in revenue and profitability. Anticipating revenue decreases this year;

• 29% of white box/custom system dealers
  
• 27% of hardware resellers and
  
• 24% of general solution providers,
  

Topping the list of specialists anticipating net revenue increases.

• 67% Software resellers
  
• 60% Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers and agents
• 55% Systems Integrators
  

Additionally, solution providers say that they are seeing the greatest slow down in business, from small (less than 50 employees) and midsized businesses (50 to 250 employees).

Ring fence your customers
Consultants and solution providers recognize that they must adapt to the poor economic conditions, and many are executing strategic plans to bring themselves closer to their customers. Hopefully this will allow them to preserve and protect existing revenues sources while seeking new opportunities to tap into new revenue streams. Clearly everyone is becoming more defensive of their existing clients and therefore, the new revenue opportunities will be harder to find and even harder to win, possibly with lowered margins and ROI spread over longer periods.

Nearly one-half of consultants and solution providers surveyed for the Market say that their top business goal for 2009 is improving customer satisfaction and retaining existing customers. It’s much easier and more cost effective to expand sales within an existing customer than it is to acquire a new customer and build a relationship. The risk that you put all your eggs in one big basket that could, in itself, fall.

Customer retention not detention
Of the consultants and solution providers focused on customer satisfaction and retention, most anticipate their profits will remain flat or decrease. The same can be said for consultants and survey participants focused on increasing revenue, the second most popular business goal for the year. Are you being retained or detained by your customers and service providers? Discuss!

QoS versus Market Share
Consultants and solution providers who are focused primarily on improving quality of service (QoS), will have a higher expectation of profit erosion. Conversely, consultants and solution providers focused on increasing market share or profitability have higher expectation of improving profitability in 2009. This may not be the case, when taking into consideration the cost of sales.

Revenue Growth - greater expectations?
For revenue growth, 60 percent of consultants and solution providers are squarely set on simply acquiring and developing new customers. Another 30% are expanding their relationships with existing customers. Interestingly, solution providers are not looking to their peer communities for support during the recession. Only 13 percent of survey participants said they would form an alliance with their peers i.e. consultant and solution provider partners, or partner with other consultants to reach new markets and customers.

Together we stand and divided,
we may fall